Melbourne

I just got back on Thursday night from my most recent trip, again to Melbourne. We had two sets of experiments scheduled back-to-back, and I think I'm now suffering from beamtime-lag. Both were using the powder diffraction line; the first was using a new technique (new for me, anyway) called pair distribution function analysis or PDF (not to be confused with Post-Doctoral Fellowship or Portable Document Format or any of the other 66 acronyms). This involved having to change samples about every hour, and take what feels like pointless measurements of the same empty glass capillary and the air (i.e. nothing in the beam). The analysis is even more tricky and I suspect it's going to take quite a long time - although we do have an under-utilised computer geek at work whose services I have been encouraged to avail myself of.

The second set of experiments involved using the beamline in a completely different way than anyone has used it before, to look at diffraction from thin films. This involved bringing our own rotation stage across several months ago, and then hooking it up to the beamline with an area detector (and this was the first time this had been used by anyone other than the beamline staff). It took the best part of a day to get everything up and running, and then when we started looking at the samples (high-temperature superconductors on a highly oriented commercial substrate) it got quite frustrating. My brain had had enough, and with so many diffraction peaks from the various oriented layers, we struggled to figure out a suitable protocol for measuring things. This led to repeating some of the samples a couple of times, but after those initial hiccups, everything went pretty smoothly. The only trouble was, this experiment needed something doing every 5 minutes. Fortunately we had planned for this and had a team of three, so we could work around the clock and try to have at least 2 people on at all times. We got through all the most important samples and think we managed to see what we set out to see (that can't be seen on the lab instrument). So just from those three days I have about 8 GB of data to work through. So that will keep me busy!

 My colleague Martin hard at work

After that (my last shift started at midnight on Tuesday and finished at 8 am) I got a couple of hours' sleep and then drove down to visit my friends Paul and Marge who live in Mornington. I stayed with them for a couple of days; we took a trip out to Phillip Island, which I hadn't been to before. Kind of reminded me a bit of Waiheke Island with the different kinds (and classes) of holiday homes, the beaches, the townships with only a couple of shops, the laid-back-ness (is that even a word?). But I'm sure the weather is quite different in a southerly

With Paul and Marge at Phillip Island 

The Nobbies, Phillip Island. We saw two penguins hiding in burrows
but couldn't tell which part of the penguin we were looking at... 

The beach at Mornington