(A couple of regular commenters will recognize this one…) Every working research lab has a sort of rhythm to it. There’s always a collection of background sounds, in a particular pattern, that indicates that the lab is functioning properly. When I was a post-doc, the pattern was something like three mintues of white noise (the…

Back when I was an undergrad, I spent the summer before my senior year on campus working on my thesis project (trying to build a MOT for rubidium, which never did work). That same summer, one of the guys I did problem sets with, we’ll call him J., who was only a rising junior, was…

This isn’t the usual story about lab mishaps, but I’m not quite sure what other category to put it in. It is a true story about my lab in grad school, though, so we’ll call it a True Lab Story. The mid-90′s was not a great time to be working in a government lab, particularly…

A low-key True Lab Story, in honor of the previous post on knowing more about your experiment than anybody else. One of the first times I had to run my grad school experiment all by myself, I had trouble getting the discharge in the metastable atom source to light. I went through all the usual…

For technical reasons, it turns out that alkali metal atoms are particularly good candidates for laser cooling. Rubidium is probably the most favorable of all of them– some atomic physicists jokingly refer to it as “God’s atom”– but all of the alkalis, even Francium, have been cooled and trapped. Of course, alkali metal elements are…

(Series explanation here.) The lab I worked in in grad school contained a bunch of miscellaneous objects whose purpose was a little hard to discern. One of the oddest was a big heavy acrylic lens. It was probably an inch thick, and two or three inches in diameter, and had four screw holes around the…