(12:09 AM)
experimental physics - lab week
am really enjoying this "Week in the Lab" series at Uncertain Principles- A Week in the Lab: Slow-Motion Experimental Physics Live-Blogging - "a series of articles explaining what I'm doing on this specific project, and how it's going. If I remember to bring the digital camera in to work, I may even post pictures of the apparatus. It'll be an all-access look into the glamorous world of lost tools, bloodied knuckles, minor electrocutions, and vacuum plumbing that is the development of an optically excited metastable krypton atomic beam source."
- The Big Picture - "The basic idea is to measure the amount of krypton in some other gas by trapping single krypton atoms out of a stream of gas passing into our vacuum system. The exceptional frequency selectivity of laser cooling lets you do this..." Also, krypton quirks.
- Lasers, Eight O'Clock, Day One - tuning lasers. "There are two lasers involved ... One is the 819 nm laser needed for the second step of the excitation process, the other is an 811 nm laser that will ... be used for detecting the metastable atoms..."
- Lock and Load - this one was my favorite: finding a tiny signal in noise
- Cleanliness Is Next to Somethingorother - details of an expensive laser. etc.
- It's Not Science Without Graphs - testing the setup.
