Working in a lab is a truly remarkable experience. I am quickly becoming obsessed with my work and find myself reading miscalaneous physics texts and pondering about the experiment quite often during my free time. There is just so much work to do and so many interesting things to learn and aparatus to improve and things to fix.
This week, although its only Tuesday, has already been extremely productive and exciting. For the first time, I get the feeling that we are making progress and that all the work we are doing is really leading towards something exciting and new!
Yesterday we oppened up our spectrometer to make sure everything was working properly. Although it is a simple device - two mirrors and a diffraction grating - it is truly amazing to see. I love the look of pristene optics. The mirrors so perfectly reflect the light upon the deceptively smoothe diffraction grating (it really has approximatley 1200 grooves/cm) which can be rotated such that it projects the desired wavlength (down to the angstrome) onto the second mirror which directs the light out a final adjustable slit onto a detector. Absolutely amazing to see. We spent the rest of the day yesterday and today trying to assure the calibration of the spectrometer and coordinate its actions with the horrendous piece of labview code that runs the entire aparatus (laser grating, autotracking system, spectrometer).
Much progress has been made in understanding the code. Though there are may mysteries and secrets of the code lost with graduated grad students, we learned enough to add one more layer of fudging to the code and make it work for today. As with everyone that has come before us, we are leaving the rewriting and consolodation of the code (as well as translation to a new computer and hardware) to some poor smuck in the future (probably me...).
After a quick pizza dinner in the office, we managed to track down our advisor and coerce him into cleaning off our nanotube experimentation table. The table was piled literaly three feet high over the majority of the surface and then cascading down into a delta of valves, gauges, old motor parts and boxes on the floor. Unattended flat surfaces have a way of dissapearing in our lab. Carter, our advisor, picked through each piece of the pile with exclamations of "Oh! These are great! If I ever need a standard 8 pin to 3 pin lamp adapter, this would be a treasure! But I rarely do..." As he worked his way through hundreds of these things, Brent (my coworker) and I climbed to the topmost shelves (a good 20 feet up) and stooped to the bottommost drawers to put away as much stuff as we could. So our project is comeing along! We will hoist our new spectrometer into place tommorow before the fresh space dissapears once again.
As this post is already far too long, I'll conclude: there is so much to be done at the lab and in life, I'm truly excited! I'm off to Michigan this weekend for a family reunion.
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