Day 23: Oscillating Voltages

We had another RISE workshop this morning — it was all about writing abstracts and scientific posters. I think one cool thing about the presentation was that it questioned what an abstract really was. When Brent (Mr. Little) asked us to take our abstracts, we were initially confused; days ago, Anna (Ms. Greenswag) had e-mailed all of us to bring our RISE application essays. Most of us hadn’t even started writing our abstracts yet, let alone finish them, so we were really confused. But after a while, it was revealed that our application essays were in fact abstracts! They were a way to concisely say something about ourselves, just like a scientific abstract concisely says something about the study it describes. Now that I just wrote all of that, I guess the idea is quite trivial. Nevertheless, I thought it was pretty interesting.

In the lab today, we followed a suggestion Joy made by keeping the chamber pressure on the low end and trying to set a higher cathode filament current to achieve the right discharge voltage. We went from a stagnant 149.5V reading on the discharge voltage to one that oscillated constantly between around 50V to around 130V. So the error wasn’t totally fixed, but at least we have something different! We turned on the ion beam to see what would happen, and while no Error 25 popped up, all the voltages and currents were oscillating and jumping around constantly so things definitely weren’t working the way we wanted them to. We collected data for 10 minutes, and it was really bad data, but at least I can say we started something, right?

That’s all we could really get done today. It doesn’t sound like much, but there was a lot of behind-the-scenes knob-turning and setting-fiddling to achieve the results I just described. Plus, trying to stabilize the chamber pressure to the value we want takes forever, just because the knob we use to do it is extremely sensitive. And it takes around 5 minutes to determine whether the pressure is stable.

Anyways, that’s pretty much all that happened today. I had a counselor meeting afterward and worked on college essays a little. Professor Ludwig comes back tomorrow, so hopefully, he can try and help us out. Also, I think we’re allowed to useI feel like we’re making considerable progress, and the ion beam is very close to working!

But anyways, that’s all for today. I’m pretty excited for tomorrow because I feel like something might happen. Again, no guarantees though. :^)

Bye everyone,
Max

Random things:

• I nearly caught a Lugia today in Pokemon Go. I know this is random, and no, I don’t play Pokemon Go regularly, but I checked it randomly for fun and there was a Lugia raid battle going on. I ran across two blocks through the rain and found 11 people huddled together under a roof. I joined them, and we all had fun taking down Lugia. Nearly half of the people caught the Lugia, but I wasn’t so lucky. And afterward, everyone rushed back to work while I rushed to get lunch.
• That’s my cute story for the day. I want to go play cards, so I’m not going to spend too much time thinking about other random things.