Well it has been a great week in Sapporo, Japan. The hotel is beautiful and the conference has been very productive. My three posters seemed to be well received and Tim's talk went well. I have tried lots of Japanese food - no sushi yet though. The food at the hotel is great and we have had some really great meals in Sapporo, although I didn't always know what I was eating!
The farewell party is a little later this evening, and we fly to Tokyo tomorrow where we have a week to explore and take in as much as we can before going home. I really wish I could remember the name of more of the foods we have tried. We went to a traditional spa which was very relaxing. I will hopefully write more of this down after I get home - I do have some great photos too - I just hope they all come out.
Well I am off to Japan. I think I managed to get most of everything done - three A0 posters (designed in LaTeX) and two conference proceedings articles submitted for LB11 in Sapporo. Trying to think if I have forgotten anything - can't take my tripod as it pushed my case 3 kg over the weight allowance
I am taking my Nikon F80 and my little Sony Cybershot digital camera with me so I will hopefully get some great photos.
Haven't heard from any of the Japanese Gentoo developers about meeting up in Tokyo. I have heard from a few who can't make it though - I will try to check emails whilst I am out there but that will be sporadic at best. Wish me luck! First big conference and first ever trip to Japan! I will be back in the UK in two weeks.
I thought I would bow to peer pressure and show a picture of my desk in its natural state. I admit it - I tidied my desk for the picture that was published in the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter
It is especially bad right now as I am preparing for a conference in Japan which is only weeks away.
If there are any devs in Japan at the moment I will be in Tokyo the week after the conference (4-8 July) - it would be great to meet up with some of you guys, may be sign each others GPG keys and have a few beers (or is it saki?) whilst I am out there. Back to work anyway...
I finally got some HRTEM images of my gold nanoparticles done yesterday and picked up the data today. They look pretty good. The first sample we looked at was my 4-methylbenzenethiol gold nanoparticles as dipped from a water surface at about 25 mN/m. Unfortunately the carbon film was all broken up and so the images were not as good as they could have been. Still managed to get size data on them as well as seeing how well packed they were. A small snapshot of a single nanoparticle (about 3 nm across) is shown below. You can even make out the interference fringes from the lattice spacing!
Got lots of images of the new hexanethiol coated gold nanoparticles too. They were smaller than we thought, and seem to be dominated by two sizes. The nanoparticles are clearly faceted with a good crystalline structure too. All great initial results, although I can't wait to get more images of an LS film deposited onto a holey carbon grid when the carbon is intact.
Just found out that my first paper has been pubilshed! It was published on the 27th of May with the title 'Evidence of collinear ferrimagnetism in (Fe, Tb)B metallic glasses from polarized beam neutron scattering' in the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter. You can look at the abstract
here and I believe the PDF can be downloaded for free by anyone.
They also picked our article to go in IoP Select! This was quite an honour for me with my first paper - I am second name on it too. Hopefully there will be many more high quality papers to come too.
I went to the GLAMOR 2005 conference on Monday 11 April. It was a three day conference held at Trinity College in Cambridge on Glasses and Amorphous materials. I have never been to Cambridge to look around before, so it was a great opportunity to see Cambridge as well as learn about what others in my field are doing.
Neil picked me up at about 8am, and we drove down arriving at around 11am. We were staying in the student residences as it is outside of their term time. Trinity College is very beautiful, as is Cambridge as a whole. Filled with grand, old buildings I felt quite privileged to be there. We ate our meals in a grand dining hall, with the staff eating at the top and the rest of us filling the rest of the hall. The hall was very old, and filled with portraits of great figures.
The conference had quite a tight schedule running from 9am to 7pm each day apart from the last that finished at 5:30pm. I helped Neil prepare his PowerPoint presentation which was given on the last day. Luckily I took my laptop so that we could correct a few small mistakes before the talk was given. I couldn't get on the Internet though, so it was quite strange being cut off from the Internet and TV for three days.
I am glad I wasn't a student at Cambridge as I don't think it is the life I would have wanted for myself, but it was great to be a part of it for three days. Eating in the grand dining hall, listening to lectures from some of the finest lecturers in the field and taking in the beauty and history of the place when I had some spare time.
Some of the talks and posters have me some great ideas for future work. It was also great to see what other people are doing, and talk to other researchers in my field a little less formally.
Still managing to prove that I am not very good at writing regularly... It was quite successful over at ILL, although very intense. We got an extra half day on D17, but that meant that I had to go in to ILL at 6PM after arriving in Grenoble at 5PM!!! I think we worked until about 12:30AM that evening and then went back in the following day for about 9:30AM.
