For those of you who don't know, or don't really care what it is I study, I'm in physics at Brock University. Since this is my final year of study, I am doing an honours project under Dr. David Crandles, an experimental physicist at Brock. Probably the nicest guy ever, with a pretty kick-ass beard.
Anyway, I returned to Brock on the 2nd to begin the actual experimental portion of my project. My experiment consists of testing how well a thin film of material reflects radiation in the mid-infrared to infrared ranges, over many different temperatures.
The first day consisted of setting up some fairly intimidating equipment (at least to me, anyway). Everything was looking good, so we evacuated the system and waited for the next day to change the temperatures and all.
The second day, we hooked up a large steel container of liquid helium to the system, and pumped said helium to lower the temperature to around 4K, which is -269 degrees celsius. We did a test run for the data collection, but we found the data to be inconsistent, so we had to call it a day and troubleshoot.
The third day, we disassembled the apparatus and looked for the issues, which, according to Dr. Crandles, was an ice buildup on a detector. So we let it heat up to evaporate the ice.
The fourth day was a repeat of the first day, with me double checking everything this time to avoid any fuckups.
Today, we're trying to collect data again. I hope to God it goes well. This is getting really frustrating.
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