Today has been frustrating as well. We’ve switched to looking at Zinc oxide surfaces while we consider what’s going on with my gold samples. However, things have not gone as planned. Getting a properly prepared surface on a metal oxide is considerably more difficult (in my opinion) than my metal crystals. That struggle has taken quite a bit of effort.

For a while I thought I’d found something really cool. I had weak diffraction peaks at forbidden locations which is (sometimes) and indication that there’s a small ordered surface layer or adsorbate. Sadly in this case it was not that, rather it was just higher energy x-rays playing havoc.

We use a device called a “mono-chromator” to select out a particular wavelength of light. In principle it works great. It uses crystal lattices to diffract the initial beam. Only photons with the correct wavelength make it through the reflections from the crystals. However there is a problem... It can’t tell the difference between photons of the correct wavelength and photons with only half that wavelength and other integer fractions of smaller and smaller wavelength x-rays. These phonies get through the monochromator and also hit our samples. Now, the real problem is that the same mechanism that let them through the monochromator also diffractors them up at times into our detector. The detector can be set to not count them, but very often they can get counted anyways as things are not perfect. So instead of finding something new, all I really saw for an hour were peaks due to these rogue photons of shorter wavelength.

Things like that happen in science. It’s not an easy process. Often at first when you think you’ve found something interesting it later turns out to be some artifact of something else. The best you can really hope and aim for is to make fewer of those mistakes (though they’ll happen) and to correct them early before you waste entire experiments on them.

No one said this would be easy... In fact, we often say just the opposite. If it was easy, someone else would’ve done it.

Injury to insult... or something. One of my colleagues said, “You know it’s just not your day when...”

After a very disappointing day, on my way out the door for home I was assaulted. Yes, assaulted by this little critter :

Sigh...


I leave the building and it’s quite dark. While walking across the grass I hear a “rustling” in the brush off to one side. When I turn to look I see what appears at first to be a crazy raccoon. The little guy was running straight towards me. “What an odd behavior for a raccoon, usually they run away.” I thought.... Once he closed within 10 yards I began to get nervous. Once he got within 5 yards I realized this was no mere raccoon. He was in fact a skunk. With no hiss or bark or warning he hopped around and pointed his backside at me. I started to run, but not before he got a “volley” off. I, a fully grown man, a scientist with a PhD in physics, ran in terror screaming “SKKKKUNNNNNKKKKKKKKK” into the night. Thankfully I was only lightly grazed and alone with my shame. However, it was a long ride home... often with the windows down.

So, to cap off a rotten day I got sprayed by a skunk. That’s not how I intended the experiment to go. No where in the proposal did we request a skunk. No where in the safety write up did it mention assault by skunk. In fact, I’m not sure there is even an MSDS for “skunk.” How careless...

I figured the cats would go crazy at home, but in fact they we only mildly curious. I did however get to sleep alone on the couch with nary even a cat.

Sigh...

It’s been a rather unfortunate day for my little experiment. We’ve encountered a problem without a real solution, at least in the short term.

In short, the beamline has been upgraded since the last time I tried this kind of experiment. In general terms this is a great thing. The beamline now produces more light and is focused to a smaller area. Unfortunately it’s too much light... or at least too much in too small of an area. If we could spread it out more (defocus the beam) over more of the sample area, then it might still work. But for now any part of my sample the beam hits becomes fried very quickly.

So... thankfully we have plenty of quality back-up experiments that can be done and we’ll shift over to them. But it means the one I wanted to do will need to be re-thought or get the “two suns in the sunset” solution. It’s too bad... We have been so close to having the data to finish this paper and now we find ourselves unable to do the experiment anymore. If it were simply a “problem” of having too much light it would be ok, but the central part of the problem is having all of that light (and hence radiation) deposited on such a small part of the sample surface.

Things have no started particularly well. We’ve had problems with both the sample and the beam. My first sample doesn’t look at all “right” when put in the beam. It looks like gold, it feels like gold, it smells like gold (does gold really smell?), but put it in a beam and it doesn’t really behave like a duck should, ermmm... like a gold crystal should. That’s been frustrating enough, but the beamline may be giving us trouble in a new way.

