Sunday, June 11, 2023
By:
Week 2 as a NIST intern has been some of the most personally challenging physics I've dealt with! I thought that the last 3 years of rigorous classes could have prepared me for anything, but I was severly mistaken. I think I expected NIST to be a lot more standing in front of whiteboards and solving physics problems, but I actually spent the last week doing heavy experiment setup. And I must say that this is a nice change of pace. I've had so much interest in thermodynamics and energy processes, and I finally get to see them applied. Massive thanks to my mentor, Dr. Kolmakov, for his patience with me. "A day in the lab is worth more than a week of lecture."
My mentor and I finished the bulk of our vacuum system early on monday. When we tested our pumping system and quickly released we were not reaching the low levels of pressure we expected. Met with a problem, my mentor and I had to troubleshoot our system. First, we used a helium leak detector to check all the junctions and pipes in vacuum. I could go on about how cool this piece of machinery is (like many of the machines at NIST) but I'll spare you that. Making no conclusions with the leak detector, we narrowed our issue down to one or both of vacuum pumps we were using. After testing them individually, we realized we had to scrap one of them and just use the one. The reason I'm telling you all this is to show that things can go wrong during an experiment. There were times where even my mentor was momentarily at a loss for what to do and asked my opinion. I had assumed that my project would be along the lines of step 1, then step 2, then step 3, and then done. Like building a LEGO set. But my week shaped up more like step 1, then step 2, then step 1.5, then step 4, if that makes sense.
This week was full of firsts for me. I soldered (annoyingly) small wires for the first time. I also realized my hands are far too shakey for me to consider surgeon as a career. I did sketchy electrical work for the first time. I don't mean sketchy as in unsafe, but I had to hookup scrapped PC fans to a (not exactly comapatible) battery. Speaking of shakey hands, I learned just how hard glass cutting is. This was to create a sort of "basket" to hold our very small sample. The most exciting news of the week is that our initial experiment was successful! I'm already excited as to what this means for the coming weeks and the next stages of my project.
Outside of NIST, spending time with the other interns has been a blast! We're all starting to get to know each other pretty well and learning each others personalities. We got together at least 2-3 of the five week nights for some kind activity. And over the weekend almost all of us went to a pride celebration here in DC. It's been really great getting to know everyone, and I'm looking forward to everything else we'll do now that we all know each other better.
Colin Myers