All aboard the midnight express.... Destination unknown!

Bear with me... I'm beginning to get a bit loopy these nights.

The picture above is with our sample being illuminated by UV light. We've got a rather hot (like perma-tan-cancer-maker-roast-your-face-real-bad hot) UV light source to trigger some effects in our sample (the sample likes it). Because much of the sample stage is made of white teflon, the whole thing just lights up brilliantly. It's quite a sight(from a safe place). And no, of course I'm not in the hutch while taking this picture.

Shortly after we turned on the UV light source this morning, our optical filters exploded. The UV source produces a great deal of other wavelengths that we don't want and don't need hitting our sample. So we have a setup to filter the light before it reaches the sample. My guess is that someone at some-point touched the surface of a filter with their hands. Even a light touch could have left enough grease on the filter to cause its destruction once it was under full power. It's not that the filter will combust or catch fire, it just shatters. But not to worry... we have several more filters.

It's been another hard evening and I think it was a particularly difficult time for the day shift. A large number of things simply broke during the day. One of our motors, one of the stages, and more. It's been a real struggle this time to get to the point of data collection. My solace is that we are (I think) reliably taking good, useful data. Reliable, good, useful... those have been difficult conditions to satisfy. But I think we've got it going well enough finally.

We're back to our old "data pipeline," and while this does mean that things won't look quite as glamorous, they will be both correct and finished on time.... I hope.

In the periods during long minutes of data collection I've managed some useful calibration of our new detector. So while we're not going to use it further this time, we will know quite a bit more about it the next time we show up. Quite surprising to me was that the "dark noise" in the camera didn't respond when I increased the gain (sensitivity) of the detector. I figured it would increase, but wasn't quite sure how much. It turns out that the dark noise is the same regardless of gain setting and only depends upon time. Look, I made a graph of it. Haha... no I won't bore you with it.

I'm reminded of a "Simpson's" episode where Lisa is explaining what it's like to be smart to her farther: "It's sad but often intelligence and happiness are inversely related. Look, I made a graph of it. sigh..."

I've also been working on a presentation for the week after next. I'm going to talk at a conference at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign about or results on the gold surface experiments. It will be our first presentation of the results and my first chance to present my new work as a post-doc for Hoydoo. We've got some really nice results from it and so I'm rather excited to hear what some other surface science people have to think about it.



I saw this little guy and took pictures of him for Kerri. He's got quite a loud call and seems to be fat and happy with all the cicadas to eat. From all his talking I would assume he's either looking for a mate or already has one and is enforcing his territory. He's always outside near our parking lot eating the insects.

That's about it for now. Another scan has finished running and I need to start working again.