Anyhow, there has been some progress. The big piece of equipment that moves our samples around is aligned and calibrated (the diffractometer). The heating equipment functions, the gas flow controllers function, and the plumbing is done for the water. Now we just need to get the sample to behave. Hopefully that shouldn’t be too hard. On a normal day that means just heating the sample up to around 1200 degrees Kelvin. At that temperature most anything that’s not gold will have left the surface and the atoms themselves will have enough heat energy to rearrange. The atoms in the bulk usually “repair” their arrangement to some extent. Gold is so soft that virtually any time it is handled the crystal begins to suffer from the forces and the crystal loses some of its regular atomic lattice. High temperatures help remove those internal clumps, stresses, twists, bunches, etc... and restore the more highly ordered spacing. However, for us the most important thing is that the high temperatures provide enough energy for the surface atoms to rearrange into the interesting patterns we hope to observe and manipulate.

Unfortunately things have not ended well for the day. As I leave the APS, turning the experiment over to the night crew, the beam has been lost and we have no light. No light = no experiment. We’ve done about all we can do without light, so it’s a matter of waiting.

and Yes, yes... it’s still October. In fact it’s not even Halloween yet. But since most of the run will occur in November, I’ll keep this as November.

I’ve got a busy month ahead. In fact, all the members in our group will be busy. We’ve got 3 weeks of beamtime at the Advanced Photon Source. The time will be split pretty evenly between the three post-docs. Happily for me, my project runs first. This should see an increase in blog entries as I tend to get wordy while sitting at the beamline.

This project will see a return to my earlier project to tidy up some loose ends for a second paper. We’re going to be studying various gas phase interactions with gold surfaces, greatly extending our first paper on the subject. We’ve almost had enough to write a paper for a while. That is we’ve seen some very interesting behavior that we just didn’t have enough time to get fully characterized with systems other than what we’ve been talking about. It’s taken a little while for us to get beamtime to finish the second part of the project (and hopefully open up a third part!). That’s due in part to two different things. First, I’ve had another project (the speckle experiment!) that took precedence in terms of my own effort. But we’ve also had a little trouble getting the time scheduled. Anyhow, that’s behind us at the moment and we’ve got time to finish this up.

It’s going to be fun in another aspect. We’re going to try an experimental technique that’s new to me : resonant surface scattering. I suppose it is similar in many respects to more traditional “in the neighborhood of a resonance” scattering techniques. But there are some subtleties here that should make for an interesting time. Modeling the data to figure out what it does in fact tell us may be the most difficult portion of the process. The other post-docs all have projects that will run too. So in general we’re going to be doing quite a wide variety of surface science experiments in the coming month.

There was an interesting post on Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog in September. It showed an interview with Brian Cox and David King. Cox came off from the interview looking much, much better than King. The comments seemed to capitalize on that and it seemed rather quickly that the merit of the discussion or points of view presented by both King and Cox were lost. Not being an expert on funding in the UK, nor on the politics of either King of Cox, but seeing what I thought might be valid question lost in the roar of criticism, I tried to write up my thoughts on the matter in a reasonable fashion.

The short of my view is this (irrespective of King or Cox) : Each year a sum of money far too small is allocated to science. As such, there has to be some rather tough decisions made about which projects receive funding and how much. It is reasonable to consider placing some of the decision based upon science that is likely to have some impact on large problems. I find the argument for “basic” science funding based upon spin-offs to be largely lacking. It’s not untrue that “basic” science often makes significant, even world changing contributions. However, “applied” science also very frequently has unexpected spin-offs that result. I think the primary justification for “basic” science with little or no direct connection to real-world problems needs to come from human curiosity and wonder.

There were several comments that followed. Sadly many seemed to be of the one or two line variety without much substance. I did get a comment that I disagreed with and thus posted up a further response. As I put a bit of effort into each I’d like to keep a copy of them here, just cut and paste.

post 1 :

# michael s pierce Says:
September 13th, 2008 at 1:48 pm

With all respect to Brian Cox, my personal point of view is that the largest reason to pursue such interests as current high-energy physics needs to be for the innate value that we humans place on understanding our universe at different levels. Call it curiosity, call it exploration, whatever, it certainly has it’s own value. But I find the degree to which Cox bases his argument on spin-offs to be rather second rate. As we push back the unknown we discover new questions, problems, and directions. Some of those have direct bearing revealing new ideas & technologies that directly benefit us. Other times they bring to light dangers we were not previously aware of (or thought we could do nothing about). However, Cox’s argument about spinoff’s is equally applicable to the more applied sciences as well. Dollar qua dollar I’d expect the spinoffs from “applied” fields to be no worse or better than spinoffs from “basic” science.

