No prizes for guessing where I went. Two colleagues and I travelled to Melbourne for some soft X-ray spectroscopy experiments, looking at aluminium in zinc oxide (for solar cell applications; at least that's what we write in our research grants). Now I've only used the soft X-ray beamline once before, and it is quite challenging. I should point out here that there are different kinds of X-rays, soft and hard: soft, falling in the range between the ultraviolet and hard X-ray region. Hard X-rays being of high enough energy that they aren't absorbed by the air. Soft X-rays are absorbed by the air, which means that the experiments all have to be done under ultra-high vacuum (UHV) conditions. Which means you can't just pick them up and put them in the beam, like I do with all my other experiments, but there's a complicated loading procedure as the sample gets transferred from one chamber to another, all the while getting pumped down to a vacuum level approaching that of outer space. So it takes a while (about 2-3 hours), and on top of that is the added pressure that the soft X-ray beamline is ultimately opened up to the same vacuum that the electrons that make the synchrotron work, are whizzing around in. So if you open the wrong valve at the wrong time, and lots of air gets in, you might as well pack your bags because you won't be allowed back.
We had four days of beamtime, and every day there was some period of frustration followed by another period of elation. It was a real roller-coaster ride. On day 1 we went through figuring out what scans we were going to use to measure all of the samples. Peak #1: we were able to get beautiful data from the aluminium in our standard compound. Then we swapped to one of our samples, which had a much smaller amount of aluminium in it. Problem #1 - we couldn't see anything. This was a pretty major issue, because we had samples with between 0.5 and 4% aluminium, and this was a 4%. So we swapped to a 0.5% that was on the same sample holder (bearing in mind it takes 2-3 hours to load a new sample), and Peak #2 - we could see a decent signal from the 0.5%. We measured a few more and figured that something was screwy with the 4% samples. So that helped us make up our minds in terms of priorities. Then we tried a 2% and a 1%, and there was something wrong with the 1%. So we decided to focus on the 2% samples. Everything went pretty well from that point, until the last night. When transferring one of the samples, I managed to get it lodged in a place that I could only push it forward and couldn't pull it out. Ultimately it ended up sitting in a window port, completely inaccessible with the transfer arm inside the vacuum system... in full view, as if it was saying, 'Na nah na nah, can't get me!'
The next day the synchrotron beam was turned off for maintenance, so we helped the beamline scientist open up the vacuum system, retrieve the sample (there were another couple that had fallen off previously too, which he also retrieved), close it all up and start pumping down again. After we'd apologised profusely and helped as much as we could to fix things, and since our flight wasn't leaving until the following morning, we decided to head into the city and spend the afternoon there. It was probably the best day we'd had weather-wise, and it was good to relax a little bit. Although we did end up relaxing perhaps a bit too much on the City Circular tram... we were all starting to fall asleep. So at that point - we were pretty close to where we had parked the car - we decided that we probably wouldn't be able to stay awake until the evening to have dinner in town as planned, so we headed back out to where we were staying in Clayton.
That night I remember was pretty rough. Usually I'm able to get a flight home in the evening of the day I finish beamtime, so I'm home when the post-beamtime blues set in. But not this time. It's weird, the way that I put myself through it time and time again. Sleep deprivation (caused by long hours and weird shifts), combined with brain having to be completely focused on the task at hand, means that when you're high you're high, and inevitably there's a big crash waiting for you as things return to 'normal'. That, and you do develop a very unique relationship with your colleagues. After four or five days you get to know things about them - and share things with them about yourself - that you wouldn't normally. But I can't say any more than that, because as the saying goes, 'what happens on beamtime stays on beamtime'.
I have two more synchrotron experiments in Melbourne before the end of the year, but thankfully they're both short - one for two days and one for one day (i.e. 24 hrs). Add to that there's two annual meetings (one for the MacDiarmid Institute and one for our combined nanoparticle research groups' meeting, this year in Martinborough), and the Australian Synchrotron user meeting. And here was me hoping to do something special for my Christmas lights this year. You never know, it might still happen... but only if I do it now!
Oh and in other news we had a church retreat last weekend. It was great fun - although hard to go back to work afterwards.
And yet other news, Mum and I have booked our tickets for a holiday to Europe next year for six weeks...
