My Lab
Category archives for My Lab
DonorsChoose Payoff: Where Do Ideas Come From?
Posted by Chad Orzel on October 22, 2010 As promised, an answer to a question from a donor to this year’s DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge. Sarah asks: Chad, can I get a post about how you (or scientists in general) come up with ideas for experiments? You’ve covered some of the gory detail with the lab info posts, but I think it would be…
Teaching, Research, and Teaching Research
Posted by Chad Orzel on October 21, 2010 Melissa at Confused at a Higher Level has a nice post on the tension between faculty research and teaching: Malachowski writes, “We all know that working with undergraduates is time consuming and in some cases it slows down our research output, but work with undergraduates should be supported, celebrated, and compensated at a high level.…
The ABC’s of AMO Physics
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 3, 2010 Over at Confused at a Higher Level, Melissa offers an alphabetical list of essential supplies for a condensed matter experimentalist at a small college. This is a fun idea for back-to-school time, so I’ll steal it, and offer the following alphabetical list of essentials for Atomic, Molecular, and Optical physics at a small college, kind…
Technical Request: Gas Cell Filling
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 1, 2010 I doubt that this will actually work, but then the Web has brought me some improbable successes before, so it’s worth a shot: I have a sealed glass cell (Pyrex, I think, if it matters) that I would like to get re-filled with a mix of rare gases– partial pressures of 100mT Ne, 30mT Ar,…
What Do You Need to Make Cold Atoms? Part 3: Test and Measurement
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 13, 2010 The third category in our look at lab apparatus, after vacuum hardware and lasers and optics is the huge collection of electronic gear that we use to control the experiments. I’ll borrow the sales term “test and measurement” as a catch-all description, though this is really broader than what you’ll usually find in that category.…
What Do You Need to Make Cold Atoms? Part 2: Lasers and Optics
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 12, 2010 Following on yesterday’s discussion of the vacuum hardware needed for cooling atoms, let’s talk about the other main component of the apparatus: the optical system. The primary technique used for making cold atoms is laser cooling, and I’m sure it will come as no surprise that this requires lasers, and where there are lasers, there…
What Do You Need to Make Cold Atoms? Part 1: Vacuum Hardware
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 11, 2010 Over in the reader request thread, Richard asks for experimental details: I’d be interested in (probably a series) of posts on how people practically actually do cold atoms experiments because I don’t really know. I needed to take some new publicity photos of the lab anyway, so this is a good excuse to bust out…
A Tale of Two Turbos
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 4, 2010 I spent most of Saturday in the lab, swapping out a turbopump that was starting to die. How could I tell? Well, for one thing, it made an awful noise, even more than usual for a noisy pump. But after it was stopped and unmounted from the chamber, there was a simple test: comparing the…
A Stainless Steel Baby Bottle
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 4, 2010 Let’s say you have some liquid that you want to contain without leaks, say, milk for a baby. What do you do? Well, you put it in something like a baby bottle, the components of which are shown here: You have a hard plastic bottle, a soft silicone nipple, and a hard plastic ring that…
Unclear on the Concept
Posted by Chad Orzel on December 11, 2009 I was sitting in my office on campus, working on some computer stuff, when I noticed a bunch of guys from Facilities out in the hall, bustling around doing something. A few minutes later, one of them stopped right outside my door, and called into the main Facilities office on his cell phone. “We’re up…
