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.