ugh.... It's been no fun this evening. Much of our earlier optimism is gone. We're continuing for the time being, but it's with "lowered expectations." We learned, tragically, that the sample we were hoping to see such great things from had been ill-prepared. So despite all our efforts, there was never anything there to see in the first place.

With little time remaining we're doing what we can. We've got our best bet sample reprepared and back in the beamline. We still have 2 more full days (48 hours) of beamtime, plus a day break in between the last two days. But we really need to move past this project and to the other postdoc's experiment. Each hour we spend trying to finish this experiment is one less hour on his project. It's not an ideal situation and makes it hard on everyone.



I'm not quite sure why I'm inspired to include the above picture, but there it is. It's nothing that we're studying this time, but rather a picture of my gold atoms arranged on a surface. The atoms are regularly arrayed in long rows that follow the step edge/terraces of the bulk crystal. You can't see the individual atoms in this picture, but you can see the "bumpiness" in the surface from their rows. Each row is about 5 atoms wide and 40 atoms long. The blobby things at the top are, for the moment just blobby things and will not be identified by their real names.