It can be cast in a different light. A classic example being Tang and Teflon from Apollo. Truly, if we wanted such things we could have made a much cheaper investment directly without going to the moon. I am disappointed that we spent the money? No, my point is that if we’re going to spend such vast sums of money, we need to sell it to the public for what I think is the right reasons.

I think King’s argument can often be lost on people. Understand that he’s not against science funding (he himself being a world renowned surface scientist, physicist and chemist before stepping into more of a political life) nor is he against funding “basic” science in general. It’s a question of balance and sadly the question of funding has been all too exacerbated by the erosion of monetary support. Funding hits has come across the board, it’s not just high-energy physics, it’s not just basic science, it’s impacted everything.

Perhaps it’s important to understand where a person like King is coming from. His field has both beautiful basic science and technologically important applied aspects to it. He’s witnessed incredible accomplishments in his career (having made quite a few himself), but has also seen too frequently the numerous instances where advances in science either happened very slowly or simply did not happen due to funding woe.

His own field is at the heart of basic energy. The problems he has seen and worked on for much of his life have had direct bearing on both energy use/consumption and climate change (along with many other things). It’s true that as Cox says, that (for instance) particle beam physics has bearing on cancer therapy. However, the proximity of that work is likely often (I suspect, though not being an expert in that field I’ll leave it at suspect) not very closely directed to such research. There is a spinoff, there is benefit, but money and effort directed explicitly towards that end would probably be a much better buy if your goal is treating cancer.

I am very happy that high-energy physics is in the headlines and am likewise dismayed at the failure (largely) of say my own field to engage the public with our own exciting discoveries. There has to be a balance between funding for research both basic and applied.
However, significant weight must be given to directly (and adequately) funding work that has the highest likelihood of successfully solving some of our greatest problems. That last sentence is what I believe to be the crux of King’s argument and is one not to be taken lightly.

Michael

PS : and yes, I am elated that the LHC is about to begin operation. I am ecstatic that we will find “Mr. Higgs” or a set of particles filling that roll. And the experimentalist mindset I have is absolutely giddy at the fact that a simply countless number of competing theories produced in the past few decades may be put to rest (and maybe, some of them confirmed!).


post 2:
#

# michael s pierce Says:
October 28th, 2008 at 4:16 pm

Apologies for not replying sooner, I only noticed your response a day ago. Please permit me to be a bit verbose if only for the benefit of others reading this. Much of my response is a more general statement and despite its length (and discussion of facts well known to you), it is not intended to be condescending.

I disagree with your statement regarding much of King’s research. Many of the parts of his research I am aware of tend to be rather important for basic energy. While much of it is highly academic, much of it also has significant relevance the “applied” side of science. There is of course a spectrum between academic and applied, but it seems to me that much of his work is quite closely related to basic energy research with at least some relevance to industrial and applied scientists. I think that is especially true if you compare his work to other fields that clearly are further towards the “basic” side of the spectrum. I’ll pick the two best examples that come to my mind at the moment: Alternative power sources such as fuel cells (yes, I’m well aware that they’re not the panacea they’re often made out to be) and cleaner conventional engines.

I think that basic science in support of fuel cells (particular the understanding of Pt surfaces and the ‘model’ fuel CO) and oxidation of gases such as NO and CO into less harmful products would qualify quite well for science with a rather direct connection to energy and the environment. Platinum crystal facets, Pt alloys, and Pt micro/nano particles have been some of the more promising and interesting surfaces with regards to catalysts for fuel cells. It is also true that catalytic converters providing a means for oxidation reactions such as CO to CO2 and NO to N & O, (among others) make for cleaner burning engines. Again, that interesting metal platinum makes an appearance. Glancing through a few searches it looks like he’s got at least around 60-70 papers that deal with the activity of gases such as CO and NO on surfaces. That number could easily be well below that actual mark. I’m certain he was often guided by curiosity and academic interest, but I imagine a reasonable amount of his motivation had to do with the potential payoff of understanding these things better.

