Tuesday, August 7, 2007

One week left for Efren and me, three more days for Dave. We arrived at 9 AM and prepared one film each (except for me, I made 2 films because I like having insurance), then took them to Hasbrouck. Dave and Efren floated their films in pure water (so much easier!) and I added the surfactant to the containers; neither of them like using the needle and syringe. We waited for 45 minutes, during which time we went to the UMass Employment office to see about getting our mandatory retirement withholding returned to us. The clerk in the office said that we should not even begin the process of obtaining a refund until mid September. It seems that the wheels of bureaucracy turn mighty slowly; this may be my Christmas spending money. We return to the Hasbrouck lab, and Efren is able to wrinkle his film, but a very odd event occurred. After he put his first 0.2ul onto the film, Efren took a few minutes to refocus the camera and when he returned to shoot the closeup of the wrinkles, the drop was GONE! It is so humid in the room in Hasbrouck that it is hard to imagine that the water evaporated, but it surely seemed to. Jiangshui says that there may have been a tiny pinhole in the membrane, and that he has had this happen to him before. Dave begins his process, and I decide to use one of my films to try to float it on the surfactant solution left over from Efren's wrinkling experiment. It worked! I was able to cut and float my film on the prepared 0.12% surfactant solution, then perform the wrinkling experiment. I am most pleased with myself!

Although Professor Russell is in California, he is treating the entire research group to lunch at the House of Teriyaki Restaurant in North Amherst. So nice of him! He calls from California to say goodbye to Anna (R.E.U.) and to the three of us while we are having lunch. I am really enjoying all of the diversity in the group...at my lunch table alone today is Martha from Colombia, Jiangshui from China, Suresh and Siva from India and Ali from Turkey, as well as Efren (Texas) and Dave (upstate New York).

This is a tremendous gift that I did not anticipate when I was selected to participate in the experience.


After lunch, we prepare more films and try to float them on this morning's solutions. No success at all, so we retrieve our data from the morning and return to Conte to analyze it. Big doings at Conte though..Suresh's new instrument (for photovoltaic nanodevices) and three glove boxes (to maintain a dust free, humidity free environment with no oxidizers in which spin coating, metal coating, and conductivity measurements of photovoltaic nanodevices can be conducted) has arrived!

It is a BIG DEAL! Everyone helps him roll the instrumentation into a storage area until the maintenance crew can run the plumbing and electricity for its permanent home. I hope it can be in place before we leave, but I doubt it.

Efren and Dave work on data analysis for the rest of the day, while I catch up on this blog.