(no subject)
So it looks like the experiment's happening tomorrow. I scrounged around for cables, for a while, for various video signal connections and now I think everything is good to go. I'm expecting to be in really late tomorrow night, possibly until 8 or 9 or later. As long as I'm not in till 11 again, like that night of the day before I left for home.
Today we finally got the laser-induced pulses to work. It's really cool to see light pushing small particles around, with the mechanism being mostly momentum exchange, I believe. You press the "single" button on the function generator, and through a convoluted way a powerful laser becomes incident on the plasma crystal. The laser light pushes on the particles, creating a mechanical wave (like if you had a bunch of little balls connected by springs and you gave some of them a push). You can watch the wave propagate via the cameras, and this is, to me, very cool.
Today we finally got the laser-induced pulses to work. It's really cool to see light pushing small particles around, with the mechanism being mostly momentum exchange, I believe. You press the "single" button on the function generator, and through a convoluted way a powerful laser becomes incident on the plasma crystal. The laser light pushes on the particles, creating a mechanical wave (like if you had a bunch of little balls connected by springs and you gave some of them a push). You can watch the wave propagate via the cameras, and this is, to me, very cool.