We Have Liftoff

Click on the picture. Watch the animation. Then come back.

It's so hard to explain what this little animation means. Just know that it took years of blood sweat and tears to achieve it, mostly Ken's, but mine too, this last year or so. A lot of the saga I described here.

This is our magneto-optical trap. Being launched upward. The things on the sides are the magnetic coils that help hold it up. They are six centimeters in diameter, which should give you a sense of scale. We just need to be able to launch atoms a little bit higher than the top of the coils, because we can put our cavity right above them. This is the whole reason we designed these smaller coils, so that we wouldn't need to launch so high.

The atom cloud actually expands as it rises, out of the cooling beams. The beam we use to light it up so that we can see it is narrow, so you all you see is a narrow, pencil shaped slice out of the cloud as it expands, like the core of an apple. That's why it looks long and narrow toward the top.

These results don't mean we're done. First of all, we might want to cool the atoms a little more, so that they don't expand so much, so fast (although there is plenty of density up there, even as it is.) We are actually doing a slower launch, so that they slow to a halt just at the top of the coils and then fall back down. The slower launch takes longer, so the atom cloud has expanded more when it gets up there, which is why we might want the additional cooling. Also, we need a way to hold the atoms there, once we get them there. We already know how we're supposed to do that. It's called a "FORT" or "Far Off-Resonance Trap." It's easy in theory -- just shine a really strong, really tightly focused laser beam on the atoms, and that should hold them in place for the few milliseconds we need. Unfortunately we haven't made it work in practice yet, at least, not that we could detect. Finally, we need to actually build the cavity and put it in there. We've already built a couple of cavities for this thing, but for various reasons none of them is suitable for what we're trying to do now.

But still, that little blob in that animation looks a little bit like a light at the end of the tunnel.

Bear Down!

Wow, my heart is still pounding. The Bears must have caused at least a couple of coronaries today.

Okay, I know the rest of the country is rooting for New Orleans right now. But I live in Chicago. And the point of sports is to bond with the people in your own community. The Bears unite us. I hear strangers on the El asking each other, "You think they got a chance?" Today a group of people in Bears gear getting off the our train (probably coming back from the game) called out to Ken and me: "Go Bears!" We pumped our fists in the air and echoed it.

I can't betray my fellow Chicagoans. Just as New Orleans loves its team, Chicago loves the Bears. It is right and proper that Chicagoans should root for the home team.

So I hope New Orleans wins the Superbowl -- some other year.

To show my support for the Bears, I spent part of the day on a little art project.

It's one of the those Magic Eye images. So I apologize to those who can't see Magic Eye images. But we were shopping in a book store yesterday, and stopped to look at a couple of books of them, which inspired me to download a program for creating my own
(StereoCreator. Scroll down at that link) And then last night, Ken had a dream that we created a stereogram in which the 3D image moved. I'm sure it's been done before, but I haven't seen it, so I had to attempt it. For that I needed an animated .gif creator, so I downloaded unFREEZ.

Unfortunately, animated gifs with 28 cells are 28 times as large as normal gifs. So I cut down the number of frames and the color density to fit within Blogger's 3MB limit, and now the depth doesn't look exactly right. But still, as a first attempt...

Click on the image to enlarge and animate.



Wondering what it's supposed to be?

Click here.

I might post a few more (non-animated) stereograms if I have more homework to procrastinate on later.

UPDATE:

In the comments, Stereo DDD links to a couple of animated stereograms that outclass mine like Cary Grant outclasses Pauly Shore.

3-D staircase
3-D descent
3-D pink

The "descent" stereogram in particular is really a stunning work of art. Check out this guy's whole gallery.

Colorado Trip

I'm late posting because I've been in Colorado, visiting parents and siblings.

As you may have heard, they've had a little snow there, recently.




