It's another reasonably slow night at the APS. We're taking data comfortably and able to work on other things for about 30 minutes at a time.

I think our research, particularly our study of Au surfaces under different conditions, got a huge boost today. Gerhard Ertl just won the Nobel prize in chemistry for his surface science work, primarily on understanding electrochemistry and chemical adsorption on Platinum surfaces. As we've been comparing our work, favorably, as an additional system not previously known to exhibit these behaviors, it will help our cause that at least a few other people think this kind of thing is pretty important.

In fact, upon learning the news my thought process went something like this :

For a second I had the scheming thought of, "maybe I should rework our latest paper to cite Ertl. That would help it get published."

Next came a short pause of guilt as I try to be above things despite the occasional impulse.

However, within another second came the moment of clarity where I realized that I actually didn't need to feel bad about that as I wouldn't have to change anything. It turns out we're already citing his work, 4 times in fact.

It's been a remarkably slow night. We're taking data at regular intervals and in between there's not much to do with the experiment. It's almost able to be unattended for 30 minutes at a time. That's rather useful as it allows me to work on other things in the interim.

Someone has been making good coffee in the evenings. Every night I come in to find a freshly brewed, almost full pot of coffee in the LOM adjacent to the beamline we're running at. Every night a new pot is brewed, like magic. So I suppose I need to find out who this kind soul is that has been making me coffee. I should like to endow them with some of my own favorite beans.

A couple of days ago we just finished out metal-oxide surface experiments and picked up to go to a different experimental station to study platinum nanoparticles under electrochemical control. This experiment has actually started fairly quickly. It's with a system we've used many times before, indeed the cell predates me here at the lab), which means most of the bugs have already been worked out of it. So even on our first night we're actually taking useful (we hope) data. After our last experience this is a welcome change. If things go well enough, we may even have some time left for one of my ideas. But for the moment I'm happy we're just taking data early on in the run.

The official wildlife report, at least thus far today, is one skunk out in the midnight hours happily scavenging in the grass. Was it the same guy I saw before...? I don't know. I don't get close enough to them to tell.

All in all it's been a pretty easy day for the start of a beam run. I'm already giving thought as to how to automate certain portions of the experiment so it can run without constant attention. It's also been a good day as I've gotten to learn a little more about this kind of experiment. I set up some of the conventional analysis software for XAFS and got some very preliminary plots of the behavior of the nano-particles. A proper analysis, with full modeling fitting and bells and whistles, will do better and be needed. But it's at least enough to tell us roughly what's going on. And to think that yesterday I didn't know how to do it!

It's about 6:30 in the morning here. You can always tell when you're working on a weekday/night as the coffee cart comes blasting music around the storage ring. That and there will be a few cars in the parking lot, not just mine.

Thus far today we're actually doing a little bit of science. Or at least we're trying to do science. There's no assurance that what we want to do will actually work, however at least we're not struggling just to get the beamline functional. It's really sad that we had to spend 50% of our beamtime just getting the light in the proper place.

What we're doing at the moment is watching how water behaves on metal-oxide surface as we freeze and thaw the water. We're seeing some interesting crystalization of the water molecules which we believe is actually occurring on the surface. We will spend much of the rest of this shift ensuring that what we're seeing really is on the surface of the metal-oxide and not elsewhere. But thus far it's repeatable and seems to be in interesting places.

We have also, thankfully, reached the stage of data collection. It means that we can pause and catch our breath while the experiment is running. Or, in this case, it should allow me enough time to walk around the storage ring for some welcome exercise. Hopefully I'll also finish the next blog entry.

We've reached the last day for this beamrun. Thankfully we're doing science and getting some really interesting results. It's been more painful than I recall as being normal to get here.

We're following some very interesting behavior as we get water to freeze on our surface. I say it's interesting, because it's freezing in two completely different configurations of ice. It's even more interesting as the ice appears to be freezing somewhat in patterns. Unfortunately we're having to do this without moving some of the motors on the diffractometer which limits our ability to really scan to determine fully the structure and orientation of all the ice crystals.

