My Lab
drorzel | June 29, 2006I ended the previous laser post by noting that diode lasers need some additional wavelength selection to be done in order to be useful as light sources for spectroscopy experiments. In their natural state, they tend to emit light over a broader range of wavelengths than is really ideal, and we'd like to narrow that down, and also to be able to control the emission.
(I should note that, while the emission of a typical diode laser is broader than people doing atomic physics experiments would like, it's still incredibly narrow by normal standards. The actual width, in wavelength, of the light…
drorzel | May 12, 2006The approval for the second year of my NSF grant just came through. This wasn't really in doubt, but it's nice to have confirmation that the thirty-odd thousand dollars I was counting on to run the next year of the experiment will actually, you know, be available when I start sending purchase orders out for stuff in a week or two...
Not to mention the summer salary that's part of the package...
drorzel | May 9, 2006Woke up, got out of bed
Ran a comb across my head...
8:40: Leave home, bike to work.
8:50: Arrive at work, stow bike in lab
8:55: Download electronically submitted papers to be graded. Determine which students haven't handed papers in yet.
9:15: Change into teaching clothes, review lecture notes.
(Continued...)
9:35-10:40: Teach class on basics of quantum computing, logic gates, supeerpositions and entanglement.
10:45: Let class go five minutes late. Run to bathroom.
10:50-11:55: Second class, review for Tuesday's exam. Answer questions about right-hand rules, magnetic fields, and Faraday's…
drorzel | April 24, 2006I've found myself in the weird position of giving career advice twice in the last week and a half. Once was to a former student, which I sort of understand, while the second time was a grad student in my former research group, who I've never met. I still don't really feel qualified to offer useful advice-- I haven't even come up for tenure yet, after all. I might have something useful to say next year at this time-- that, or you'll know not to listen to anything I have to say.
Anyway, since I'm thinking about this, and since I'm otherwise afflicted with motivation-sapping medical crud, I'm…
drorzel | April 11, 2006One of the features I always like in the print edition of Seed is the lab notebook pictorial. Every month (or, at least, all three of the months that I've looked at the print edition), they publish a reproduction of a page or two from the lab notebook of a working scientist. It's sort of cool to see how they differ from one field to another, while remaining largely the same.
Back when I was doing the "A Week in the Lab" series of posts, somebody asked me about my own lab notebooks. I present here the reason why Seed is never likely to ask me to supply notebook pages for their monthly feature…
drorzel | February 16, 2006Union College Physics and Astronomy Colloquium
Feb. 16, 2006
Speaker: Dr. Chad Orzel, Union College
Title: "Counting Atoms for Astrophysics: Atom Traps, Neutrino Detectors, and Radioactive Background Measurements"
Abstract: A new generation of neutrino and dark matter detectors is currently under development, using liquid neon or xenon as a detection medium. These detectors offer unprecedented sensitivity, but in order to reach their full potential, the liquid in the detector must be purified to an extraordinary degree to avoid contamination by radioactive krypton isotopes. I will describe a…