You can click on the picture for a bigger image. That's not my parents' car, just a random one parked in my old neighborhood, which we visited on a little nostalgia trip. Actually, both my parents have SUVs, of which I've been disapproving, but I have to say they came in handy this year. The city doesn't plow the residential streets (instead they rely on the 300+ days of sunshine Colorado gets to melt the snow for them within a few days.) So the four wheel drives are the only reason anyone was able to make it out of the cul-de-sac they live on for a little while. The neighbors all shared a couple of snowblowers to clear each other's driveways and get rid of the larger drifts, and then drove in each other's tracks to flatten down the snow on the street.



That's what it looked like by Saturday, which was almost a week after the big storm and the cleanup. Of course, during that week, another eight inches or so fell...

As the van picture indicates, our old neighborhood got a bit more, even. Here's the house we lived in during the eighties, from a couple of different angles.

Driving back there took us a little closer to the mountains, so my parents took me into the foothills a little ways for lunch at a restaurant that they remember from when we lived in that old house. And I can't resist including a few pictures of that, because they show the biggest icicles I've ever seen

To get a sense of scale, compare to the doorway.

As for gifts...

From my husband I got a really fancy portable DVD player and earphones (which I used on the plane and in the airport, both ways) and a shoulder massager, and a Bears T-shirt which I am currently wearing, and a movie, "The Ref," which was hilarious and has nothing to do with sports and was perfect to watch on Christmas Eve, and a video game, "Nancy Drew: Danger by Design." Because I said there should be more video games where you have to solve mysteries.

From my parents, Ken and I got an electric toothbrush (which I asked for, and love) and a down comforter, and I got a new winter coat (black with cool random metal bits, and very warm), a couple of pairs of jeans and tops during a mother daughter mall trip, and holes in my ears. Yes, my mom paid for me to get my ears pierced. I must be one of the only women in the world to pick out her first earrings to match her wedding ring. Also, they're paying for the plane ticket for the visit, which is a huge gift in itself.

From my brother, the Xbox 360 remote, because the Xbox 360 is now the source of all our entertainment. From my sister, a poster sized Lord of the Rings Calendar and a Harry Potter bookmark, because she knows I'm a sucker for LotR and Harry Potter. And from my Grandpa, as usual, a pad of one dollar bills. You tear them off one at a time and the look of consternation on the store clerks' faces is worth way more than a dollar.

All in all I made out like a bandit, and I hope you did too. Happy New Year.

Things That Look Cool

* Close Up Pictures of Snow Crystals via Girl Hacker

* A photographer who made his famous subjects pose in midair via MetaFilter

* This is what the end of the world looks like Links to missile test pictures at MetaFilter

* Manhole covers of Japan via Making Light

* The Biomedical Image Awards We know lots of people in biomedical imaging these days... Also via Making Light.

* Photos of Mars they need your help cataloguing all the craters. Computers aren't good at it. Via User Friendly I think.

* The Sidewalk Art of Julian Beever via Making Light and User Friendly.

* Mars in 3-D I'm sorry, I forget the source.

* The Nieman Marcus Catalog featuring a cruise in a space ship.

* Light and line Great shots by Chicago Tribune photographers. Registration probably required.

* Our pumpkin. Ken suggested I try to carve this Bears logo, and it turned out great.

Hawaii: A Pretty Nice Place

So, my dad has been saving up frequent flier miles for years to take my mom to Hawaii. But my mom wanted to take the whole family. (Thank you, Mom!) The complicated nature of a project like that, and the sheer number of frequent flier miles required, and the way that busy people have of putting off vacations, meant it felt like it was never going to happen.

Until some friends -- they were our next door neighbors twenty years ago in San Antonio, and moved to Colorado shortly after we did, for the first time -- invited us along on their Hawaii trip, to see their daughter's graduation. (These same friends had come along on my parents' trip to see my graduation, in the Seattle area. So there was a kind of symmetry.)

What this meant for Ken and me was that we got a call out of the blue one day: "If we went to Hawaii in May, would you be interested in coming?"

There is only one possible answer to that question. (Well, there are two, but "Duh!" isn't very polite...) That's the kind of prize you usually only win on a game show. On Fear Factor, you'd have to eat a couple of pounds of live insects just for a chance at a prize like that.

