Day 24: 37.0 Volts!

The coolest thing that happened today was that we finally got the ion beam to work. We realized that whilst attaching the argon tank to the vacuum chamber, we were trapping a small amount of air in the tubing, contaminating the argon. So we flushed the argon out for about an hour and tried turning…

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…

Day 22: Questrom Library

I woke up at 11:30 am this morning and got breakfast. Then, I went to the lab for a few hours to fiddle around with the vacuum chamber. Peco and I found out that Emily might need the other argon tank for her experiment, so it was off limits for the time being. We tried…

Day 21: Hampton Beach + Dick’s Last Resort

Edit: I’m a horrible brother for forgetting about July 22nd, but happy belated birthday, Michael! I literally just got back to my dorm — whew, today was a really long day! I woke up at 8:00 am and immediately started packing stuff: a towel, swim trunks, sandals, etc. I went downstairs, grabbed a green tea…

Day 20: Hopeful!

I’m not going to lie here — let’s just say that we made progress on the chamber today! The first thing we checked was the filament — by attaching a multimeter to the outside of the ion source, we were able to gauge whether current was running through the filament. The multimeter read a non-zero resistance,…

Day 19: Blown Fuse

So I went to the lab this morning… Okay, I need to stop using that line at the beginning of every blog post. Let’s just talk about what happened in the lab today. You can probably tell by the title or at least the fact that the title wasn’t some celebratory phrase, that we didn’t…

Day 18: Error 22

This morning, I woke up and walked to the lab expecting to not do anything but wait for parts the entire day. But in the morning, Peco and I asked Emily about it and she showed us a cabinet of old cables. And lo and behold, what did we find in that cabinet? That’s right:…

Day 17: The Mystery of the Washing Machine

This morning, I walked into the lab and the chamber had reached the low 7’s. We followed the steps of our procedure to start collecting data: We lowered the silicon shield to set some initial conditions for our experiment, we turned off the turbo pump’s cooling fan to prevent shaking, and we pumped argon into…

Day 16: Set Back

In the morning, we had another RISE workshop. A BU admissions officer walked us through the application process, and then Anna Greenswag and Mr. Little (the RISE Practicum organizer) talked a little about planning a scientific career. Then I headed to the lab. We were going to begin taking measurements today, but… We realized over…

Day 15: Laundry

As you can probably tell by the title, nothing much really happened today. I woke up at like 10:00 am so that I could help my friend in China practice his English speaking skills. Then, I did the laundry. Then I worked on one of my school club’s infrastructures for the following year. Then, I…