Night Shift at the Syn chro tron








The spectra were looking good, and all through the house, not another soul was to be found. We do all our work in an aluminum tree fort at one end of a long metal pipe branch. The operation of the
electron-filled doughnut (actually a decagon 9 meters on a side) is left to people I never see--and who quite often set the electrons racing around and then leave for the day. All of that is by way of explaining the sense of exploration with which we set out to see if there was access allowed to the center of the ring. Evidently we are permitted to look across the space at the center of the ring but not to descend into it. The giant black bags are collecting the helium and possibly nitrogen which boil off the superconducting magnets. For those who didn't play with Build Your Own Synchrotron kits as a child, magnets do one of two things for you: very carefully made little magnets keep the electrons in nice little bunches as they fly around, and very carefully made giant magnets bend the electrons' path to keep them going in a closed circle. Steering the little suckers around makes them shoot off light in the direction they were going before we pushed on them to bank, and that's the light we use in our experiments. Actually, it's one step more complicated than that: in a straight section of the electron's racetrack (rejstrakk), a whole array of magnets along the top and botttom of this pipe cause the electrons to slalom side to side on their way through, spraying light which goes forward with them but which doesn't curve away as they come into the next bending magnet. Instead it shoots forward into our beamline (really just a metal pipe with some fancy vacuuum pumps hooked to it), bounces off a few mirrors and shiny diffraction gratings, and then slams into a chunk of material we're playing with.

It's not all science as we wandered around the night-empty laboratory: there's art, too.

The big stick wielded by the Swedish lumber industry is such that the lab, part of the national university here in Lund, was required to invest a fraction of the building budget in timber. Because you can only usefully make so many cubicles out of good Swedish plywood (), there are also some large-scale pieces of what can only be called art. Here Tim gives us a sense of scale for the ode to sailing. I think the title of the piece is translates "Ominous Ebony Wave of Death". My Swedish is rusty, though--meaning nonexistent. We went back to work and dawn found Tim and I sharing a beer.

It was a produktiv nightshift, and the Swedish appreciation of a lax alcohol policy was very much appreciated. Brian (the headless guy adjusting the sample positioning in the chamber) came in to relieve us and we passed the torch.


On the way home, I grabbed a shot of cars in the grocery store parking lot for a friend back home with a preternattural affinity for all things automotive.

Notice that this ICA is a Quantum Tuna, open every day 9am-10pm. This figures large in my schedule, now that I'm only awake for the last four hours of operation.


In the guest house elevator, a warning tone is set for my day's sleep. Recycling can be a dangerous undertaking.

Returning refreshed to the beamline that afternoon, we got to talking about the pros and cons of cats and dogs as pets. In a light Irish accent, imagine hearing the following:

"I'd like a monkey, but I don't like the way their anuses stick out." (BK).

Can you find the leprechaun who said this?



Is the radiation starting to get to us? I certainly hope so.

From the middle of tomorrow night,
-Dr. S

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.