While Kate was off being all lawyerly at her NAAG workshop, I spent my time visiting my old group at NIST, and some colleagues at the University of Maryland. This wasn’t just a matter of feeling like I ought to do something work-like while she was workshopping– I genuinely enjoy touring other people’s labs, and… Continue reading Lab Visit Report: Cavity QED
Category: Experiment
A User’s Guide to Vacuum Pumps Part 1: Noisy Pumps
A great many physics experiments need to be conducted at low pressures, in order to avoid sample contamination, thermal effects, or dissipative forces produced by interaction with air. Some experiments don’t require all that much in terms of vacuum, while others require pressures so low that they’re limited by the diffusion of gasses through stainless… Continue reading A User’s Guide to Vacuum Pumps Part 1: Noisy Pumps
Dinner With ΔKE
As mentioned previously, I was invited to discuss physics and politics at one of the local fraternities earlier this week. Oddly, given the primacy of Greek organizations on campus, this is only the fourth time I’ve set foot inside a fraternity or sorority house in seven years. The previous occasions were times when I was… Continue reading Dinner With ΔKE
Experimental Physics for Morons, #47
I spent the bulk of yesterday afternoon doing vacuum system work, specifically working on the system to feed gas into the atomic beam source. My feelings about this can be inferred from the Facebook status message I set at the time: “Chad Orzel abhors a vacuum.” The apparatus I’m building uses laser cooling to decelerate… Continue reading Experimental Physics for Morons, #47
Trapping of Neutral Mercury Atoms and Prospects for Optical Lattice Clocks
I’m not hugely enthusiastic about the ResearchBlogging.org project, but it’s a little ridiculous that they’ve been active for weeks now, and there still isn’t a single post in the “Physics” category. If they’re going to offer the category link, something ought to come up when you click it, so let’s give them some blogging on… Continue reading Trapping of Neutral Mercury Atoms and Prospects for Optical Lattice Clocks
True Lab Stories: The Oaf Effect
It’s been a while since I did one of these (see “How to Tell a True Lab Story” for an explanation), but yesterday’s laser tech story reminded me of one. The lab next to mine in grad school also used an argon ion laser to pump another laser, but they were much more cramped for… Continue reading True Lab Stories: The Oaf Effect
Lazy Particle Physics Query
I could probably tease this information out of the Particle Data Group website, given enough time, but somebody with a background in particle physics can probably answer this in two seconds, so I appeal to the Internets: What is the shortest lifetime of a particle that has been directly detected? By “directly detected” I mean,… Continue reading Lazy Particle Physics Query
Particle Physics Requires Faith
Faith in theory and curve-fitting, at least… Tommaso Dorigo reports some new results, which are based on a figure that could be titled “Why I Am Not a Particle Physicist #729”: “What’s the problem?,” you ask, “There’s a nice big peak there, looking a little like a black-body spectrum.” Ah, but that’s not the signal.… Continue reading Particle Physics Requires Faith
The Environmental Cost of Physics Research
I burned out some diode lasers a while back, and needed to buy replacements. Here’s one of the replacements on top of the tube containing the other, with a US quarter for scale: Here they are, with the box and packing material used to ship them to me:
The Easterbrook Idiocy Supercollider
I generally like Gregg Easterbrook’s writing about football (though he’s kind of gone off the deep end regarding the Patriots this year), but everything else he turns his hand to is a disaster. In particular, he tends to pad his columns out with references to science and technology issues. I’m not quite sure what the… Continue reading The Easterbrook Idiocy Supercollider