Life in Lund.

Sure, it's gloomy-looking in the afternoon, but the birds sing regardless.Besides which this shot from my window is taken at ~1:30 am on the foggiest day thus far.

I flew into Copenhagen, where you can get a Visa Electron. I thought it would be funnier once I got to the electron structure spectroscopy studies. Then I forgot about it until just now.

Danish trains are models of efficiency-- and they are also model trains. They seem to be made by Ikea, in fact. It doesn't amuse Tim (half of Tim appears in the shot of the train doors) after our redeye flights.


The room in the MAX-Lab guest house proved to be a pleasant surprise. Easily the nicest accomodations I've had at any synchotron: a fully equipped communal kitchen which is kept
clean by the mysterious and pervasive Swedish sense of decency and socialism; a private bathroom; more storage space than my entire three-bedroom apartment back home; and hotel wall art which isn't bland and inoffensive.

When in Tuna (the local neighborhood of the lab in which I'm doing this work), may as well take advantage of local culinary
art. Lunch, for instance, of KraftOst sandwiches (lobster and

cheese in a tube) and leftover fish from last night (a piece of salmon which might have been labeled as salted, so we soaked it and cooked it at the guest house kitchen... and then discovered it was lox) with a side of picked beets. Even our smallish grocery store, conveniently located on the same block as the guest house on the walk to MAX-Lab.


The lab has its own, equally well-equipped, equally equal (in the sense of communal) kitchen, which is good since I'll be spending some 14 hours a day at the lab, and food helps keep you awake and productive.







The coffee machine is free, too, and hosts a long line of cheery science nerds every (weekday) morning. The selections are a bit odd, though they taste just fine. The Wiener Melange isn't nearly as bad a coffee drink as it sounds in English.

Before I give the impression that I came hier only to grow horizontally, at left is the first of the material sample platters I prepared. Its actual scale is about 3cm across. It features boring old calibration samples of zinc (the square metal foil), manganese (the penant-shaped metal slab), and the two materials we're starting with. The greenish shards are MoO3, which should be a one dimensional conductor but isn't. (We'd like to know why.) The pressed powder pellet (try saying that while holding your lips open) is MnVCuO4, a material which is pretty much new to the world and isn't well understood. Pretty much anything we find out will be news.

Sample plates like these we load into steel vacuum chambers, then held in a very intense X-ray beam whose color (/energy) we may sweep through a range, to see the different elements in them absorb the light by coughing up their electrons (in which case we see more electrons flow up from the ground through a wire, and measure that to see how which energies of X-ray get that to happen). Alternatively, we can beam in a single X-ray color, then collect the very, very weak X-rays that come out of the material. It depends a little on direction, too but I'll maybe get to that in a later post.

One last dose of Sweden to chase that shot of Science: The sign on the back of the bathroom door is also good for a cheap mistranslation. Or perhaps the forklifts have higher cosmic significance than I give them credit for.

I'll post again soon.

Senare.