Since we had nothing to do in regards to planning this trip, it sort of got pushed out of our minds, as work got more and more stressful and Ken's candidacy came over the horizon. But all of the sudden it was time to go. Frequent flier miles had been spent on tickets in our name. A beach house was reserved with room for six (if two slept on a futon in the living room.) All we had to do was pack our bags the night before, and catch a cab to the aiport. (We caught the cab at 3:00AM, from the lab, where we had stopped to check on the baking vacuum system).

It was a surreal experience (especially with the ten hour flight and the five hour time zone change.) But when we got to the beach house, it was literally on the beach. You could watch surfers from the deck.

And we did. For a week, we watched surfers (including my brother and sister, and also the friends who invited us) and grilled out, and played in the waves. Gorgeous white sand.

And then we did all the activities the guide book told us too, too many to describe. But the highlights were a swim with dolphins who really did seem uncannily human, and, the final night, a luau and show at the Polynesian Cultural Center, complete with Fire Knife Dancers.

I filled up my camera's flash card for the first time ever. And half a dozen rolls of film. So even though it went fast, I'm definitely going to remember it.

Trap Day

Day before yesterday, Ken got a trap.

Yesterday he got it again, only bigger and brighter.

Yay! Hooray! You're cheering, right?

No, you're asking "What's a trap, and why does it matter?" That's the problem with achievements in a field like this -- any specialized field, I guess.

A "trap" is a small collection of atoms held suspended in mid-air -- except actually there can't be any air in the system or it won't work. A small collection of atoms held suspended in mid-vacuum. They aren't touching anything at all. They are surrounded by almost perfect nothingness. What holds them up? Laser beams, and a magnetic field.

The technical name for it is a "magneto-optical trap." You can actually see the atoms hovering there, a small glowing spot a few millimeters to a centimeter in diameter. You can see them because the lasers make them glow. In our case, they glow in the infrared, so you have to use a viewer to see the light, but here is a picture of someone's sodium MOT, that looks just like ours, only glowing with yellow light.

How does it work? Light actually does exert a force when it interacts with atoms. It can slow them as they come out of a nozzle. If you have light beams pushing up, down, left, right, forward, and back, it can keep atoms from escaping in any direction - it can trap them. Now the problem is to make sure that it exerts the right amount of force, and more, that the left-pushing beam only operates on atoms that are moving to the right, and not on those already moving leftward, and likewise for the other beams. This is where the magnetic field comes in. It changes the properties of the atoms, so that atoms in one part of the field interact with a different kind of light then atoms in the other part, and atoms further from the center are pushed harder than those near it. How do you calculate these forces and interaction energies? Um... Ask Ken. But give him time to go through his notes first.

The best explanation of laser cooling and trapping for the non-scientist (OK, and for the scientist as well. I personally need help turning the math into a conceptual picture) is at the University of Colorado's Bose-Einstein Condensate page. It's got little java videogames (hit "next" at the bottom of the page to see more), to let you try your hand at some laser cooling of your own. In our lab, we stop short of the "evaporative cooling" stage, and we don't get BECs. But we do get cold atoms.

What's nice about cold atoms is that they don't bump into each other so much, and they all have about the same velocity (close to zero). Any time you want to do an experiment that involves putting atoms into certain quantum states (you do this with lasers) -- you really want to do it in a trap, because if the atom collides with anything, your state is ruined. Also, you have to use different laser frequencies depending on the velocity of your atom, so if you can arrange for all the atoms to have the same velocity, you get better results.

So, Ken's project involves putting atoms into a certain quantum state, called the "dark state". You can control whether atoms in this state absorb light or not, and if they don't absorb it, what kind of "phase shift" they give it. (A phase shift just makes the peaks and troughs of the wave occur in different places.) This is supposed to be analogous to what some parts of a computer do to electronic signals and would supposedly be useful for some hypothetical quantum-computer, someday. Possibly. Maybe. Whatever. It means Ken is one step closer to graduating.

It's been a long, gruelling, frustrating process. The lab used to have a trap, and Ken worked on it, but with the departure of one of our post-docs, the whole shebang became Ken's responsibility. There are so many working parts to this, what with three lasers, at least nine different beams to align, electronics and optics to lock the lasers, frequency modulators, waveplates, beam expanders, magnetic coils, cooling water, and, oh yes, the vacuum. The pressure has to be on the order of 10^(-10) torr. Atmospheric pressure is 760 torr. Three different pumps, each with their own plumbing, their own gaskets, their own impossible-to-reach nuts and bolts. So many things have to work, all at once...

Only three people ever understood this system. The other two are now gone. Our former post-doc was able to consult a little, and I could help do the two-person jobs if he told me what to do (turn a knob at this end of the table to adjust a beam at that end. Turn the gas on and off to blow sealant through the coils, etc.) but Ken ran the operation, knew what had to be done, and succeeded.

So now you have enough information to understand what these pictures mean, scientifically and emotionally.






This is the vacuum chamber, in which the atoms are trapped. You can see a camera on the right-hand side.






This is what the camera saw. That bright dot at the center is the trap.






This is my attempt to take a picture through the viewer. The trap is very clear and bright, if you just look through, but it's hard to take pictures through an eye-piece. Anyway, click on the picture to enlarge it, and you can see it, a bright dot at the center of the small window.






This is what the vacuum gauge reads: 7.1*10^(-10). That's .00000000071 torr. Thank you, vacuum gods!

Christmas Eve Day

So Much Sci-FI!

I thought about doing a sciency post today, but it seemed like work. I did a little searching on uninspired topics (in the course of which I did learn that the sky is really violet (scroll down)) but figured I was too confused to write about it. I'm more in the mood for mindless entertainment, so instead, you get an entry about sci-fi television.

I will be the first to acknowledge that not all sci-fi TV is mindless. I do know the difference between the good stuff and the bad stuff (I even know the difference between sci-fi and SF). But the thing about me is, I like them both.

So I decided to search for sites about the stuff I grew up watching, first in syndication and then on the Sci-Fi Channel. I figured maybe I could find some hilarious merchandise like this:






and put together a sort of holiday gift list.

But what shows to include? Well, obviously the Bionic Woman, and the Six Million Dollar Man




And Wonder Woman




And MacGyver




(Is that Portuguese?)

And Quantum Leap




(I read all of those!)

And The Incredible Hulk




(This and Quantum Leap were by far my favorites of all the shows listed here.)

And I have to include Knight Rider




But what about all those great Irwin Allen TV shows? Time Tunnel, Lost in Space, Land of the Giants, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea?




I'm beginning to think this post is going to be even more work than the sciency one would've been, what with all the searching and uploading and formatting. And I haven't even scratched the surface!

What about Mission: Impossible?




And the shows I never watched regularly, but which definitely belong to the same class, like

Battlestar Gallactica
Probe
VR.5
Forever Knight
Space: 1999
The Powers of Matthew Star


And what about the anthology shows

Twilight Zone,
Ray Bradbury Theater
The Outer Limits

And the British shows?
Dr. Who
Red Dwarf
Blake's Seven
The Prisoner
The Avengers

And the new bad Sci-Fi (I am, of course, not including big, almost mainstream shows like the Star Treks, Buffy, Angel, Babylon 5, Farscape, Firefly, and Alias -- the last of which Ken and I are currently working our way through on DVD). But...

Xena
Hercules
Beastmaster
Stargate (both versions)
Andromeda
Mutant X
Highlander
Land of the Lost
Cleopatra 2525
She Spies
Space, Above and Beyond
Seaqest DSV/2032
JAG
Charmed
Sliders
The Invisible Man

I've watched all of these too, some regularly. I have a deep knowledge of the backstory on many of them, and can name cast members... And I don't have the excuse of having been a kid at the time. These aren't old enough to justify watching for kitch value or nostalgia. I just like them.

And I can think of half a dozen others, too, which I'm not listing mainly because either I can't remember the name (what was that show that got cancelled about the guy in Seattle who was an expert in every field, but couldn't remember his name? John Doe? Something like that) or I don't think anyone else will remember them (Nowhere Man?) or I don't really know anything about them (M.A.N.T.I.S? Robocop? Swamp Thing? V? Never watched)

Enough! I must either draw the line, or decide to write a book.

I can't believe how much TV I watch. I can't believe how many shows like this get made. And I can't believe you can find episodes guides and merchandise for all of them on the internet... This is the power of the internet.

More Lab Pictures

This is a seventies era argon ion laser. You can just about see the orange case at the bottom, even though the cover is off. We were told to figure out if it would still work. The first time it was tested (Ken and I were safely in Europe, fortunately) it blew a fuse.




The fuses are those white cylinders sitting horizontally in the middle. They're bigger than a roll of quarters, maybe the size of a roll of half-dollars. The blue cylinders at the top are capacitors as big around as my forearm. I can't remember how many thousands of volts I was told this thing needed for initial discharge, unfortunately. It was a really impressive number.




Looks like it works. But those are some weird error messages... Turn it off!




Liquid nitrogen is less dangerous. The thing it's spraying from is an ion pump, for the vaccuum system. Liquid nitrogen cools parts of this thing, and then the rubidium vapor condenses on them, like water condensing on the inside of your car windows when they're cold. This gives a higher vacuum. Or so I'm told.




This was sent with one of our orders from Thorlabs. They are now my favorite optics company.

Scary!

Autumnal Images and Brotherly Birthdays

I like autumn. I like it better than "fall" because the word "autumnal" exists, but there's no corresponding adjective for "fall." "Autumnal" is such an evocative word, poetic, wistful, reminiscent. It brings to mind scenes like these from Lord of the Rings. (Those are all different links.) You know, endings...

It's the end of the baseball season, for one thing. The Cubs weren't even in it, but if the White Sox win their game today, Chicago will nevertheless host a World Series this year. I find that exciting, even if some people I'm married to (naming no names) say I shouldn't care. It's also football season, and the Bears, believe it or not, are first in their division as of today, in spite of having lost more games than they've won. I'm trying, for Ken's sake, to care about that.

It's also horror movie season. I've watched seven Friday the 13th movies (all in one day!) and two Halloween movies, plus Nightmare on Elm Street, and I'm sure there will be more to come. This is the first time I've seen any of them. I never knew, before, what they were.

The villains can always be outrun or even outfought by high school students, provided the high schoolers know they are being hunted. The main protagonists are nearly always young women, and they are usually more than a match for their supernatural stalkers, which I find positively inspiring. And the victims are always the cool kids that you wished would drop dead, back when you were in school. This poetic justice, I think, is the biggest appeal of this kind of movie. The actual violence is too cartoonish, and the characters too paper-thin, for any of the death scenes to really get to me, emotionally. On the whole, I would say slasher flicks are female-nerd empowerment stories (the ones with boyfriends always die first, of course), and how can I not approve of that?

So this Halloween, I'll be carving the masks of Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees into pumpkins, and watching a lot of sequels. Also, dressing up as Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Where was I? Ah yes, aside from Halloween, horror movies, baseball playoffs, football optimism, and Rivendell (that one goes to a page of paintings, and incidentally says that Rivendell is based in part on the real-life Lauterbrunnen Valley, which is one of the places Ken and I went on our honeymoon), autumn is also the season of apples, Oktoberfest and other parties, garage sales, and all kinds of fall festivals. Doesn't the color of the sunlight, and the smell of the air, and the trees, and the temperature, make you want to go on a hayride right now?

Finally, it's a good season for family, 'cause Thanksgiving comes at the end, and right in the middle, today, in fact, comes my brother's birthday.

Happy birthday, Patrick!

Blois

Staubbach falls, Switzerland

Chambord

Royal Palace, Amsterdam