Beamtime!

I have not mentioned how comfy the seats at PSI are... they are extremely so.

Tomorrow is the start of the booked cSAXS beamtime for my group. Beamtime is, as you might have guessed, the time of availability of beam. The beam in this case is X-ray. It has to be arranged well in advance, starting off with a proposal from the experimental team and depending on the "rating" it gets, I think that determines how long people have to wait before they can carry out their practical work. I don't know how long this team has had to wait - I know they got an extremely high rating of 1 or 2 - but I have heard of people (worldwide I mean) waiting for months for beamtime. Also tomorrow is a seminar and meeting that I'll probably head along to.

Most of today was spent at the beamline, where myself and mostly Martin (my PhD student and mentor for my first week since the team leaders have been away) completed the experimental set up and tested the distances and limits of the moving parts. It's all linked up to computer so remote controlled from the next room. Controlling the parts involves a few Linux commands.. and it is SO unbelievably MUCH cooler to plug in coding and see machinary move than it is to plug in ordinary differential equations and see confusion. Of course it doesn't move much, but the point is I did Science today and it was COOL.

I've updated the links on the left-hand side to include a link to the cSAXS beamline and its research. It's so cool, please don't just take my word for it.

I must try to remember my camera for tomorrow.