CSIRO and Penn State!

Today was another routine day in the lab for me, but I brought my camera along to take a few photos of the place where I have been working for the last couple weeks now (it is amazing that it really has been that long now). The first stop on our tour is my temporary office. As you can see, it's pretty empty (I keep my backpack and laptop bag on the desk to make it look less empty). The window views are great though and I have enjoyed having a nice amount of space to spread out. I guess the office belongs (or will belong) to a new-hire who hasn't arrived yet to start with CSIRO. In any case, it works out well for me!

I have talked a bit in the past about the PALS analysis that I am doing here in Melbourne, so I decided I would get a photo of the experimental equipment. When all else is working as it should, the experiment is very simple, but the electronics (housed in the tall cabinet) are incredibly complicated (all of that equipment goes with one spectrometer) and sensitive. The sample is placed between the two detectors (vertical black cylinders, with the yellow radioactive label, to the left of the equipment rack and monitor). My understanding is that the equipment consists primarily of components to delay signals and assign them to specific channels that the computer can then understand as time intervals. I hadn't really thought about it before, but distinguishing time events that occur on the order of picoseconds is not trivial. The computer would not be able to process the data stream if the detectors were patched in directly. In any case, I've been doing work in this room for the past few weeks. The room itself is surrounded by lead because a particle of gamma radiation is produced for each positron that is emitted from the source. Luckily, the intensity is pretty low so we just take appropriate precautions to protect ourselves.

I worked with Cara today to go through all of the UT samples (the ones that aren't mine). We have been working as hard as we can to run samples, but it is pretty apparent that we won't be able to run all of them in the time that I am here in Australia. The experiments are relatively easy to set up, but they take a solid amount of time and no amount of extra effort will be able to change that. Unfortunately, it will become Cara's responsibility to run the samples after I leave. I say unfortunately, because I can empathize with her for having someone else's work dropped in your lap. That is a double-edged sword about working in a lab that is the best in the world at doing a particular type of characterization. On the one hand, you are working in an excellent place where you can learn a lot and do great science. But, lots of people around the world want you to characterize their materials - and this simply takes time. We run into the same situation in Austin since we often get samples from companies or other research groups for characterization. I have been in the position of having to do work like that and, since it takes time, it can be a bit of a drag at times. I think the key is to involve the person who is doing the work so that they are able to gain something through the experiment. Nobody likes to run a black-box experiment where they don't really learn anything. So I started working on that with Cara today and hopefully the work will benefit both her and our folks at UT.

Dinner tonight was interesting... I found out that I don't really like artichoke. My dinner ended up being a lot of bread, salad and rice tonight, but that's okay. We'll have to see what tomorrow brings! Speaking of tomorrow, I will present at group meeting for Anita's group at CSIRO. I have been working on my slides all day and I hope I have put something together that will be accessible for the audience. In any case, I am looking forward to the talk!

It's hard to believe that I'm leaving for my New Zealand conference/sightseeing trip in a few days... I still have to get a few things done in order to be ready to go, but things are coming along nicely.

In other news, I saw someone walking down the street with a Penn State t-shirt on!!!! I was on a tram, so I couldn't say anything. But that definitely made my day! The Nittany Lions are everywhere :) Interestingly, this was also the first person I have seen (since I've been in Australia) wearing clothing featuring an American university...very cool!