Perhaps my original wording is misleading towards implying something to the effect of “King makes Fuel Cells or King’s research makes your car produce no CO.” If that is the impression my words give, then they should be restated. Nonetheless, I do think there’s a quick and ready connection between much of his work (over 3 decades of it) and what can be applied towards cleaner power and engines. I find it hard to imagine that the potential payoff of understanding those systems and reactions played little role in his motivation. Remove the work by people such as King or Ertl and the industrial scientists trying to develop fuel cells and catalytic converters would be at a genuine loss. Compare that to the contributions of many a successful scientist rooted in high-energy physics (such as Brian Cox or even a more senior researcher). They often do fascinating work, but the connection towards real world problems is very often (not always, but very often) much further removed. They rely much more heavily on innate human curiosity/answering big questions (truly often a valid reason) and potential spin-offs (I find that less compelling as I see both “basic” and “applied” science generating unexpected benefits). It seems to me that the work of King, while often very academic, still has significant importance to the “real world.” I think you’ll find true applied industrial scientists working in basic energy that do cite some of King’s work. Perhaps I’m lacking imagination but I’m not seeing that direct of a connection for someone like Cox (and I shouldn’t have to say this again, but here goes : that’s not a knock against his research based on a curiosity or wonder metric).

There’s perhaps a bit of confusion for some people upon our use of the terms “basic” and “applied.” They’re often stated as if there’s a clear and distinct difference upon which we all agree. Often that’s the case. However, very often that line is rather blurry, especially depending upon your point of view. The terms “basic” and “applied” science often have different meanings depending upon who is using them. Typically “applied” is used when there is a specific end in mind other than answering inherently interesting questions and satisfying curiosity. Typically the term “basic” is used to describe work that is principally undertaken to sate our curiosity. However, the “line” between the two is drawn in very different places. I consider my own work on the basic side. I’ve given talks before industry crowds and often had the response, “that’s interesting, but really too academic to be useful to what we’re concerned with.” At the same time, many of my friends in high-energy physics or astronomy look at my work as deep in “applied” territory.

In fact while I think my own work does fall on the “basic” side, it’s near enough to occasionally be of interest to those on the “applied” side. I take a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction in that respect. I think it’s a fascinating, interesting place to do science. I’m also happy that my work does contribute (in my case in only a small way so far) towards things that I think might make the world a better place. King’s work that I’m familiar with often falls in this middle ground (though with much greater impact than my own).

My defense of King is not based on any personal knowledge of the man nor am I very informed about his politics. Living in the states, I’m well aware that there’s probably a great deal I do not know or understand about the state of science funding in the UK. Rather, it’s based on the (admittedly) limited amount that I have seen such as the above video and my knowledge as a scientist (which compared to quite a few people is also limited, I am only a post-doc). However, from that I see a great deal of people bashing King with arguments that seem very ad hominem and without recognizing that you should give very serious consideration to the following situation.

Regrettably we only have a certain amount of money each year with which to fund science. It is far, far too low an amount to fund everything and everyone. As such, while we may work in the long term towards hopefully getting better science funding (and education), in the short term we’re faced with a very serious issue. We’re going to have to decide that some things don’t get funding or get much less money than they need. Perhaps it is in our genuine interest to weight some of our decision about which projects receive money (and how much) based upon those programs that are working more directly towards problems with a broad societal or potentially global impact?

I think that’s a tough and fair question to ask.

Best wishes,

Michael

Here’s a great little program I ran across recently and have been trying with much glee, Papers. The basic idea is one that’s probably occurred to most scientists with varying degrees of frequency. The problem is how to personally manage an ever growing knowledge-base of papers. Each day, not only does the sum total of scientific literature increase, but as a scientist the boundary of your own knowledge also gets extended. Frequently you run across new papers that are interesting. You’ve got to decide if it’s worth keeping an electronic copy and if so, how to put it in an accessible place. Many of us (myself included) break down and being manually categorizing papers and then renaming the files by some pneumonic that makes sense. Retrieving the papers then becomes the next challenge. Having a way to search through all those papers would be nice, but in the absence of anything I’ve often been forced back to the publisher’s website to use their search engine (or to a broad search engine such as google scholar). This really defeats the whole purpose. Why bother in the first place? And how about having a sortable list of papers, broken by subject with your own comments/rating/thoughts included?

