Category: Lab Stories

For technical reasons, it turns out that alkali metal atoms are particularly good candidates for laser cooling. Rubidium is probably the most favorable of all of them– some atomic physicists jokingly refer to it as “God’s atom”– but all of the alkalis, even Francium, have been cooled and trapped. Of course, alkali metal elements are… Continue reading True Lab Stories: The Sodium Incident

(Series explanation here.) The lab I worked in in grad school contained a bunch of miscellaneous objects whose purpose was a little hard to discern. One of the oddest was a big heavy acrylic lens. It was probably an inch thick, and two or three inches in diameter, and had four screw holes around the… Continue reading True Lab Stories: The Plastic Lens

(Series explanation here.) When I was in grad school, I worked in a lab with an incredibly high density of laser technology. We had not one but two Ti:sapphire systems, with 15 W argon ion lasers pumping Coherent 899 ring lasers, plus a pulsed YAG/ dye laser system, and a couple of miscellaneous diode lasers.… Continue reading True Lab Stories: The Water Fountain

Every good blog needs a signature recurring element. Dave and Greta have Casual Fridays, RPM has Double Entendre Fridays, Grrlscientist has Birds in the News, PZ has Say Mean Things About Religious People Days-That-End-In-Y, Orac has EneMan… I’m not organized enough to commit to posting things in a certain category on a specific day of… Continue reading True Lab Stories: The Series

As a sort of cautionary counterpoint to the anecdote in my How to Tell a True Lab Story post, Derek Lowe has the story of somebody who pulled the same trick with a big commercial liquid nitrogen tank: The cylinder had been standing at one end of a ~20′ x 40′ laboratory on the second… Continue reading Don’t Try This At Home