Tag: Newsletter

The color makeup of a fluorescent light, imaged through a spectrometer made of folded paper and a chunk of DVD. You can print and fold your own for free following the instructions here [http://publiclab.org/wiki/foldable-spec] (they also have a kit [http://store.publiclab.org/products/foldable-mini-spectrometer] , which

Smiley face lasers! Now decorating our office door. Left half: Top view showing the light distribution in the lasers - these are whispering gallery modes [http://tmblr.co/ZP7VLs1AcrIut], where the light bounces around the laser’s perimeter. Right half: Diagram of the lasers (red), their glassy coatings (greenish), and

Common grad student problem: ever get the feeling that you’re being watched?

Sometimes the view under an electron microscope can be positively scary. I’ll be scrolling along at low magnification, checking out some nanoscale features, when all of a sudden a colossus will loom huge above the nanolandscape. Sometimes I actually jump. Usually it’s a tiny microscopic speck of dust,

The long valley, surrounded by jagged mountains, occupied by a picturesque leaning castle…. Actually, this is a closeup of a minuscule scratch in a coating of photoresist. At this magnification (2096x), it’s clear that the photoresist has a rough, mountainous surface, caused by the high-energy plasma I’d bombarded

ThorLabs displays a keen understanding of graduate school - as of a few years ago, they’ve included snack boxes with many of their orders of optics components. The boxes include things like trail mix, granola bars, goldfish crackers, and fruit snacks - not, of course, that this influences any

Low-budget geeky grad school magnetic poetry: cut up the fridge magnet ads that they hand out at conferences and job fairs. If there’s any whitespace, go to work with a Sharpie. Thanks to some junk mail, I’ve got a pizza-themed set as well!

Light in a circular cavity makes a variety of standing wave patterns, some of which look like flowers, wagon wheels, or even tie-fighter spaceships. These images are from my simulations of the light in the cavities of nanolasers - each pattern is called a mode, and the smaller the laser,

<a href="https://aiweirdness.com/" style="text-decoration:underline;">lewisandquark</a>: Someone recently asked me if there were other grad students/scientists blogging pictures from their daily life in the lab. I realized that I only know of a couple scientist bloggers who

The view inside one of our lab’s titanium sapphire infrared lasers - if you see a view like this, you’re doing something wrong. Specifically, you’re not wearing laser goggles around a 10W laser source (bad), and placing your eyeballs at beam height (very bad, yet done almost