Category Archives: Lab Stories

Bloopers

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I was sorting through some email (searching for some old tidbit) and ran across a few chuckle-inducing transmissions I had saved. Someone who used to sort the mail ages ago was a few quarks short of the standard model, and these are some email inquiries we got as the person attempted to track down an unknown recipient.

I am in receipt of mail for a Verenigde Staten and xxx xxx. If anyone knows these people please let me know

“Verenigde Staten” is Dutch for “United States”

I am in receipt of mail for Provost Marshal. Does anyone know this person? Thank you.

Ah, my good buddy Provost. Hey, Pro, how’s it going? Or was that supposed to be Provost, Marshal?

Does anyone know a Beale Cypher Crew? Thank you.

The Beale cyphers/ciphers are a famous set of encoded documents of questionable authenticity, purporting to tell the location of buried treasure. I can neither confirm nor deny the presence of a decoding effort operating at work.

(I was tempted to ask a friend to send mail to Hugh Jass, or some Moe’s-prank equivalent, in order to induce more of these emails, but I never did)

Hey You, Stop Being … so … Unsafe!

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Over at incoherently scattered ponderings, there’s a post on safety at academic labs, which links to an article at Slate about an explosion at a lab which killed a worker, and discusses the difference in safety standards for students vs workers, and academia vs industry.

Why the difference between industry and academe? For one thing, the occupational safety and health laws that protect workers in hazardous jobs apply only to employees, not to undergraduates, graduate students, or research fellows who receive stipends from outside funders. (As a technician, Sheri Sangji was getting wages and a W-2. If she’d been paying tuition instead, Cal/OSHA could not even have investigated her death.)

I had not realized that students aren’t covered, but the disparity between the described situations is not surprising. I’ve spent time in academia (grad school) and worked in national labs (the NanoFabrication facility at Cornell, TRIUMF in Canada), and my current government job is a confluence of being industry/government and a quasi-national-lab (though not formally recognized as such). And I have to concur: lab safety in a university setting is not formally the priority is is in those other places. Academic safety leans far too much on the involvement of the PI, and leaves way too much to chance. A key difference of academia is that students are … students — they are still learning, and one cannot assume that they have the requisite experience to know much about the finer points of safety.

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Vintage Lab Pictures

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I was decreasing the local entropy in a small part of my abode and found a shoebox full of photos which happened to contain a few shots of my grad school lab, in all its glory. We were building an interferometer which would use cold atoms, which means relatively large deBroglie wavelengths and a correspondingly small system. But one has to trap the atoms and cool them down first, and then generate the cold beam of atoms to feed into the diffraction gratings that comprise the interferometer, so the system is still quite complex. Since I was the first PhD candidate in the group, it meant I was involved in the construction of most of the components of the lab apparatus pictured here. It also meant a lot of fumbling in the dark, both figuratively and literally, since the only one with any experience with doing this kind of work was the PI, who had other duties (like teaching, writing grant proposals, etc.) It was a big day when the group finally reached the point where we didn’t want him playing with the experiment, because we knew more about the details than he did. That took a couple of years.

Here’s the vacuum system.

osu-vacuum-system

At the bottom of the picture is the oven, which was basically a pipe bomb with a hole in it (under vacuum, of course), and when heated sufficiently, would spray Rubidium atoms out. These were collimated with a second hole a few cm away (the extra Rb was collected on some cold metal and sent back into the oven during a refill cycle we ran each night after running the oven). Underneath is a turbo pump and a roughing pump; the small green hose was for adding dry nitrogen if we needed to open the system up. The nitrogen was supposed to keep the Rb from reacting with water in the air. It never worked.

The long pipe leads down to the next part of the vacuum system, and it has a “wobble stick” that blocks the atomic beam, if desired, and a valve to isolate the two parts of the system. You can also see an ion gauge on the left which was normally off so the light from the filament wouldn’t register on any photodiodes or the photomultiplier tube.

The tube is about a meter or so long, and needed to be so we could slow the atoms down. A laser was sent down the tube from the other end, and “chirped” in frequency to account for the changing Doppler shift — you wanted the laser to track the resonance of the atoms as they slowed down, so they would keep scattering photons. Once the atoms were slow enough, the laser turned off, and the atoms drifted into the bigger chamber, where they were trapped in a two-dimensional trap called an “atomic funnel.” They were able to move along the axis of the funnel, and were forced out to the left into the region where the interferometer would be. I made the gratings for the interferometer, but never got to the point where the apparatus was finished.