It's exciting to have a science question to actually ponder. We're not sure of exactly how the ice crystals are going onto the surface. Is it purely epitaxial (ie lining up with the metal atoms underneath) or does it have some variation, perhaps random? More importantly... how can we test for this with our remaining time? And how can we test for it with a buggy instrument and still have a reliable result? So we forge ahead, not knowing exactly what we'll find and trying our best to figure out ways to tell us what we're seeing.

As per Kerri's request, the wildlife sightings are as follows. Tonight was quiet with no one about. Yesterday was quite active with 2 raccoons and a skunk out during the night hours. During the morning there was a large hawk on a post. The previous two nights saw a small herd of white deer grazing contentedly. Among them were two yearlings and the buck.

As I write this, it's early morning. A thin crescent moon is rising, framed between a brilliantly shining Venus above, and Saturn and the star Regulus below.
By the way, at the outset I should mention that the official observing food of Astronomers are Fig Newtons.

Growing up I didn't do terribly much in the way of science. I was identified early on as a "special needs" child in the public school system and special certainly doesn't mean anything good in this case. Aside from a few rare, bright patches, I could have been better served without the benefit of my public education.

The exception to this was astronomy. As a small boy my father used to bring me out to look at the stars. He bought a large 6inch telescope and I have many happy memories of us sitting outside (though often in the cold) looking at the planets and stars. It was, perhaps, this early activity that set the stage for things to come later in my life. This interest was, unfortunately, blunted somewhat through the Amarillo school system. However, all things come to an end and eventually I left high school for the local community college. As poor as my public school experience was, my interest in learning, and ultimately science was quickly rekindled by some wonderful professors. Along with this personal renaissance, came a renewed interest in amateur astronomy. And it is some of the anecdotes from that time that I wish to tell you.

I developed a few friends, similar in age, that enjoyed taking that telescope out. At one point our favorite spot to go observing was down in a little nature preserve canyon called Buffalo Lake. We found it rather late in the year about the time when the park would be closed after hours. So we called the park ranger's office and obtained permission to go observing. He didn't seem to mind us being there. We were quiet, didn't litter or drink, and certainly were not there to poach game with a telescope. Earlier that year, an electronic gate had been installed at the entrance. The gate closed automatically everyday at 6pm, preventing people from entering and tire-spikes made sure to keep people out once they'd left. Fair enough, we just needed to be in before the gate closed.

Well, one day we were late getting there and the gate had closed before our arrival. Now, every good amateur astronomer back in the day had a copy of the Sky Atlas 2000. It contained huge maps of the night sky that would fold out, and as any good group of observers, we had a copy between us. However, our copy, for a small extra fee, was officially the "Field" version of the atlas. Until this moment, none of us fully appreciated what this meant. In our moment of need, I realized that the field version of the Sky Atlas 2000 was more than just an atlas. In fact, it was also a gate key. Let me explain.

By angling the approach of a car to a set of tire spikes, you can have it so that only one tire goes over the spikes at a time. As such, you can then carefully, and slowly drive one tire up, place your copy of the Sky Atlas on the spikes, drive that tire over, and then move the Atlas to protect the next tire. I recommend having at least two people to do this. Anyhow, it worked! It was a happy time indeed as now we could come and go from the park as needed. So on those very cold nights when we'd run out of coffee & Fig Newtons, or needed an extra blanket, we could just go get one without fear of the entrance gate being blocked.

One fine afternoon, we managed to get to the gate just before it closed. We quickly drove the car under the gate and within seconds the gate began closing behind us. We got out of the car and cheered our good fortune. We also hopped back over the gate and ran up to place our admission fee in the park money box. Though we might be there after hours and skirting the gate system, we certainly wanted to pay our share for use of the park. About that time a game warden/wildlife official drives up and is in a foul mood. He gets out and explains how he has just caught several guys that have been poaching animals. "That's good" I think, not realizing that by "just caught" he meant right now and that by "poachers" he meant us.

