Thesising...
Feb. 27th, 2006 03:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meanfreepathToday I wrote one of the appendices I needed to add to my thesis, on a calculation of the collision frequency between impurity and majority ions in the SSX plasma. There's one part of it I just couldn't solve, involving Rutherford scattering, but at this point I think I'm just going to brush it under the rug with "We can show from conservation of energy and angular momentum that..." Classical mechanics was never my forte, and I certainly hated the scattering chapter in Marion/Thornton.
I did spend some time numerically doing the calculation in Mathematica (way too many constants to keep track of in what ends up being a rather ugly expression which also depends on the Coulomb logarithm). Mathematica does make pretty plots, and I am putting a 3D plot of the frequency's dependence on density and temperature in my thesis.
I still need to flesh out my sections on IDS calibration, IDS external optics, and prior spectroscopic measurements. I also need to write up a calculation to show that effects such as pressure broadening and Zeeman broadening are negligible. Tomorrow morning I need to retrieve an old book on plasma spectroscopy from the Haverford observatory library that I know contains useful formulae for the latter calculation.
Time for a couple of hours of sleep...
I did spend some time numerically doing the calculation in Mathematica (way too many constants to keep track of in what ends up being a rather ugly expression which also depends on the Coulomb logarithm). Mathematica does make pretty plots, and I am putting a 3D plot of the frequency's dependence on density and temperature in my thesis.
I still need to flesh out my sections on IDS calibration, IDS external optics, and prior spectroscopic measurements. I also need to write up a calculation to show that effects such as pressure broadening and Zeeman broadening are negligible. Tomorrow morning I need to retrieve an old book on plasma spectroscopy from the Haverford observatory library that I know contains useful formulae for the latter calculation.
Time for a couple of hours of sleep...