Here is an early version of the funnel:

old-hairpin

It’s a “hairpin” made of copper tubing so we could water-cool it while sending several amps through it, and it creates a quadrupole field in two dimensions, so that atoms would be trapped into a pencil shape along the central axis, left-to-right. It’s supported from below by two insulated standoffs — you can see the ceramic, i.e. insulating, part — to keep it straight. The dark hole straight through it is the tube leading to the oven and the lighter window on the left would be where one of the six trapping lasers would come in. Up top there is a tube with some lenses in it for imaging the trap, and on the right is a target for aligning the lasers. The target is on a linear feedthrough, and the target could be inserted into the center and all of the lasers sent through it to make sure they all overlapped where they should.

The funnel tubes were originally soldered together. What you see here is version 2, because at one point we lost cooling water while the system was energized, and the solder melted. Which meant that lots of water was introduced to the system and it became a giant fish tank, sans fish. Fortunately, we had interlocks in the system so that if the pressure rose too high the pneumatic valves would shut (that’s what the rest of the green tubing is for in the first picture), and the damage was limited. The white blobs at the ends of the little elbows are torr-seal, which we used to repair the trap. This eventually failed, too, and we replaced it with a much better trap fashioned from a single piece of copper tubing.

new-hairpin

I graduated after having built much of this and characterizing the atomic beam. We were able to extract atoms going up to 10 m/s — this was adjustable, depending on the laser frequencies of the different beams, but atoms going too slow would miss the interferometer because of gravity, so we didn’t bother trying to generate a beam going below a couple of m/s. The atoms were also somewhat cold — less than a milliKelvin — so that the beam didn’t spread out too much. At the time, one other funnel had been built, but it had on of its lasers along the axis of the funnel, which precluded putting any sort of target there. This was novel enough for a publication (T. B. Swanson, N. J. Silva, S. K. Mayer, J. J. Maki, and D. H. McIntyre, “Rubidium atomic funnel,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 13, 1833-1836 (1996)) and more importantly, a degree.

Putting the "Vent" in "Inventory"

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It’s getting to be inventory time again, and that usually invokes trepidation and stirs the nightmares of the ghost of bureaucracy past. Somebody, somewhere, needs to know that all that shiny equipment you’ve purchased hasn’t walked off, and that’s fair enough — I’m spending somebody else’s money, and they have the right to know that if I’ve used it to buy a new 60″ plasma monitor, that it’s not being used at home to confirm the resolution of the HD-TV ESPN signal. But I just wish they didn’t make it so painful.

Whenever an inventory-worth item gets purchased (anything over a certain dollar amount, computers, monitors and other computer-related things comprise the bulk of them) I have to tranquilize and tag it with a sticker, fill out a form to record what the item is, how much it costs, and where it will live. I bundle that form along with the duly-signed invoice and purchase request and pop it in the pneumatic tube and send it to the accounting trolls. (I kid, I kid. We don’t have a pneumatic tube system.)

And every so often someone will come around with a barcode reader and scan everything, and then the fun begins. Equipment gets mounted in racks, or moved in some way which obscures the barcode, or moved entirely out of the lab, and you end up short of what the inventory list says you have. And then the great equipment safari starts, where you try and track down the missing equipment. If you could, you’d hire the expert tracker to come in and find it — checking for electronics spoor.

Oooh. Smell that? That’s the unmistakable scent of a 1460A 100 Megahertz programmable waveform generator … and she’s a big one! (Best done in an Australian accent, for some reason)

The last time the inventory push happened, the list of the MIA only contained the barcode number, serial number and a generic description — nothing else. So there’s this list that has a dozen entries with two numbers followed by “computer,” and we were told to go out and find them. What the? All that extra information on the inventory sheets that would have helped — all the useful stuff like make, model, owner and room number, was not given to us. The serial number does no good, since it’s hidden just like the barcode is (or else it would have been scanned already). It’s not like we humans refer to the machines by either number (I don’t know about the trolls). “Joe’s Mac that’s supposed to be in 329 is missing on the inventory” is a lot more useful than “computer XWK19886FG32Q is missing.” I’m wiser now, and all that information also lives locally on a spreadsheet. I know someone who went as far as photographing all their inventoried equipment so they could match up inventory numbers of missing equipment with a mug shot, which would help them find the equipment.

Inevitably, some of the equipment is just missing. Lent and never returned, or disposed of improperly because the sticker was hidden, and then begins the paperwork to explain all of that. Ugh.

