Life, the universe, and teeny tiny particles.
by phill
So now that everyone’s had an opportunity to gander at my far-too-long Warhammer Online review, I guess I’d better update this journal.
I had the opportunity to visit and use the Australian Synchrotron this past week, which is the main cause of my lack of updates–stressing over making sure everything was prepared for the trip was doing my head in. It’s a pretty damn impressive sight, and you can check it out on Google Maps here. It’s the round structure sort of in the middle with the blue stripe down the centre of it.
For those not familiar with the instrument, it’s essentially a big particle accelerator that has the capability to shoot x-rays at high energies. The most common use for such x-ray radiation is to get diffraction patterns, graphs that show where a substance placed in the beam has ordered placement of atoms (or crystallinity). We can then use these patterns to determine placement of atoms in a particular substance, and a whole bunch of different properties that might not have been available to be viewed in a conventional laboratory x-ray diffraction machine with its lower energy.
So I was using a big humming machine of radiation death for about a week. Thankfully there’s so many safety protocols and failsafes that it’s literally impossible to get stuck in the way of the radiation unless you’ve got two accomplices and you really, really want to do so. As the safety officer explained to us, we probably got more radiation coming over in the plane than we would get if we worked at the synchrotron for a year. Natch.
The way most of these open facilities work is that you apply for beamtime, get allocated a chunk, rock up and experiment for the entire time. This means either taking along a friend, or a friend’s weight in Red Bull. In my case I had two friends: my supervisor and another one of his postgrad students. So we weren’t so much under the hammer when it came to staying awake. We worked out rough shifts, and I took the first all-nighter as, well, it’s my stuff so I figured I should be the one to do the brunt of it.
Fortunately the facility has a sweet little room called the ‘User’s Lounge’ which accomodates anyone staying for long periods of time. There’s a really nice espresso machine, large plasma screen teevee with just about every single Foxtel channel available, and comptuers for internet lovin’. Not a bad setup, and I think I watched more Simpsons and Futurama than any other time combined while I was waiting for my samples to run.
The experiments all ran relatively well. We’d had grand ambitions for some in-situ stuff but it didn’t really turn out exactly as we’d planned. But that’s the nature of science I guess, and I’d already sort of thought that anything we got from the in-situ stuff was a bonus, really.
The unfortunate fact about getting so much data is that now I need to go through and interpret all of it. Right now there’s just a bunch of squiggly lines with no real meaning attached to them, so it’s my job to go through and assign meaning to everything. This is the hard part, and it’ll probably take me all the way through until next year to do it, but hopefully by the end we’ll have a fuller picture of what’s going on.
Anyway, back to work. A more regular program will be forthcoming.
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Comments
You get much better patterns off the synchrotron primarily due to the higher intensity (and so your peaks are much higher relative to the background and have a more well defined form-factor) and then then energy influences the positions, spacing and capacity to resolve and fit the peaks relative to each other … I should go away now shouldn’t I :P
Oh blahdy blah. I try and explain things for a layman and now look what you’ve done :O Geeeeez
Geez louise
Oh wait thats not really a saying here is it :P
“For those not familiar with the instrument..” ie, the majority of the population of planet Earth.
“..hopefully by the end we’ll have a fuller picture of what’s going on.” Going on with what? Or is this another one of those things that the majority of the population don’t need to know?
BTW, has your story been published in that publication yet?
“Going on with what? Or is this another one of those things that the majority of the population don’t need to know?”
The latter. Definitely the latter.
And yeah, still have to cash my cheque but it’s out there for all to laugh behind their hands at (: