Sophisticated Mecanno

After my two classes on Wednesday morning, I spent a few hours in Tyndall. Because I still have no keycard (or, rather, I do have a keycard but it doesn't give me lab access), I went through the spectrometer's instruction manual at my desk first. Then I went down to the lab with Roy and Dipankar. I had been moved to a new corner complete with shiny, black metric breadboard (whoo!). I began setting up the HeNe laser and spectrometer. After about 30 minutes of screwing posts and post holders and bases and clamps together, I realised I was failing miserably at this sophisticated form of meccano. John probably noticed my amateur set-up and dropped me over two laser-shaped clamps - they worked perfectly.

I got a spectrum for HeNe that yielded a 0.012% error, so no complaints there (see image on the right). The other laser emitted at 531nm or thereabouts. I stupidly didn't bother to check what the expected wavelength was supposed to be and I assumed it was 540nm - producing a 2% error. Eeep. Sile had to point out the correct wavelength to me.

I also had a meeting with Sile yesterday afternoon and she went through an idea about my project involving polystyrene microspheres rather than glass microsheres. I've found a couple of papers using polystyrene spheres, but nothing with the sort of set-up I'll be using. Hopefully I'll obtain some nice results!