July 29, 2010

Things are starting to come together, finally. My paper is being written (slowly, but surely) and my abstract is at least written (however badly) and revised, and in need of further revision tonight. My experiment is coming to an end, as well. There's still more work to be done, but at least some mysteries have been resolved. Mainly, that there is indeed diffraction affecting my beam structure. I haven't figured out what the ideal conditions for recreating the experiment are, but I have recreated it once since the initial observations. More experiments are needed to figure out how to get exactly the same results, but I don't have enough samples or enough time here at Stony Brook to figure out what they are. Right now I want to focus on manufacturing one good UV grating to demonstrate that I indeed can turn it off and on. Also, tomorrow I will take some high resolution microscope pictures of my samples to put in my report. There's still one major issue to figure out, which is giving me a bit of a headache at the moment, and that is how to approximate the line density of my circles. I found a hand "microscope" that has a scale inside, but it doesn't have the focusing abilities an actual microscope has and I can't use it to see past the surface of the top glass of my sample. Everything else I could think of today didn't work (mainly trying to put something of known length under the microscope).

Home