We started work this summer on May 27th, and ended on the first of August.  

Meet the Molbeamers:

Chris Conklin	Bjorn Paulson
conklin@stolaf.edu	paulsonb@stolaf.edu
Class of 2011 - Physics and Math major.	Class of 2010 - Physics and Math major

SUMMARIES

Chris:

When I began working this summer at the end of May, I was overloaded with so much information, I thought there was no way my brain could ever be able to handle it — much less be productive afterward. Fortunately, through lots of questioning of Bjorn and Dr. Cederberg, and though long hours walking around campus pondering the significance of a tensor spin-spin interaction, I began to make some progress. Of course, with every epiphany came ten more questions, but like a professor once told me, “that’s why it’s research.”

Unfortunately the weight of RbI made it difficult to find many lines this summer. At the same time, this meant that the discovery of a line was always and exciting moment, and such a discovery would always reenergize me enough to occasionally skip lunch just to find a fit. Most of my time though, was spent reading about multipole moments, tensors, and group theory. I would say my biggest accomplishment for the summer is that I understand the tetrahedral symmetry group forwards and backwards!

When things got slow, it seemed the beam would notice this and courteously break down just to keep our lives interesting. We found a leak in the copper tubing of the oil diffusion pump, and in cutting off the pipe Bjorn and I coated the lab table with copper dust and dremmel blades. Then, of course, there was the time a loose screw caused an outlet to short circuit, showering the room with sparks!

Overall I have learned extraordinary amounts this summer. I think that when the learning happens slowly, you don’t really notice it. Now I look back on the summer, and what seemed impossible to understand in May is completely clear in August. I still have lots to learn, however, and I look forward to broadening my understanding and solving this RbI puzzle in the future.

Bjorn:

This summer began with a large sense of indirection; We had no idea what to start work on; whether to return to the very challenging RbBr spectrum, to improve a molecule that had been worked on a while ago, or to start something new. After a day or so we decided to hybridize the latter two, and ended up working on the second isotopomer of KBr for a few weeks, and then switching to RbI. Throughout most of this, our main task was to predict where lines would appear using Focus and Simulate. Then, once we had found a line, we tried to identify it. At first, we approached this in a very daft manner, trying to identify observed lines by brute force simulation. Toward the end of the summer his got too tedious, and we discovered that with good guesses for the nuclear electric quadrupole moment, we could guess where a well-focused peak would appear with reasonable accuracy. Hopefully in three or four more months of beam time we will have found a fit to the spectrum which is relatively certain and stable.