After a good deal of threats on one side (I'm gett'n tha Sheriff), and a good deal of explanation on the other (It's really quite impossible for our telescope to actually fire any sort of ammunition at a deer regardless of how hard you try). We avoided out right arrest and only received a small fine, plus permanent expulsion from our favorite observing site. It mattered not that we had permission from the original park ranger. Nor that we were good enough to go back and pay our fee.


There was the time, while looking for a place to go observing that we picked up a hitch hiker. We were out in the middle of nowhere and a guy is standing on the road trying to get our attention. Now, there's 3 of us and only 1 of him, and he looks about our age and in need of assistance, so we stop. He just needs a quick ride to town as his car is broken down. No problem we think, and off we go. It's only after 10 or so miles that he explains how his buddies (who were also out with him) we hiding in the bushes. They were hiding so we wouldn't see the fact that they were armed with rifles. While it's certainly true that we would not have stopped had we encountered 3 raving lunatics waving rifles at us from the side of the road, this also almost caused us to dump him back on the side of the road. Sigh...

At one point I began trying to take pictures through the telescope. This was long before digital cameras and required quite a bit of work to get a camera mounted at the correct position. It also meant that you didn't get to see the pictures immediately, but instead had to carefully record what each exposure should have been and then wait for the film to be developed.

Getting the film developed actually turned out to be quite a problem. Most places that process film have someone that checks to see if everything on the roll should be developed. The first time I turned in film for development(3 rolls of it), all I got back were a few pictures of the moon. The kind attendant explained that all the rest of the film just showed "little specks of light" and "blurry light" so they decided not to develop them. The next time I tried to do this, there was a further problem because the employee could not tell where exposures began or ended. So I started taking "blank" pictures with a flashlight down the telescope so that every other picture would be clearly defined making it possible to locate exactly what I wanted in between. I explained all this to the film store and eventually everything got sorted out and I got the pictures developed that I wanted.

That worked great for about a week, then the store went out of business.

So for my next batch of film, I took it into the local walmart (everyone has a local walmart don't they?), the same place where I would stock up on Fig Newtons for our nightly excursions. So as to avoid enduring the entire process over again of training someone how to develop my pictures through trial and error, I decided to cut it short and attempt, through explanation, to get it right the first time. I asked to speak to the person that would develop the film because I had a special request. I began with, "I need you to develop these pictures regardless of how they turned out or what they look like."

Now, in hindsight, maybe that's not the best way I could have started the conversation. She immediately picked the film up, threw it at me (a mere 4 feet away from her), and yelled, announcing to the entire world within earshot, "YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED! WE DON'T DEVELOP THOSE KINDS OF PICTURES!" It took a full 2-3 seconds before I realized the error inherent in my approach. The fact that I turned beet red did nothing to help my cause. Regardless it was too late and despite a few protests on my part, I was quickly escorted from the store by a manager and asked not to return (neither for photos nor fig newtons). They didn't need my kind of business. It was interesting as most people just pointed, stared, and quietly discussed my offensive photography amongst themselves. I think it would have been easier had they at least laughed. sigh...

We basically got no where last night, and basically the day shift didn't make it any further either. We've lost now fully 3/8ths of our beamtime because we the beam of photons and the diffractometer refuse to line up. Sadly, this is not something that users should be doing. In an ideal world, we would just come in, set up our experiment, and do science. That's not really the case in practice, but usually things go smoother than this. We still have to struggle, but usually we're struggling with the experiment and not basic beamline function.

Regrettably the diffractometer motors frequently lose their positions. And by frequently, I mean that two of them seem to lose track every time they move.

This is further complicated by the fact that the photon energy, the wavelength of the light, is A) not as advertised, B) not constant, and C) drifts in position. The beam of x-rays that comes from the storage ring has lots of different energies, most of which we don't need. So there is a device called a monochromator that selects out a particular energy that we want. The x-rays dump an enormous amount of heat on the monochromator mirrors. Usually there's a fairly reliable cooling system that adjusts the angles, correcting for aberation due to the heating. Unfortunately this is not the case. So we suffer from a beam of photons that is not the energy we request. The energy of the beam fluctuates and its position at the diffractometer also change. Such problems may be fatal to the experiment at hand...

