Cleanroom, more beamlines and nuclear waste

Today I am having a great day, first of all Celestino Padeste came with Maria René, a little girl from Bolivia who is here for a sabbatic year. He told me to show her what we do and our lab and I did so, and I also started having very nice measurements (yesterday it was one of the most horrible days, at work, I have had). Ok, let’s continue. After seeing the lab and letting the STM taking pictures we came to Ana and she took us to the cleanroom (since today my work was going on “automatic mode” mostly, I decided to visit all these new rooms and buildings). There is where Ana (and others) prepare the silicon gratings (obleas de silicio). Quite good.

Later we went to eat and afterwards we (Ana, Maria and me) met for coffee (after eating I ran to the lab to set the STM to zoom in a bit) with Dirk, Claudio, Phillip and Celestino.
Then we went to show her the SLS. I also went into some beamlines and hutchs I hadn’t been before.

After that we left Ana at her office and we came with Fátima to her lab, called the Hotlab, because it’s focused on nuclear waste disposal and reclycling. This was pretty amazing. We had to take new special dosymeters, the security team had to set our badges (magnetic cards) to be able to open the Hotlab doors for two hours and we went to it…
First of all the first control. The door at the main entrance of this building works like these (there are two not only one door), you insert the card, then a little alarm sounds, the door unlocks, you step in and you keep on a little green circle with both feet, when the door you have passed is closed and locked, another alarm starts and the other in front of you unlocks and then you are in.
After that you go into dressing rooms:

There you leave your shoes, you choose a pair of “strange shoes of thread” and you “jump a bit” around that machine on my back (a radiation detector) without touching it, otherwise another alarm starts. Now you pass through a shower (you don’t have to take one if you are there for just a few hours). You insert again your card and the door opens and now you are inside the core of the building.
Then Fátima introduced us to her labor and work:

And Javi appeared during that time as you can see. After that we went to the “high activity” samples rooms…

And now I am back and still taking nice “photos” with my STM of 60×60nm^2 of pentacene monolayers.

Laser pyrometer

We have a nice new pyrometer which you can see taking the temperature of our sample, or better said of the Kötzly of the sample. Pointing the Láser directly to the crystal would gave us a better measurement but it would be dangerous since the crystal is almost “perfect” and it’s reflection index is extremely high.

Yesterday it was a long day, I kept on analyzing data trying to see how are the physics here involved and we also start measuring again. Also quite in a hurry since we have a beamtime by the end of July (~28). Only one (24 + X)h day but it’s still hard. I also found while analyzing one image that the distances are a little bit less than expected… so we need to re-calibrate the piezos (we use the converse piezoelectricity to move the tip of an STM/AFM).
Clic on the image to see the rest.

Emergency instructions

This weekend was quite boring, I wanted to visit the Böttstein (Beznau) and the Leibstadt
nuclear reactors which are 2 and 8 Km far away from PSI but the weather was horrible.
Then I came back to the Hotel and I continued playing with complex dispersion relations and Riemannian Geometry…

SLS Control Room, Jorge, Rolf…

Here you can see some of the pictures I took this afternoon (just clic on the image).

It’s a pity Jorge is so dark there… Stimmt!.

Au (111)

I like gold, pure gold. Specially the 111 surface. It’s so cute!.
Clic on the image to see the rest.
Btw. I am also working on this document.
This is an old version that I need to update… later.

Let me take you on a trip

Let me take you on a trip
Around the world and back
And you won’t have to move
You just sit still” [...] Depeche Mode, “World In My Eyes”

Clic on the image to see the rest and if you have never listened to that classic of DM, try it!.

SLS and BBQ

Yesterday I made some new photos and two of them are already uploaded in my Flickr, as this one near the synchrotron ring.

Clic on the image to see more.

Tonight at 20:00 we have a BBQ in the forest here around PSI. It will be fun but It’s a pity that since Peter has to defend his tesis tomorrow, he will not come… Anyway, tomorrow we’ll party him because of this lecture. Sure!.
By the way, Thomas still asked me the other day that if I would like to take the Phd. They have seen 11 more candidates after I gave my talks (add that to the other 18 candidates that applied sooner or at the same time I did and it makes me feel I am a good physicist ) and they still want me , which is nice to listen. On Friday they have another talk from another candidate.

Flickr

Today I started (suggested for the last time by Lgs) uploading fotos to Flickr.

Clic on the image to see my Flickr

Today I kept on working on analyzing data, taking monolayer densities and so… But Rolf came to me with a very interesting question for which I still don’t have an answer, maybe my Electronic Freaks can drop a line.
He has an accelerometer, this one connected to an osciloscope. The accelerometer gives 1V per 1G (9.8m/s^2). The output of the osciloscope is the Fast Fourier Transform of Voltage in dB for frequency (Hz). The question is, which is the acceleration for a given frequency?. I have been fighting with FFT and iFFT and come to the conclusion that the problem is in deed not well formulated. But obviously it must have some truth. I think there is no FFT at all… But I have to wait till tomorrow to know more about it.

After travelling thousands of Km…

It arrived!.
Clic on the image to see the rest.