This will be an interesting first for me, an honest to goodness first. We've got beamtime coming up next week, but I'm strictly going as a supporting person. Both of our other post-docs have projects that will run during that time, but none of mine will.

The reasons for mine not running at this point are actually quite good and I'm in no way upset about it. The most important reason being that the physical geometry of this particular station is poorly suited to my experiments. The second reason is that my good synchrotron experiment already has a large supply of data and my secondary faceting project is more suited to our in-house lab equipment. Also it really doesn't make any sense to try and cram too many different things into 6 days of beamtime. It will be difficult enough to do two successful experiments during that time.

Alot of the pre-run jitters are absent. There are problems to be solved, things to be made, things to be fixed... but I get to have tasks delegated to me to work on instead of being the one delegating (and having to solve many of them too). It's actually pretty refreshing in this respect. I've even got time and energy to do some background reading beforehand.

So I am in the interesting position of getting to do and participate in a great deal of science, but not to have quite as much pressure associated with it. One of the biggest flaws in beamline science is that it is very unforgiving to both errors and unexpected results. When you've only got 96 hours in which to do everything (including set up!), you really have to be on your toes to solve problems as they occur. You've also got to maintain the presence of mind to steer the experiment in the correct (read that as "most interesting") direction. Nature frequently gives us things that we do not expect and beamline science does not afford us much luxury in the way of time to figure it out.

But that is the nature of the game right now. There are so few light sources bright enough and with the proper support to do these experiments. Thus, the competition merely for time at the facility is of course very high. Beamtime is the life-blood of today's x-ray scattering scientist. Thus, it's easy to see how there can be a great deal of pressure on the individual scientists to perform well.

However, a great deal of that is not really on my mind as much right now. There's still plenty of pressure and work ahead, but the simple fact that it's not one of my own babies that is running makes my life a good bit easier.

So.... we'll be running two experiments: Dan's titanium-oxide surfaces and Kee-Chul's platinum nanoparticles. Both are exciting experiments and will involve really high quality work(though each is extremely distinct and different). My next beamline experiment will come up before too long and we've got several more in the works. But for now my primary and secondary projects are both "in house" in our own laboratory.

We will be running at a different beamline than is normal for me as the station we normally work at is being upgraded. Most of the time in the past we've used "undulators" or "wigglers" that produce quite controlled x-ray radiation by steering (or rocking) the electron beam back and forth rhythmically. This time however we'll use what is known as a "bend magnet." This changes the direction of the entire beam in an arc, but only once. The radiation emitted is not quite as controlled as before. The beam emits radiation over a much broader spectrum (many more frequencies) instead of being peaked around a particular ones. We will still filter out the frequency we need, but in general we tend to lose some of the total number of photons compared to the undulators or wigglers.

Anyhow there's lots to do and I need to get back to it.

thanks for reading!