Back in the comments of one of the “Uncomfortable Question” threads, Matthew Jarpe asked (as background research for a new novel): If someone were to hand you the keys to your own particle accelerator and you could do any experiment you wanted, what would it be? Well, if somebody just gave me the keys to… Continue reading Semi-Comfortable Question: Personal Particle Accelerator
Category: Experiment
Chain, Chain, Chain… Chain of Valves
Here’s a picture of the gas-handling line leading to the discharge region seen in the plasma post: How many valves can you count in that picture? If you said “seven,” give yourself a pat on the back. Here’s the same picture with the valves numbered for your convenience:
Lab Porn: Plasma!
A couple more pretty pictures of the apparatus, to pass the time: This is the plasma discharge source that we use to make metastable atoms. We excite the gas using a RF coil (under the tinfoil) with a couple of watts of power at 145 MHz (local ham radio people must love me…), which creates… Continue reading Lab Porn: Plasma!
Lab Porn: Doomsday!
Behold, the end of the world is at hand! They said I was mad– mad!– but now they’ll pay… Well, ok, it’s not actually a doomsday weapon. It’s a shot of the main experiment chamber in my lab, taken in very low light in an attempt to capture the orange glow of the ion gauge… Continue reading Lab Porn: Doomsday!
Uncomfortable Questions: Particle Physics
Stephen asks: Why do you try to hide your secret desire to be a high-energy particle physicist? Heh. Seriously, honestly, I have no desire whatsoever to be a high-energy particle physicist. I wish I had a somewhat better understanding of particle physics, becuase that way I would have an easier time reading a lot of… Continue reading Uncomfortable Questions: Particle Physics
Lab Visit Report: Unusual Lattices
In one of his March Meeting posts, Doug Natelson writes about laser cooling experiments that explore condensed matter phenomena: While the ultracold gases provide an exquisitely clean, tunable environment for studying some physics problems, it’s increasingly clear to me that they also have some significant restrictions; for example, while optical lattices enable simulations of some… Continue reading Lab Visit Report: Unusual Lattices
Lab Visit Report: Four-Wave Mixing
The next lab visit experiments I want to talk about are really the epitome of what I called the “NIST Paradigm” in an earlier post. These are experiments on “four-wave mixing” done by Colin McCormick (who I TA’d in freshman physics, back in the day), a post-doc in Paul Lett’s lab at NIST. As Paul… Continue reading Lab Visit Report: Four-Wave Mixing
Lab Visit Report: Francium
As I mentioned a few days ago, I visited Luis Orozco’s lab during our trip to DC last week. I already talked about his cavity QED stuff, but that’s only one of the projects under development. He’s also working on a next-generation apparatus for the laser cooling and trapping of francium, to be done at… Continue reading Lab Visit Report: Francium
Lab Visit Report: Cold Plasmas
Another of the labs I visited while in DC was Steve Rolston’s lab at the University of Maryland. This actually contains the apparatus I worked on as a graduate student, including many of the same quirky pieces of hardware– Steve was the PI (Principal Investigator) for the metastable xenon lab in the Phillips group at… Continue reading Lab Visit Report: Cold Plasmas
A User’s Guide to Vacuum Pumps Part 2: Quiet Pumps
In the previous post on this topic, I discussed the various types of noisy vacuum pumps, both clean and dirty varieties. This time out, we’ll deal with the quiet pumps, the ones that don’t deafen people working in the lab. Quiet and Dirty: The quintessential quiet and dirty pump is an oil diffusion pump. These… Continue reading A User’s Guide to Vacuum Pumps Part 2: Quiet Pumps