As sort of a counterpoint to the previous entry, here’s a more positive poll question: What’s the most useful antiquated tool you keep around? That is, what dusty old relic do you keep around because there’s no modern alternative that works as well for what it does?
Category: My Lab
Dorky Poll: Lab Relics
Welcome to the laboratory graveyard: This picture shows the back room in one of the labs, and most of the gear in it is broken or useless. There’s a computer that’s so old it has a 5 1/4″ floppy drive, the skeleton of a vacuum evaporator, a crappy student STM system, and an electrometer that’s […]
True Lab Stories: Death of a Laser
So, what’s the deal with last night’s silly obituary? Basically, the main laser in my experiment died because I’m a jackass. More specifically, the laser in question is a diode laser, similar to the kind found in CD and DVD players. These are broadly tunable, available in a wide range of powers and wavelengths, and […]
Requiescat in Pace
SDL 5401-G1, October 2001- February 6, 2007 SDL 5401-G1 (“Sid” to friends) died today of static shock, after five years of service in a grating-locked diode laser system. He had survived three lab floods, and more than a dozen power outages, but succombed to electric shock following a mishap with a Tesla coil. He is […]
Hopeful Abstracts and Extra Motivation
Late spring/ early summer is Conference Season in academic science, with lots of meetings scheduled during the academic break, so that everybody can attend without cutting into their teaching responsibilities (of course, our trimester calendar means we’re still in session for most of these, but whatever…). The peak time for conferences in my subfield is […]
Cosmetics in the Lab
I spent the better part of an hour putting nail polish on mirror mounts yesterday. No, this isn’t a tragic misinterpretation of my students’ advice to “wear more pink.” It’s because the optical table looks like this:
Mirror, Mirror
A little bit before Christmas, I spent an afternoon swapping mirrors out of one line of the apparatus. I was losing too much of the laser light before it went into the chamber, and replacing the mirrors increased the power entering the apparatus by a factor of two or so. Here’s a picture of the […]
Every Picture Tells a Story
So, what’s the deal with that graph I was talking about the other day? I sort of left it hanging at the end, there, but I ought to actually interpret the figure. It also serves as a nice and fairly simple illustration of how physicists approach experimental data. Here’s a newer version of the plot […]
The Making of a Graph
One of my current thesis students has been plugging away for a while at the project described in the A Week in the Lab series last year, and he’s recently been getting some pretty good data. I’ve spent a little time analyzing the preliminary results (to determine the best method for him to use on […]
Mr. Toad’s Wild Vacuum System
I’m in charge of the senior major seminar, in which we have the senior physics and astronomy majors meet once a week to talk about topics of interest to them. I’ve also been making them give short “progress reports” on their thesis research projects. Last week, one of my students was tapped for a progress […]