1 hour of desktop use whilst writing 2nd year presentation

Around these months, every year the plasma physics group runs the “Student Seminars” on wednesday afternoons. All the PhD students give a 12min talk on their research, this year with three students per afternoon.

Enjoyable as it has been seeing what everyone else has been getting up to, I am facing a mixed bag of emotion whilst writing my own work up. Although  I normally love public speaking or presentations, there is something almost exam like about the process, also, It is hard to condense all the various tracks, and possible tracks the research has and might go down into a physics-y 12 min.

So in a small amount of procrastination I downloaded this program: http://iographica.com/ and produced something pretty

enjoy.

This weekend I went back to my parents house in Oxfordshire. Very nice to be able to get away from the “big smoke” once in a while… Also, the bluebells were out! Made me very happy ^^

Cherry Blossom

The bluebell

The bluebells carpet the beach woods for about a week or so once a year. This never comes out quite as well on film as it looks in real life. Also, it smells amazing.

Honey bee doing his thing..

THURSDAY:

Today was visually unexciting as I was at my desk all day.

Hard work (?) in the office

I have been asked to proof read 20 pages of one of the final year PhD’s thesis on our project. This reminds me how far i have to go till i am in a position to do my own writing up…

Thursday evening I met up with some friends and we tried an Ethiopian restaurant on Caladonian road, near King’s Cross. First time I had tried this sort of food and was really very pleasantly surprised to find it unlike anything I’ve tried before. There were several stew/curry-ish dishes served on a sour dough bread/pancake. no knives and forks, we ate with our hands. Very fun and communal.

The lovely Ethiopian dish.. bread and several spiced veg/meat combos.

FRIDAY:

Yes its Friday, and i am sick of my desk so i went and helped out on the last of our ‘Astrophysical Jet’ shots.

There was a power cut last night (around 8pm) and this mean our Vacuum systems and various computers all went down, so firstly there was a little fuss getting everything back on line, then down to business.

Timing our cameras and probing laser pulse

The shot unfortunately didn’t go so well electronically as our Marx banks all mis-fired. We repeated the shot in the afternoon however and all went very well…

As the sun is out we went to the Union as a group for lunch.. last friday before it is crammed with Undergrads again ( ^^) and that was lovely.

Cherry tree (?) in full blossom in the union. Spring is here!

Guy disapproving my 'photo blogging' at lunch

I even got my shades out. This photo attracted rather a few 'top gun' comments. pfft.

So that afternoon I was back at the desk.. designing away.

View from level 8 tea room. Loving the sunshine!

So the weekend is almost here… the week flies by.

Here are some fun things I’ve come across:

The Sun with different light filters..

some beautiful shadow art..

WEDNESDAY:

Today was a less exciting day (at least visually) as I was mostly desk bound doing some design work.

Old hardware for creating "end on" cylindrical wire arrays

Recently on MAGPIE  we have been upgrading various parts of the machine. One part was a bigger and better vacuum chamber. As a result allot of the hard wear from the old chamber has to be redesigned so it sits in the right place for everything “looking” at it.

Some quality white board action

One of the research fellows and I spent time in front of the whiteboard hashing out various problems with the design of the old hard wear and also brain storming ways around the for seeable problems with the load I want to investigate.

Getting some exercise..

The MAGPIE lab is located in the basement of the physics bulding, however our group offices are on the 7th floor. This leads to a foreseeable amount of lift abuse. I thought it would be a great idea to start taking the stairs, although it is taking some getting used to.

Later in the afternoon we had a seminar from a visitor from the University of Tronto who gave a really good talk on “Relativistic effects in absorption in ultra-intense laser plasma interactions”. Not exactly in the same area as the work we do on MAGPIE, but very interesting none the less.

So a little experiment here; A photo diary of what I get up to over this week in my PhD projects. I did mean to start this yesterday, but you know how it goes.

TUESDAY: In the Lab

Today I spent time on MAGPIE (see earlier post) working on our current shot series. Our experiments aim to create a small high velocity plasma jet which interacts with a puff of gas. We look at this interaction with a myriad of diagnostics including green light laser probing, optical fiber spectrometers, X-ray pinhole cameras, photo-detecting-diodes and streaked cameras. The little jet of plasma created on MAGPIE can be scaled up and compared to Jet’s created by young stars (shown below).

Hubble telescope image of plasma jet from a young star

MAGPIE creates a plasma jet from a bike spoke-like configuration of fine wires. Today I made the load, a very fiddly job as we were using 18 micrometer wires!

Putting 18um wires into MAGPIE

From the photograph you can see the fine operation of the morning. Wires are weighted with lead fishing weights. The big copper ring is the Anode, and the little circle is the cathode. The 1.5MA current pulse of MAGPIE will travel from the centre ring to the outer ring along these tiny wires to create our gas jet on axis. Super!

