Welcome back for yet another installment of "beamrun at the APS."

Our first day has been rather frustrating thus far. The day crew suffered from some alignment and equipment issues. Those have, we think, been solved, but we're still not to the point of actually taking data yet.

We've got one of the titanium-dioxide samples prepared and mounted in the hutch ready to go. But we're having a little trouble on two fronts. The confined geometry that we're forced to work with is keeping us from being able to orient everything easily. This is something that we can eventually overcome, but it takes lots of little checks until we're confident that it's all going to be ok.

The other problem may be more serious. The sample, quite small in size, is held in position by a small suction pump. So it's on a flat surface with a tiny hole. There's a pump trying to pull air through that hole and so, in principle, the sample should be stuck there. I'm not entirely convinced that it is. While the sample does not appear to move to our eyes, I'm beginning to think that it's still moving by huge leaps on the atomic scale (which is deadly to our experiment).
Or it could be that it's deforming... I'm not quite sure.

There seems to be another issue... we're getting too many photons at this point. My guess is that either they use a different (ie lower) set of filters on this beamline, or that one of the filters in series just isn't installed. Regardless we are having to take pains not to saturate the detector. We know it's not simply that we have more photons as the device making them has a much lower output than what we've used previously. So either it's a difference of filters or a difference in the electronics of the detector.

Well, at this point we have many banal questions and are rather frustrated trying to figure them out instead of doing real science. The truth of the matter is however, that this is exactly what real science involves. It's a long road to get to the point where you've got a system doing something interesting. Much of the work along the way isn't nearly as glamorous as we might like.

I did have an interesting thought today though. Scientists "love" to make posters. and what better place to put up your posters than around a facility like the APS. So we have probably a few thousand of them scattered around the ring talking about all the science that goes on here. Much like people's ability to give talks, the posters can vary from actually quite exciting and interesting to complete obfuscation and opacity.

Anyhow... nearby is a poster with several names on it for an xray scattering experiment. One of the names on there is my advisor from graduate school. This was long before I began working for Larry (about two students before my time). The person who made this poster was trying to convey their work, their results, etc... but the thing I went away with was what can only be described as a feeling of home. Here in this far off land (well, is Chicago really that far from Seattle?), in this far off place (again, is there really that much difference between hard and soft x-ray work?), one of the most important people in my life had been here doing science. It's probably not the intended "take home" message that the author of the poster intended.


Ok, enough procrastination. I need to get back to this blasted sample. We're still not sure what's wrong with our setup.