Hi everyone!
It’s officially (almost) Winter Break!!! I have been counting the days to it ever since we came back from Thanksgiving. I’m flying out on Tuesday, so there’s definitely some time (and assignments to do) before I’m home, but now it all feels much more manageable. I have already packed up most of my stuff for home; I’m just missing some last minute gifts for my family at home.
I spent a lot of this past week in the lab, either for my experimental physics class or for my thesis. For my class we had to design a final project, and my group decided to make some plastic scintillators, which are very useful materials that are used in particle physics to detect particles. We compared the ones we made to the commercial one we used in a previous lab. Those took such a long time to make, let alone analyze afterwards. They took several hours to cure on the hot plate, so you can see us watching Mamma Mia in the background while waiting for them, hah.
Our scintillators
I have also been working in my thesis lab. We spent this last week calibrating one of our newest sensors, a capacitance-based liquid level sensor. We had to dunk it in liquid nitrogen to calibrate it in order to define our zero and our full level. It was really fun even though it took longer than it should have.
That’s it for the semester. I’m looking forward to going home soon and resting. We have some exciting plans with the family, so I will make sure to tell you all about it when I am back in January. Have a great break and holiday season everyone!