We started work this summer on May 26th, and ended on the seventh of August.  

Meet the Molbeamers:

Emily Berger	Chris Conklin
bergeren@stolaf.edu	conklin@stolaf.edu
Class of 2012 - Physics and Math major.	Class of 2011 - Physics and Math major.

SUMMARIES

Chris:

As I began my second summer of research on the beam, I was excited to realize how much I had learned from the summer before. Concepts I thought were impossible to understand I grasped easily this year! However, there was still much to learn, and I spent much of the beginning of the summer learning more about the quantum mechanics of our research. We chose to study NaF this summer, and since it is a lighter molecule, we found and fitted lots of transitions. I also spent time working on the source code to our fitting program, and wrote a function that allows us to import our graphs into Excel. Overall it was a very productive summer, and we have almost enough NaF data for publication. I will be sad to the beam leave St. Olaf after three decades of productive research.

Emily:

Like previous researchers new to the Molecular Beam research project, I initiated my research by Professor Cederberg giving me “The Lecture” on quantum mechanics and the basic workings of the beam. The lecture left me (like so many other researchers) utterly confused, which motivated me to read everything that might unwind the mysteries of the Molbeam. I now know the general workings of the Molbeam and molecular spectroscopy, some mathcad, the internal code that runs our machine, and to top it all off some quantum mechanics. I could add much more to this list because I have learned an amazing amount through this great project. Throughout the research we worked on the molecule Sodium Fluoride. Our values that we have determined from the data are not quite at the level of uncertainty that we wish to obtain. Some further data collection and determining a possible mis-labeling in one of the data sets will help us take the final step to achieve our goal. We expect to have results to publish around the middle of the fall, if everything goes according to plan, but the beam has a way of making all of our lives interesting by breaking down now and again. This summer has been very productive and I am a bit sad that the machine will leave St. Olaf after this summer. I hope that the Molbeam will remain in use in the future.