Lab Stores (x6489, or Peter Robinson at x6846) is a good place to start your treasure hunt. They can often tell you where to find the equipment and how to get certified to use it. Some of the special equipment has a staff person to run it and train new users. What is their training schedule? Please do not assume they can make a special appointment to train you, but instead try to fit into their schedule. There has been a lot of turnover in Lab Stores and Science Instructional Technicians this summer, so there are quite a few new support people coming up to speed. Let's do our best to work collaboratively and patiently with them, and with the experienced staff, who will be working overtime to fill the gap.
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Scanning Electron Microscope
Velocity-selector Mass Spectrometer Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer
Inductively Coupled Plasma HP diode array spectrophotometer
Spectrophotometer FRITZ X-ray crystallography
Cary 17 Spectrophotometer Fourier Transform IR Spectrophotometer
One of two brand-new, classic, turn-key experiments from Cenco, the Franck-Hertz experiment yields a lovely visual demonstration of the quantization of energy transferred by scattering electrons off atoms in monatomic gas. Christopher Wolfe started playing with it this summer in Lab I Rm 1056. I hope it will be easy to make this one work so we can all use it when we learn Quantum Mechanics in winter.
One of two brand-new, classic, turn-key experiments from Cenco, the Photoelectric Effect demonstrates the quantum relationship between energy and the frequency of light, by knocking electrons off a metal target. Einstein's 1905 paper on the photoeectric effect issued in the quantum era. Christopher's initial investigations suggest that this experiment may be more useful if we can do a little rewiring to tune the ammeter's sensitivity, so some electronics will probably be involved.
Meade LX-200 telescope and observatory
We got a lovely new 10", computer-controlled telescope that we'd like to be able to use more for astronomy, but it really needs a permanent home to maximize its accessibility and minimize the wear and tear on its soft aluminum mounting plate. (Currently the telescope lives in a box in the basement: Lab I Rm 051A.)
Would you like to help research observatory options, with the goal of building a very simple obsevatory in winter? A simple shed with a removable roof would do the trick for now. There are also two astronomers in town who are happy to advise us on observatory siting and construction - they've built observatories of their own, which we should go visit. In Fall, you'd learn to set up (and operate) the telescope, do a careful study of the best location on campus for an observatory (library roof? Lab II?), meet with astronomers and the campus architect to draw up agreeable plans, price it out, and get approval for construction. Zita has a good start on all this, and will consult with you extensively. This is more of an architecture than a physics project, though it will require careful consideration of sky access from various rooftops. (The importance of architecture to experimental high-energy physics is elaborated in Traweek's Beamtimes and Lifetimes.)
Daylight is scarce in Olympia in the winter, making many of us sad. One approach by Evergreen's Counseling Services (Shary Smith) is to give out plans for building lights: UV increases vitamin A production and can fight seasonal depression (what does vitamin A have to do with it?) Building these winter lights could be a good exercise in understanding electricity and magnetism, and if you blow your own light tubes in the neon shop, you'll learn about vacuums to make them work. These are great basic skills for any experimental physicist, as are knowing how to use ship equipment. For this project, you would learn (from Doug Hitch) to use the shop to build working lights in fall, and teach the whole class to build our own lights as a winter project. Part of your winter task will also be to do a careful, quantitative, electromagnetic and energy analysis of the lights.
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR)
NMR is used in chemistry to probe the structure of molecules and in medicine to produce high-resolution 3-d images of the internal organs without the use of x-rays. In NMR, a strong magnetic field is used to align the nuclear spins. When a perpendicular RF signal is applied at the resonant frequency of the nuclei, the nuclear spins flip over and then precess back into alignment. This resonant frequency is affected by the local electron density (i.e. the chemical structure near the precessing nuclei).
We have a 60 MHz NMR at Evergreen (a little one in the CAL lab?) and a 200 MHz NMR that quenched a few years ago and needs to be revived.
Velocity-selector Mass Spectrometer
Classic device based on crossed electric and magnetic fields. It would be great to find and revive this equipment - we have one somewhere on campus, and it once worked very well.
Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer
Fred Tabbutt has one of these- ask at Lab Stores how to get certified to use it. Cool physics inside this equipment.
KV Ladd has one of these, and hospitals use them to sterilize equipment. Now, when I think of plasma, it's highly ionized, rare hydrogen gas, as in stars or fusion experiments. But the hospital ICPs use dense, partially ionized hydrogen peroxide - a molecular plasma, a strange beast. What kind of plasma is in KV's ICP and what does it do?
HP diode array - UV/visible spectrophotometer
We have 5-6 new digital ones, and a number of nice old ones with chart recorder feeds. They measure 200-1000 nm and are really easy to use, Jeff says. Can measure concentrations of colored species in solutions.
Cary 17 - UV/Visible/Near IR Spectrophotometer
Can measure concentrations of colored species in solutions, with 10x greater sensitivity than HP silicon diode arrays. Fred has used it to measure gas pollutants in air samples.
We have one of these - ask at Lab Stores how to get certified to use this.
Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrophotometer
Dharshi Bopegedera has one of these.
FRITZ is the original Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrophotometer.
Has a control computer set up in octal, is programmed bit by bit. The 456-K hard drive cost $5000. An antique with excellent optics. The interferometer has been interfaced with a Mac by Barlow's lab. Fred and Clyde looked at Bromine gas with this and were able to separate the IR absorbances of different isotopes.
Students may control the operation of this instrument by writing a program in LabView.
Betty Kutter and Jim Neitzel use these to count beta particles from radioactive samples. There's a radiophysics room down the hall from the CAL, across from the wet lab, where you could measure neutron activation and do elemental analysis from the gamma spectrum on activated samples - if we had a neutron howitzer!
We have one of these at Evergreen.
LIGO for Gravity wave searches
One prediction of General Relativity is the existence of gravity waves. Unfortunately, gravity is such a weak force that the effect of a gravity wave on a terrestrial object would be minuscule. Nevertheless, several experiments have been built to search for these waves, including from enormous superconducting cylinders (Weber bars) to titanic Michelson interferometers (LIGO).
Ligo is just down the road, at the Pacific Northwest National Lab in Richland. A nice place to visit in the cold wet winter. Field trip?
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