And it’s not like this is tremendously different than places I’ve been in the past. I recall a conversation with the bookkeeper when I was in grad school, which went something like this:

I’m filling out the inventory form for this purchase of a “30/70, 1″ nonpolarizing beamsplitter cube.” What is it, and what does it do?

Well, it’s a cube, 1″ on a side, that splits a beam 30% one way and 70% the other, regardless of and not affecting the polarization of the light.

That won’t fit on the form. You said it’s optics? Like a lens?

Well, it’s sort of like a lens, in a very vague sense, in that you can send light through it.

Can I put down “lens?”

No.

OK. I’ll fit the whole description in, somehow. Here’s the sticker.

You can’t put a sticker on it.

Why not?

Because it’s optics! An expensive piece of optics that will be ruined if you put an inventory sticker on it!

I have a colleague who went through a similar discussion concerning a component that lived in their vacuum system. The compromise was to put the sticker on the shelf where the component would live if it weren’t in the vacuum system.

I’m sure I’ll survive this, somehow. But in any event, have a weekend, enjoyable, one each.

Mffle Wffle Hmm?

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Eating al desco

I was recently eating lunch ‘al desco’. While I was eating-working, a student walked in my office to ask me a question, saw I was eating lunch at my desk, and said “Oh, I’m so sorry for interrupting your lunch. I’ll come back later.”

I was stunned. This has never happened to me before.

I’ve taken to eating at my desk much more in recent times. (Defections of the old lunch crowd left us with less than critical mass, and I can web surf/blog on my lunch break if I’m at my desk) And I get similar treatment as FSP — the assumption that I’m in “may I help you” mode because I’m at my desk.

Not Subject to the EEOC

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We’re rearranging the lab, and clearing out some old equipment, including taking down part of the original Cesium Fountain laser layout (which uses a lot of optical table space). A colleague was moving a rack, and wanted to know where it should go. I suggested next to a hard place, but leaving a gap, so something could go in between. Badump-ching!

Fortunately for me, puns are not inherently part of the “creating hostile work environment” definition which applies to Federal employees.

Anyway. part of the laser system of the Cesium fountain (the slightly less dense optics forest on the far side of the table in the picture) is no more. Walking into the lab to see that half the table bare was a bit traumatic for me, since it’s the experiment I raised from a pup. But my colleagues said the setup isn’t really gone — they moved that part of the experiment to a very nice lab out on a farm, and assured me that the optics were much happier there, because it has very nice temperature control and people to clean the mirrors and keep everything aligned. So I feel a lot better about that.

The Inside Job

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Scott Adams (fellow Hartwick alum) continually tells people, “No, I don’t work at your company,” because the problems he lampoons are so widespread.

Allyson points out a problem that is less so, that of purchasing within government regulations, in the shoe bomber theory of purchasing regulations. So in this case she does work at my company, in a sense. I feel her pain. And this is exactly right.

In 2001, a jackhole named Richard Reid got on a plane and attempted to make it go ‘splody by lighting a bomb in his shoes.

Now we all have to suffer the indignity of standing barefoot in line at the airport while the security goons X-ray my Hello Kitty flip flops. An appropriate punishment for Mr. Reid would be to chain him to the metal detector at various airports and then we could all smack him in the chops with our shoes before boarding the plane.

Likewise, somewhere out there, some jackass probably used his government p-card to buy a hooker, forty-eight pounds of veal, a case of absinthe, and a weed whacker for a groovy night of debauchery at a conference in Madrid.

Then some bored reporter showed up to blow the lid off this travesty as if s/he had discovered a Woodward and Bernsteinesque plot, it all ended up on the evening news, and suddenly I need to get sixty-eight approvals from the head of NASA all the way to my mom (hi mom!) to order a box of Kim Wipes. I hate waiting for stuff.

Most of the “solutions” with which we purchase card holders are burdened are the result of poor oversight. The probably-not-so-farfetched scenario Allyson describes would normally be caught in the routine audit when the jackass submitted his statement, and it was reviewed by the next person up the chain — no need for any additional regulations at all, if the reviewing official was doing the job properly. But somehow lapdances and sushi are purchased and not discovered until much later, and the solution is to add more rules to the mix. The problem is that it doesn’t really do any good — incompetent review hasn’t changed, and if someone is hell-bent on defrauding the government, they (by definition) don’t follow the rules, so a new layer of them won’t matter. Especially if the new rule has huge loopholes in it, as it usually does.

So I heartily endorse the solution

Whenever a new control is put in place that causes me to wait additional time for an approval, I believe that the new approval process should be named after the jerk who caused the problem to begin with.