So we're not very happy at the moment.

We'll try to make the best of it.

Hello dear readers (both of you),

Things have not started on a particularly good note. The beamline we're doing our first set of measurements on has had some.... problems. In fact, despite it now being a little past midnight we've been working 16 hours and have yet to achieve alignment on the diffraction instrument. If we cannot get the beam through the diffractometer properly, get the instrument aligned, and get it all together, well, then there's nowhere to put our experiment. Ideally the previous users would not leave the hutch in such poor shape, but that's part of the "shared" access problem at a facility like this. We've now spent a good 15% of our allotted time here doing absolutely nothing (except working our asses off).

But that is often the way of things. The night continues, though without much success. It's 3am and we still have not gotten a sample even mounted in the beamline. We are certainly close, but still not there.

Our primary data collection tool this time is an x-ray CCD camera. Usually we have a point detector that we sweep past the area of interest. The CCD camera has the distinct advantage of having a large area with high resolution. It allows us to collect all the scattering from a particular peak in one place without having to move the sample.

There are some disadvantages however. Most of the area (ie the camera) vs. point detector debates focus on resolution, count rates, efficiency, and things like that. For the moment we''l leave all that discussion to the experts. My major problem with CCD detectors is the company that manufactures them, Roper Scientific/Princeton Instruments. I had to use one of their cameras during graduate school and I detested the foul piece of equipment. I produced an extremely long laundry list of complaints about the camera and the software that controlled it. By the time I came into possession of it, the camera was already quite old. So you'd think, you'd hope, that some of the problems would have been solved in the 10 years between that old piece of junk and a brand spanking new one today. However, you'd be wrong.

So many of the same communications and software bugs that caused problems for me with the decade old camera are also present in this camera as well.
It's been 10 years and they still can't design a camera system that will work and "play nice" with anything else in the computer. sigh.....

Such is the way of things at times.

If you'd asked me earlier today to predict what I would've done for the day, I would have been totally wrong.

Today was certainly a difficult day at the beamline. Finally we got all the problems with the beamline and hutch under control. This moved us on to the problems we needed to solve with our experiments. As I said earlier, I hate Roper Scientific. These people are not even the least bit afraid that there might be a hell. Anyhow, we've had nightmarish problems with our computer talking to the ccd camera. The eventual solution was to take out the high-end digital electronics and fiber optic cable. This solved our last communication problem, but left us with a new one.... Our cables are a bit short.

In fact all USB cables are a bit short as they just do not make anything long enough for what we need. The problem is that the CCD camera needs to be inside the hutch with the x-rays and the computer needs to be outside the hutch with us. Humans and x-rays don't play well in the same room together. That's something you learn being an x-ray physicist. They teach you that in school.... never go in the hutch with the x-rays.

The eventual solution has the CCD and its electronics in the hutch with a long cable on the floor to our computer (inside the hutch still). However, the computer is close to a "rabbit hole" to the outside. In fact, it's close enough that I got the cables for the monitor, keyboard, and mouse through the hole and intro the hutch. It just means that the "control" center for the experiment sits on the concrete floor. So be it.

Our next problem, still not 100% solved, has been temperature control of the sample. The stage has a heat sink, but it does not dissipate heat quickly enough to be useful. I salvaged a few computer fans from trashed/junked computers, powered them, and stuck them under the stage. That sort of worked but not enough... So I got a liquid nitrogen dewar, filled it after only 2 minor fiascos, and took copper cord to the sample block to act as a sink for the heat. That also worked, though still only sort of... and not enough...

At this point we pulled the entire stage off in favor of putting an older cryostat assembly into the diffractometer. One entertaining bit is that it uses high pressure helium lines for the cooling. Anyhow, the cryostat didn't fit well into the diffractometer as at some point, someone had smashed the threads. We spent another hour fixing some rather onerous screw threads before the new/old stage could be assembled. But now it's there and sort of working. we'll see...