The Metastable Xenon Project

Over the past several weeks, I've written up ResearchBlogging posts on each of the papers I helped write in graduate school. Each paper write-up was accompanied by a "Making of" article, giving a bit more detail about how the experiments came to be, what my role in them was, and whatever funny anecdotes I can think of about the experiment.

If you haven't been following the series, or would just like a convenient index of the posts, here's the complete set:

So, if you've ever wanted to know why they gave me a Ph.D. in the first place, there's your answer, in great detail.

I may or may not continue this with an explanation of the work I did as a post-doc, on Bose-Einstein Condensates in optical lattices. That work is a good deal more technical, though, so it'll take some doing.

More like this

One of the things required for the tenure review is a full and up-to-date curriculum vitae. Having spent an inordinate amount of time updating and re-formatting my CV, it seems a shame not to make more use of it than that, so I might as well recycle it into a blog post (after stripping out my home…
Via Bee, we have the BlaBlaMeter, a website that purports to "unmask without mercy how much bullshit hides in any text." Like Bee, I couldn't resist throwing it some scientific text, but rather than pulling stuff off the arxiv, I went with the abstracts of the papers I published as a grad student,…
I'm in the process of putting together my tenure documents (I know I've been saying this for weeks. It's a long process, OK?). Most of these are really not appropriate for reproduction here, but I'll post a few of the things I'm writing, when it's reasonable to do so. A major part of the tenure…
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…

Thank you for writing this series of posts. They've been very interesting to read.

Thank you for writing this series of posts. They've been very interesting to read.

Yes, thank you very much for writing these. Very interesting for someone such as myself still in high school, wondering what might be ahead.

By harriss kol (not verified) on 04 Oct 2008 #permalink

Great post! If I didn't suck at math (because of my ADD) I would be a scientist, instead of a artist. Ultracold Collisions sound really intresting. We all grown up with the fact that collisions of things normally heat up. On a side note I was pondering the idea that Time and Space are the same thing, but I can visulize it but i cant prove it with the math....

By Christopher Guerra (not verified) on 05 Oct 2008 #permalink