After a 30 minute morning run, breakfast, shower, and then 1 hour nap, I'm convinced that this is the way to start the day. But before I digress on the perfect lifestyle, let me first talk about the awesome progress in the lab!
The excimer laser we are using is rather old. As old as I am. Thus it has many issues. During its hay day, it was quite the laser. It had automatic and internal gas handling, a nickel plated inner chamber and a nifty LED display letting you control the laser with the press of a button. Since then, its decayed quite a bit until it reached its current state.
The nickel coating inside the gas chamber has erroded away so now the HCl and plenty of contaminants absorb readily into the chamber walls. The automatic gas handling system was corroaded by the HCl and now has an all manual external plumbing system. It still gets the job done. It just takes a little TLC.
To clean the laser of all the gas contaminants, we circulate the gas around a liquid nitrogen filled dewar (around 90 K) to condense out all the contaminats such as water. However, it also takes all our Xe ad HCl out of the system as well. Thus we clean and give it a fresh fill of Xe, He, and HCl. So after a few weeks of tinkering with all the plumbing (read fixing leaks), and playing with the dye laser and following optics, we are finally fresh filled today. We have some awesome power now. I put a piece of tape on my finger and let it dangle in front of the laser beam and I could feel the vibrations. I'm a believer that light has momentum!
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