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.