This is the last of the papers I was an author on while I was in grad school, and in some ways, it’s the coolest. It’s rare that you get to be one of the first people to do an entirely new class of experiment, but that’s what this was. It kicked off a new… Continue reading Creation of an Ultracold Neutral Plasma
Category: Experiment
Earth Saved Until Next Year
So, the LHC has been shut down until next year, after a major helium leak in on section. This means it will be March or April of next year before collisions in the ATLAS detector create dragons that will eat us all. Now you know why I didn’t make a big deal of the “start-up”… Continue reading Earth Saved Until Next Year
Bandwidth and Community Expectations
Derek Lowe has posted an article about X-ray lasers in chemistry, which amused me because of the following bit: Enter the femtosecond X-ray laser. A laser will put out the cleanest X-ray beam that anyone’s ever seen, a completely coherent one at an exact (and short) wavelength which should give wonderful reflection data. This is… Continue reading Bandwidth and Community Expectations
Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions
This is the last of the five papers that were part of my Ph.D. thesis, and at ten journal pages in length, it’s the longest thing I wrote. It was also the longest-running experiment of any of the things I did, with the data being taken over a period of about three years, between and… Continue reading Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions
A One-Afternoon Experiment: The Making of “Time Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions” (part 1)
As I said in the introduction to the previous post, this was the first paper on which I was the lead author, and it may be my favorite paper of my career to date. I had a terrific time with it, and it led to enough good stories that I’m going to split the making-of… Continue reading A One-Afternoon Experiment: The Making of “Time Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions” (part 1)
Time-Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions
This paper is the third of the articles I wrote when I was a grad student, and the first one where I was the lead author. It’s also probably my favorite of the lot, not just because of the role it played in my career, but because it packs a lot of science into four… Continue reading Time-Resolved Studies of Ultracold Ionizing Collisions
Scooped; or, The Making of “Suppression and Enhancement of Collisions in Optical Lattices”
The experiment described in the previous post was published in early 1998, but the work was done in 1997. This was the year when things really turned around for me in grad school– the optical control paper was done in the summer 0f ’94, and ’95 and ’96 were just a carnival of pain. Everything… Continue reading Scooped; or, The Making of “Suppression and Enhancement of Collisions in Optical Lattices”
Suppression and Enhancement of Collisions in Optical Lattices
I announced my intention to do some research blogging a little while ago, and managed one pair of posts before the arrival of SteelyKid kind of distracted me. I’m still planning to complete the Metastable Xenon Project blog, though (despite the utter lack of response to the first two), and the second real paper I… Continue reading Suppression and Enhancement of Collisions in Optical Lattices
The Making Of “Optical Control of Ultracold Collisions”
One of the things I’d like to accomplish with the current series of posts is to give a little insight into what it’s like to do science. This should probably seem familiar to those readers who are experimental scientists, but might be new to those who aren’t. I think that this is one of the… Continue reading The Making Of “Optical Control of Ultracold Collisions”
Optical Control of Ultracold Collisions in Metastable Xenon
(This is the first in a