Photoemission in the Forest

What the hell is it? It's not spit, not from a person anyways. See how regular all the bubbles are in size? I wonder if it's a deposit of frog eggs, but it's far from any pond where the tadpoles could develop. Maybe toad spawn? Is it a clump of insect eggs? All expert guesses welcome.

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Welcome to BNL. Bored yet?

Another synchrotron, another blog. It's the perfect way to entertain myself while I wait for the signals to assert themselves above the noise. Cutting-edge science so often involves pushing the current technology to the limit of what it can deliver. Which leaves me with long stretches during which I can't go far but also can't do much.

This time I find myself on a tropical island just south of Connecticut. Here the natives are not like they were in Sweden. They seem to be on average less entirely pleasant to look upon, even uncouth in some instances. Their choices of apparel heighten this effect rather than downplay it. I saw a lady at the King Kullen whose hair and makeup must have taken more than an hour, but the rest of her only meritted sweatpants and a sweatshirt.

Long Islanders seem to enjoy eating well, but so farI haven't find out where they do this, since none of the towns and strip malls in the area surrounding the laboratory grounds would have me eating like that. Which is about enough complaining, since many people here have been quite friendly and human, velour tracksuits notwithstanding.

Brookhaven National Laboratory has a reputation among its users as boring and crapulent. In fact, I originally planned this entry to be a photo essay of just how miserable and half-assed this place is, but as I documented it I realized just how lovely it looks. I have been trying since I first came here two years ago to emphasize the beauty of this place, both to myself and to my coworkers. It's been too easy to slip back into the dissatisfied boredom that they voice in response. Judge for yourself how it looks on film:

The National Synchrotron Light Source is just one of several research centers here at Brookhaven National Labs. To first approximation, BNL is a 5000 acre forest. (Pardon the use of local vernacular.) The smattering of roads and buildings are the most important correction to that approximation, but I found a shortcut between the dorms and the lab, so this pine-needle red carpet is my walk to work. Well, the picturesque part.

The lab grounds are more forest than research centers, and are home to more critters than scientists, such as these:

...that I surprised on the walk to the lab in the morning,

... as I cut through a parking lot,

... in the grass outside the northeast entrance,
... and even among the gravel surrounding the transformer outside the dorm.

(See? I ain't lyin'.)





I'll thrown in more shots of the wild turkeys, fat little groundhogs, racoons, and song birds if I get some worth sharing.


Buut when I'm not pretending to be a naturalist, this is the Millenium Falcon of a lab facility where I'm doing my work. Actually, it's not my own work, since the chemist who is synthesizing the material I will use is still putting the finishing touches on the samples. So for the last week or so I've actually been lending a hand to one of the other students in my research group. This gives me a chance to polish my understanding of our techniques and gives me the incidental benefit of extra experience in the lab here.

For instance, I learned not to optimize the sample position using the intensity of the valence band peak; I took excellent data for a whole day without noticing that I was using the sample holder and not the sample we're experimenting on. My head wasn't even foggy from overwork. I look forward to making more exciting mistakes in the future.

-Dr. S