A couple of Dutch biologists actually did something about it.

On Tuesday the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics was announced, going to Nambu, Kobayashi, and Maskawa for their related work on symmetry break in high energy physics. I won’t go into any detail (and at this point I probably can’t go into much detail as it’s been so long since I wore a high-energy physics hat), but I noticed something rather funny on the morning news.

This being “Chicago” it was big news that one of the prize winners was in the physics faculty at U of Chicago (Nambu). The reporter tried to convey the idea of what symmetry breaking is with the pencil example. However, he kind of mixed up the explanation and his mistaken interpretation then propagated through the rest of the newsroom as others tried it.

The idea is this : Suppose you have a symmetric pencil and you stand it on end on a flat surface. All things being equal, there’s no reason it should fall any particular direction. But eventually some air currents or vibrations are enough and it falls over. It has to fall a particular direction, but before hand there’s not necessarily a direction that it should fall. Now that the pencil is on its side pointing a particular direction we say that the earlier symmetry is broken. Since there was no way to predict which direction it would fall we say the symmetry was broken “spontaneously.” Say it fell pointing due east. It could just have easily fallen pointing north, south, west, or any other direction.

Anyhow, the reporter had been told the example and managed to get the part about the pencil falling. However, he didn’t understand what was meant and instead described it as a pencil being held perpendicular and being dropped. This in turn led to the news-casters (including the weatherman) dropping pencils and pondering an incorrect notion of symmetry breaking. I suspect he was told the example (perhaps he even asked someone!). However, I think this was clearly a case where showing someone the example would have produced a much better result. Anyhow, I got a real kick out of seeing them drop pencils. sigh...

That said, the award brings with it the whole host of questions and detractions. Why pick a particular subject and not another (I was hoping for condensed matter such as Pendry for the negative index of refraction work)? And even within that sub-field and the idea it’s being awarded for, there are usually several individuals all of whom made significant, major contributions. How do you decide when so many are involved? For symmetry breaking in high energy or nuclear physics, why not Cabibbo? why not Higgs (he missed out on it in 79)? Why not Goldstone? The 2007 Nobel Prize in chemistry certainly was close to home though! I was throughly giddy about it (though again the same questions apply). All in all though, I’m much, much happier that we have the prizes (though there should be more) despite the nagging questions.

Most everything seems to be back online and so far the software has not deleted anything. That’s a sad qualifier, but true. I’m still missing a few entries that are potentially lost to time. My great “how to visit CP1 and CP2 out in the original Argonne site” is gone, and a few others I’ll miss. But most everything is accounted for.

If this trend continues then I’ll probably begin putting more frequent entries up. It’s a reasonably exciting time right now, I’m just reticent to type up too much of it until I can see whether or not we’ll get another round of epic fail. I’ll also begin including my own thoughts on music I enjoy, maybe books too. I could be opening a terrible time-sink here. heh.

My big plan, if things work, is to begin a “reciprocal space gallery.” In short, there’s a bunch of awesome looking diffraction patterns which should be shared and enjoyed.

Yes, it’s been a while, a few months as a matter of fact. Part of it is certainly my nature drifting between different things. But part of it, and much of the barrier to keeping up the website has been problems with my software. After losing all the entries (and painfully restoring them) a few times, I gave up on things for a while. It’s rather discouraging to record entries and keep things up to date when the software (cough, ahem... Rapidweaver) decides to periodically destroy all the previous entries. Things did not work as intended after the software upgrade. So the solution was to recreate the site from scratch and block copying entries in one by one. The other impediment was of course answering the question of whether or not to continue using this software. For better or worse, it’s what I know so the easiest thing seemed to be sticking with it a while longer.

Ranting aside, I was reminded today by some friends as well as my wife that things needed a face-lift.

For the time being, please bear with me as I recover and restore the website. For now I’ll leave you with a picture of Buckley. This evening he discovered an open guitar case and with his natural attraction towards guitars, he was right at home.