{"id":2413,"date":"2008-03-24T09:44:33","date_gmt":"2008-03-24T09:44:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/03\/24\/lab-porn-doomsday\/"},"modified":"2008-03-24T09:44:33","modified_gmt":"2008-03-24T09:44:33","slug":"lab-porn-doomsday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/03\/24\/lab-porn-doomsday\/","title":{"rendered":"Lab Porn: Doomsday!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Behold, the end of the world is at hand!<\/p>\n

\"i-ec7f2292205b40ceb0084aa00ebc09cc-sm_doomsday.jpg\"<\/p>\n

They said I was mad– mad!– but now they’ll pay…<\/p>\n

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 inside the chamber. It only looks like an instrument of apocalypse.<\/p>\n

Here’s a better lit picture:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"i-0de74fb8b67a2563d904658fbceca06b-sm_wmd_chamber.jpg\"<\/p>\n

And here’s one showing a bit of the atomic beam line behind the chamber:<\/p>\n

\"i-4c5cb3cf1865769a53285052a9ba0f0e-sm_chamber_beamline.jpg\"<\/p>\n

The large copper coils in the foreground are for the magneto-optical trap, while the longer coil stretching off to the right is the Zeeman slower. The discharge source is off at the far end, and looks sort of like this:<\/p>\n

\"i-d77edb45e9572ec4cffc3da6bae302e9-sm_pmt_mount.jpg\"<\/p>\n

That’s the source chamber, with the gas inlet to the right, and the beam line out of the frame to the left. The ball of tinfoil in the middle right is the high-tech electromagnetic shielding around the RF coil sustaining the plasma discharge we use to excite krypton atoms to a metastable state (which accounts for the pinkish color of the inlet tube).<\/p>\n

There’s a photomultiplier tube mounted at the top of the chamber, as part of an attempt to measure the metastable flux, and the other notable thing about this picture is the highly professional mounting of the PMT, in a chemistry clamp supported by a stand that’s been duct-taped to the table. Hey, it was fast and effective.<\/p>\n

(I spent an inordinate amount of time taking lab pictures one day last week. I’ll post them to Flickr eventually, but for now, they’re a good source of filler posts while I’m in Pennsylvania to give a talk at Bucknell…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,32,7,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experiment","category-my_lab","category-physics","category-pictures","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}