Action shot of me loading the wires into the vacuum chamber

Finished radial wire load!

The load sits in a large aluminum vacuum chamber, which once the load is made and all our diagnostics are ready to go, is closed up ready for the shot.

3rd yr. PhD student George with MAGPIE

The main focus of my PhD thesis (at least for now)  is plasma spectrometry. Most of my work o far has been focused in the soft X-ray region on the sorts of hot metal plasmas we create on MAGPIE. Recently however we have got a hold of an exciting optical fiber spectrometer which works in the visible wavelengths of light. I spent some time this afternoon learning how this works so I can start analyzing data from it this week.

2nd Yr. PhD student Guy shows me how to operate the visible light spectrometer

Alignment of our green light laser imaging system.

Around 4:30pm we fire the shot…

Timing, Vacuum, Valve and safety controllers for MAGPIE experiment. Oh, and also the fire button

Although not exhaustive that was my day. And its not over yet (as I write this on a tea break) !

More tomorrow…

After a fun sunday wandering the south bank I found myself migrating back to college to work on the last round of undergraduate Lab marking. Hungry I lurked around South Ken’s various cafe’s looking for some inspiration.

About a month ago (I am told by the helpful waitress) Tombo, a Japanese deli & cafe opened. What a find! Brilliantly cheap (for London ) well made Japanese food to take out or eat in. Sweet, airy decor and a chilled vibe in the cafe and very tasty food. The Chicken Teriyaki Don box hit the spot for a not too painful £6. My bigest surprise was that they serve flowering tea for £2.40. Well, hardly the cheapest but in comparison to a starbucks coffee (and you get about 4 cups out of one “flower”, topping up with hot water ) I am sold.

check it out, open till 7:30pm, 29 Thurloe Place (next to the ‘snog’ yoghurt shop).

And in their own words: Tombo website

The importance of coffee both in my undergraduate and in my day to day life now is unquantifiable. These are my some of favorite venues (and rough closing times) within strolling distance of the college.

They are listed in order of walking distance from my office. the closest, cheapest (30p) and possibly even best being our group coffee machine. But its good to get away from the desk sometimes..

—–

“Level 8″ – Blackett Lab

Price coffee : 40p

Access: Mon-Fri Closes 4:30pm, only serves postgraduate and staff in the physics department.

Pluses: cheap, lots of places to sit and an amazing outdoor space with panoramic veiws of London. loved by the plasma physics group.

Minuses: coffee of instant variety and the snacks are limited and do run out.

tea and caned drinks also available.

——-

SCR (Senior Common Room)

Price of latte: £1.28 (regular + with student discount)

Access: mon-fri Closes 7pm, open only to postgraduate and staff

Pluses: Close, easy to get to, served in a real cup if you sit in. Also a great place to bump into other PhD’s and staff. Also a loyalty card (which can be used in the library or other venues on college) gets your 8th hot drink (any one, any size!) free.

Minuses: Coffee is so so and the queues can be very long.

——-

Library

Price of latte: £1.28 (regular + with student discount)

Access: Closes: Mon-Thursday 23:00, Friday  21:00, Saturday & Sunday  16:00

Pluses: its in the library? also has internet. but then everywhere in college does if you count WiFi ><

Minuses: can be quite crowded. Its in the library?

—–

Gloucester Road Starbucks

Price of latte: £2 ++

Access: Closes: Mon-Friday  ***, Weekend:

Pluses: nice-ish. and they have cake. Also open lateish

Minuses: starbucks

——-

Gloucester Road little cafe opposite Waitrose

Price of latte: £2.**

Haven’t been there for a while but they did some great deals on scones and tea. lovely venue too.

——

The Forum / house of coffees

Price of latte: £2 ish

Access: Mon-Sunday  open late! never seen this place closed

Pluses: 2 for 1 on pizza till 8pm. woop! and free croissant with coffee in the mornings. double woop!

Minuses: food getting ever more pricey in this favored venue.

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By no means exaustive. but hopefully informitive. long live the buzz!

Well, not quite in the classical sense.. but the SCR was Rammed with staff and PhD’s searching for a warm lunch. And in the office we are all a little excited about the big fluffy drops falling from the sky.

office excitement over english weather

A fair point however crossed my mind… I hope this doesn’t spill over too long to the weekend or all the travel arrangements are going to be a little messed up…

I am going to enjoy a hot chocolate, seems appropriate

In the office today twiddling my thumbs before the 1st year transfer viva.

more later….

3 course meal? christmas crackers? and its only the 9th Dec. Super

feeling the cheer!