Week 7

Ooops! I skipped Week 6! I was very busy last week with my experiment and then I would come home from work and just veg out for the night. This weekend was busy too but so fun! I'll explain this in a bit.

So last week, we set up my experiment to run and we ran into a lot of problems with the equipment and the programs and such. The experiment was only supposed to take one or two days and ended up taking most of the weekend and the week! The computer program kept crashing every once in a while so when that happened we had to restart the program and the hardware. My poor mentor actually came in on the weekend to make sure the experiment was running correctly (and also to make sure there was plenty of liquid helium left to use and that the experiment was being conservative with it). Last week I also started a side project: I am going to be building my own transducers! The whole process only takes a day or so, and after my poster is finished I will have a lot of time to work on that and some other side projects. Also, Friday of last week was a day off, but I came in early in the morning so that Victor could show me an experiment to measure magnetic susceptibility of a sample with one of the magnets!! It sounds exciting, and I was very excited to see the experiment, but it was not what I thought it would be. The usual magnet experiments that people do at the lab deal with short pulsing and long pulsing, which is basically just a change in the magnetic field over a certain period of time and you measure the sample's response to the change in field. Usually this change is very fast, like in microseconds. There is a pretty B.A. feeling to the whole process. The speakers go "Charging Banks" when they are charging the capactiors and then "Ready to fire....FIRE" when they finally fire the "shot" of electricity to the magnet, which makes a loud clanking sound for some reason. However, the process that we were dealing with was very slow. We cooled the magnet down to helium-4 temperature and put the probe with the sample into the magnet. Then we took the magnet slowly up to a certain magnetic field (when I was watching, we went up to 10 Teslas) and recorded the response of the sample in terms of frequency and amplitude. Not too exciting, but now I get to say I played with one of the magnets at the magnet lab, hehe!

This weekend was a lot of fun! On Friday after I left the lab, the girl I work with named Yuliya and her friend and I went to this amusement park called Cliff's in Albuquerque. It was so much fun but it was SO hot out! We all got a little bit of heat stroke and the rides didn't help that much because we got dizzy on a lot of them. There was really only one typical roller coaster, but some of the other rides like the Super Fireball (which is a huge hoop that flips you upside down like 43829438 times in a row and then backwards!), the Cliff Hanger (one that brings you really high up in the sky and drops you straight down!), and the Sidewinder (a pendulum type ride that spins you around and up and down) were crazy rides even though they weren't conventional rollercoasters. We also played some games and won some cute stuffed animals!!

On Saturday, I had to go back to Santa Fe to get my car fixed for the 1000th time. This time it was truly fixed!! After that, I went into downtown Santa Fe and had lunch and walked around by myself. I went into some shops and bought some cute things for myself and others. Then by the time I got home I was so exhausted from waking up so early and from the day before that I just vegged out the rest of the day. Sunday was pretty much the same thing! I needed to sleep and relax.

Anyway, this week is consisting of poster preparation. The mini rough draft of the poster is due on Thursday so I have to finish it tomorrow. I am half done and it looks really nice! I have some cool pictures on there of the setup and the sample, and one frequency sweep. Tomorrow I will be putting together my experimental results and conclusion to the poster and then it will be done! Apparently, we're going to print 2 posters so I can take one back with me to FSU for the WIMSE Research Symposium. Now that I have a cool poster and really interesting research, I am excited to present at the WIMSE symposium this year. Two years ago, I was frightened to present my poster because I had no idea what my research was about and it was really over my head. So this year will definitely be better! I am a little nervous about the poster session here however because a lot of the people from the lab will be asking me questions and they obviously know more than I do about physics. Technically my poster is in the Materials Science category but the concentration is in Experimental Condensed Matter Physics so I'm sure I will get a lot of physicists asking me questions. I am just going to take it as a learning experience and try to have fun with it.

In 6 days, my mom will be flying in from NY!!! She will be taking a little trip to Albuquerque to explore on her own for a few days and then when she gets back, we are going to do some exploring around here. I have been wanting to go to Bandelier National Monument, do some hiking somewhere around here, go to the hot springs in the Jemez Mountains, etc. We are both really excited to do those things! The student poster session is on August 3rd in the afternoon, so we will be leaving here on August 4th (exactly 2 weeks from tomorrow!). On the way, we are going to stop outside Albuquerque and go to Sandia Peak to ride the "world's longest aerial tramway" and get lunch at the top of the peak. After that, we will start the long trip back to Tallahassee and then a few days after we get there I will be home sweet home on Long Island!! I can't wait to get home, it feels like it's been forever!

Until next time...

Peace & Love,

Val