3 June
This week I (Sara) was all alone in the lab.
Jimmy is still in Budapest where he spent the spring semester and John
just left for Norway for the music tour. Dr. Cederberg and I
refilled the source, and I started fitting the data that was taken
during the school year.
10 June
This week we welcomed Jimmy back from
Budapest. He jumped right into things picking up where he left
off last summer fitting and analyzing both the KBr and RbF
molecules. Sara continued fitting the last of the new RbCl
data. During this week we took advantage of Dr. Cederbergs
absence to plot and plan a glorious presentation. We decided to
spice thing up a little by bringing a few pieces of the molbeam up with
us and a kind of show and tell. The presentation went well, and
we thought very unique.
16 June
We spent this week fixing the molbeam.
Over last weekend the mechanical pump for the source section failed
causing the entire system to shut down. Luckily the molbeam can
be run using only one mechanical pump. We needed to change
the detector, recreate a vacuum and take the mechanical pump apart to
send in for repairs. In addition Jimmy continued working with the
KBr data and spect-fit is converging nicely. Sara altered
spect-fit to allow for different quadrupole interactions for each of
the isotopes of RbCl.
...
6 August
Here's the rest of the summer in a nutshell.
John got back from Norway on the 4th week, and he started working on a
Resume Scan option in WinBeam. After that, he expanded Linefit to
fit a maximum of 8 linesets at once. Then he learned some quantum
mechanics, worked with Dr. Cederberg on the 6LiI paper, and made his
presentation. Sara persevered with her work on RbCl. She
continued collecting RbCl data until the source clogged.
Eventually, she managed to coax specfit into producing good
results. Then she worked on writing her paper. She wrote a
nice macro to ease the creation of data tables. Jimmy continued
work on RbF and KBr. Although he kept telling us he was done, his
fits got nicer with each passing week. He wrote a multiple
isotopomer simulate program in the process.
A few weeks ago, we decided to move on to
RbOH. Several experiments have roughly determined the
coupling constants, but we can really improve on them with our
apparatus, so we decided to give it a go. We loaded the mostly
anhydrous RbOH into the tube in the glove box. We have seen a few
lines so far.
Last week the pump came back, so we reassembled it,
and it works fine. Yesterday John gave a presentation on the 6LiI
paper, and Jmmy and Sara bravely gave their talk, called "Everything
You
Didn't Know You Wanted to Know About Quantum Mechanics." It's
been a good summer.