The Man Across the Hall

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Every so often the powers that be™ decide that a reorganization would be a good idea, and that some people should change offices. A few years back this was stimulated by one group of people vacating some desirable office space in the main building (they were ordered to relocate to Crystal City by even higher powers that be™) and the decision to occupy that space set off a domino effect wherein our group made a “land grab” for some extra space, in which we secured offices with windows (yay!) while hanging on to the offices we we already occupying.

We needed the space, too, because, we were getting set to hire two new employees and were also running out of storage space. But storage space is a low priority in the eyes of the beancounters, so you can’t use that need to justify being assigned new space, and can’t fully depend on it to defend space you already have, especially when it’s empty space, for equipment you are planning to buy (logic is a puny weapon against Bureaucracy-Man, and the future is a myth, since it can’t be documented). And since we knew that somebody would do the math (X number of people left, so there must be some empty office space around here) we had to protect and defend the extra space somehow. That’s where Tuttle came in. The empty office would belong to Tuttle.

Jonathan Tuttle is from an episode of M*A*S*H, and is doubly fictitious — within the TV story, he’s also a made-up character, which was a criterion I used in selecting the name. (Another name that would fit this requirement was George Kaplan, from North by Northwest, but we already had someone with that name at work!) Much like the TV episode, the idea was that if anyone asked, one could always come up with an excuse for Tuttle not being around (“He’s in the lab,” “He’s gone up to Building 1,” or even “He’s at a conference/on vacation this week.”)

Tuttle’s office started out as a spare office, complete with a desk and computer and our networked printer, with office supplies and some other minor items on the shelves but the furniture was eventually moved out for someone to use and was replaced with heavy-duty shelving. To keep up appearances, I took a picture of the office and edited it so I could place it in the door’s window and have it look like it was still an office when the door was closed.

And that’s what you see here — a photo in the window. That’s a printer and an old iMac on a table, but what’s really in the office is a bunch of shelving with equipment and supplies. And the printer — we still use it for that. A number of people have been fooled into thinking it’s an office. That red dot on the door trim was a mark left by some beancounter marking it as occupied office space. The equipment staging area (we don’t call it storage) next door, which was never camouflaged, lacks that mark.

Attack of the Killer Dust Bunnies

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I was waylaid by dust bunnies yesterday. It started in the lab; I was exposing the fresh layer of sticky mats as I usually do, and noticed that the air disturbance (quite a flourish if you want to get the sheet up in one motion) had sent some dust bunnies scurrying. I tracked them down and captured them with an unused section of the mat, but they really shouldn’t be in the lab at all — that’s what the mats are for. We don’t let the cleaning crew in, because of safety issues and the potential for damage. But the mats have proven to be stronger than the floor, and the tile has been failing, so there are areas that have been mat-less for a while, and that has helped the bunnies thrive. I bought some frames (non-skid backing rather than adhesive) for the mats, so the mats can be reintroduced. Open season on dust bunnies! My colleague that signed the receipt for the mat frames said, “Mat frames. Cool!” Sure. He’s the one playing with the pulsed laser.

So I get home, and there’s a dreaded “Can’t connect to the internet” error on the computer. So I went searching for the likely suspects — cycle power on the modem and router, and then recheck all of the connections. Which requires some crawling around in places that have more dust bunnies! I had to wield the bunny-buster to ensure I got out alive. Turns out my phone jack had died, so no more DSL from there. I had to move the model and router to another room, and now I’m relying on wireless (and had some trouble with the router. Obviously an ally of the bunnies)

No More Breadbox

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I’ve mentioned before that I’m bigger than a breadbox. But that description will have to change. It’s not that I’m appreciably smaller (though I have lost some mass from running a net energy deficit the last several lunar cycles), it’s that I now have a much geekier description to use.

A colleague has been setting up a pulsed laser system, in anticipation of getting into frequency combs for optical time transfer using fibers as well as eventually doing optical clocks. And, frankly, he dropped the ball. He got the system running and announced it had a pulse, but neglected to shout “Give my creature life!” or “It … is … ALIVE!” at any stage of the work. Anyway, we were watching him tweak the system and were looking at the signal on an oscilloscope, and got to the point where we wanted a much larger bandwidth, so we started looking for the spectrum analyzer.

“Where is it?”
“I think it’s in the lab. I saw it around here somewhere.”

[Group members begin to fan out]

“Oh, there it is, behind Tom.”

I had been blocking the view of it. Ergo, I can now be described as being “bigger than a spectrum analyzer.”