Next trip

I bet you can hardly believe this as much as me... I'm off again on yet another trip away.

It's less than three weeks since Mum and I got back from Europe, then I was in Melbourne for a week, and now I'm off to the U. S. of A.

I'm heading to Chicago to do some experiments at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab. It's the largest synchrotron facility in North America, and home to one of the few (i.e. 2) beamline instruments in the world which offers high resolution X-ray diffraction at temperatures down to 10 K (that's -263 deg Celsius). I'm looking at some high temperature superconductor materials: one that has oxygen-16 and one with oxygen-18. If these experiments work, it should help shed some light on the isotope effect, which is one of the puzzles surrounding the theory of high temperature superconductivity. (I tried to find a wikipedia, or similar, entry on the 'isotope effect' but no luck - you can try googling it if you like, but chances are you'll end up with some journal article from Physical Review that even I don't fully understand!)

The good news is... after this, I only have one more trip planned before our trip to Brisbane in August for the Gospel for Asia marathon walk...