Wow... well, we’re done for now.

My project was running at beamline 8 and we took an enormous amount of data. It was very hard work, but I think we got some very interesting results. It’s not going to be easy to analyze, but it should be quite rewarding when finished. We managed to get a very exhaustive look at our two primary objective samples in a variety of different conditions. With our remaining two days we managed to do some exploratory work on even a couple of our backup samples. Usually the backup samples only come out with the primary things don’t work. In this case we managed to get so much done during the first 5 days that we could call the most important things “finished” (at least until a complete data analysis can be done) and that it would be worth it to look at a couple of new things.

I’d prefer not to discuss any of the details at the moment as it’s both very new and not understood. But we managed to continue to extend coherent scattering work onto new surfaces and new/different systems. The above picture is no secret though. The glowing white hot thing is a platinum single crystal being prepared. It is annealing at a temperature of ~1700K, hence the glowing so brightly. If you look carefully you can see that the top of the crystal is flat. That’s the surface of interest for this sample and it’s been cut and polished along a particular crystal facet. You can also see the heating mechanism (the 2 turns of a copper coil) and the quartz pedestal holding the sample.