1998 Individual Progress Reports

Matt Feig

This was my third summer on the molbeam project, so I started out already knowing a lot about it. At the beginning I split my time between helping bring Ryan and Pete up to speed on how everything works and preparing to give a talk about our project at a conference in Ohio. Giving the talk to a roomful of Ph.D.'s and graduate students was a totally new experience and the highlight of my summer. When we got back from the Ohio State trip, I did a lot of work with rubidium flouride, a molecule which we began to study this summer. I looked at other studies which had been published on RbF so we would know where to begin looking for lines when. That work paid off nicely as we were able to find lines almost immediately. After that, I would take the data files and fit them using "isimp" and eventually run "beam" to obtain the RbF hyperfine constants.

Pete Feig

I spent the first couple weeks out of the summer reading magazine articles, books, and reviews on anything with any relation to the project. I had to familiarize myself with the experiment since this was my first year. It took me quite a while to grasp the physics behind our experiments, but I've got it under control now. Then, I split my time between learning Quantum Mechanics with all the other guys on the project and learning how to program. I had no experience in either before the summer began. So, I mainly sat in with them as they programmed and helped them when I could and learned from them. The only thing I can claim to have specialized in was the writing and revising of our project's paper on Latex. Latex is a fairly simple scientific publishing program that I learned to help Professor Cederberg complete the paper. I checked his work, made corrections, and entered equations and paragraphs. It was a quick summer.

Thomas Hoft

I started the summer learning how to program in Borland's C++ Builder 3. I then wrote subroutines to calculate three-j, six-j, and nine-j symbols in C++ using prime factor arithmetic. This was to speed up the fitting program Dr. Cederberg wrote in MathCAD. After that, I spent a while learning Quantum Mechanics. Then I worked on translating the spectrometer program from DOS to Windows95 using Builder. That project is now close to being done. The user interface is mostly complete, and the major piece lacking is GPIB functionality. That will come through .dll files.

Ryan Hollom

My summer started in the same way as Pete's, being brought up to speed on the project. Having some programming experience in C++, I worked closely with Thomas throughout the summer. Our first project was writing the prime factor arithmetic version of the three-j, six-j, and nine-j calculation. Most of the remaining time was spent working on the conversion of the beam program from DOS to Windows. C++ Builder is being used for this project, and a few Visual C++ DLLs are needed as well. The program is nearly finished, and will hopefully take the place of the DOS version in a faster, more efficient way.

John McKinzie

My summer has basically revolved around the upgrading of my program I wrote last summer called "McPlot." Having more programming experience this summer than last, I started the summer by rewriting McPlot. I made it more structured and improved its flexibility by seperating the code into modules. Along with this, I wrote newer and more flexible plotting function which is used for all plotting, even zooming. This allowed for a greater variety of ways to zoom in on a data file. After this was done, the focus my summer shifted to adding the ability to view fitted files with McPlot. We decided this could be best achieved by using the existing C/C++ code and write DLL's to be called by Visual Basic. I am still currently working on this, using Visual C++ to write the DLL's. Within the last two weeks, I have also changed and updated the Molbeam web page. Along with the research, we have also spent some time on Quantum Mechanics, which I have in the fall.