The runs had to be quite long, between 5 and 6 hours. This meant that we couldn't run anywhere near all the samples I had prepared - so I had to pick the best ones to go on and leave the rest. We only had two days on D17 but I learnt so much in that time. Andrew explained how to operate the instrument, and showed me LAMP and how things can be automated by scripting them in LAMP.
Altogether we only got reflectivity profiles of 7 samples - one gold nanoparticle sample right at the end along with mainly C16O3 with and without Li ions, and one C16O4 sample. Now the task of analysing all the data begins - Andrew was very helpful though and explained how to use Cosmos to extract profiles from the raw data.
Also managed to get a TFT screen finally! It is a very nice 17" LG TFT screen that arrived on Friday. I will be getting one for home very soon too - it is so much nicer to work on than even my Iiyama 19" CRT screen (and so much smaller).
It would have been Aaron's 21st birthday on Monday, so I have been feeling pretty down about that... It never seems to get any easier. Mum seems to be taking it pretty hard too - I hope she is OK.
That is it for now anyway...
I am going to France tomorrow - or may be that should read today now as it has gone 12 AM. Really disorganised - I have been so busy that I am up now printing out directions, eticket receipts, itineries, packing my bag and generally trying to make sure everything is ready! It has been a really hectic few weeks, and I really need a few more days to prepare!
I have loads of samples anyway. The hostels on site at ILL are closed/full, and so I will be staying in a hotel in Grenoble. We only have two days on D17, and so I will be back on Wednesday. I don't think we will get through all the samples I have anyway with the time available - but I do hope we have enough to get some good data... It is my first ever trip for my PhD and so I really want it to go well
Anyway, I am going to have to run as I am really tired, need to finish packing and get to Manchester airport terminal 3 for 10:00am in the morning.
Still not managing to write very regularly, I just never seem to get time. Anyway, I will be going to ILL in Grenoble on 27 June, we have 2 days of beam time there to look at the C16O1-5 series on D17. Hopefully I will also get chance to look at a few of my gold samples too, but we'll see how it goes.
I have just got hold of 30 50 mm silicon wafers, and am in the process of hydrophobising it. It seems to be going fine, but we will see just how it's going once I have deposited some samples. I am going to go across to use the D8 in chemistry to test my samples before taking them to France.
Saw the Venus transit this morning too - went up on the roof of the Hicks building to have a look at it. It was actually pretty interesting, and the image was very striking. It was also the best kind of astronomy - in the middle of a beautifully sunny day. There was a great breeze up there!
It is absolutely boiling in the lab and office at the moment. The air conditioning in the lab doesn't seem to be working properly - temperatures are up to 28 C and I am worried it will affect my samples and how they deposit. Usually deposit at 20 C, and the air conditioner really doesn't seem to be working.
Did some more AFM on some new Pd nanoparticle samples. The first AFM images showed large structures between 200 and 400 nm across and nearly 80 nm tall - some even had spikes on them. The new images show nothing like that. Very flat films, with very few features - although I don't know if I trust the images produced at the moment by it. I am being trained to use it by Andy too, but at the moment the images coming out don't seem right...
My new computer is still working great - although my old one is totally dead. I think it is a dead motherboard. Anyway, it's very late and I should try to get some sleep.
Made three samples on Thursday last week - two 4 layer gold nanoparticle samples (15 and 20 mN), and one 8 layer sample (20 mN). So today and yesterday I have been learning how to use the D8 X-ray diffractometer across in chemistry with Jonathan Howse. It has been really cool learning how to use it all, and how it all works. I think I just about get everything, but I get the feeling that next time I am going to be doing it alone...
The first result for the 4 layer sample deposited at 20 mN looks very promising, better than the last set obtained as far as I can tell. Jon has been really helpful too, and I have learnt a lot about using the diffractometer and XRR/NR in general. He even told me the best place to get hold of silicon from at the moment
Tim is back from Japan tomorrow too - I hope it has all gone well over there. Hopefully we will have some nice AFM images of my gold nanoparticles when he gets back too. I think I have figured out why we get two layers from every dip using the LS technique when one would clasically expect to get only one layer. It will be good to find out if I am correct, and whether no one has ever thought of it again!
An action packed week really - I get to see the other 4 layer tomorrow morning. I am also working on the modelling with Neil right now, and have an amplifier on order with Phil for the end trough. Hopefully we can get the end trough computerised and capable of doing isotherms and transfer ratios soon - although I think Phil would like to add some extra gearing in there too.
What a week it has been! I have been so unbelievably busy this week, and it's finally over. I did make the samples I needed for Japan on Tuesday. First try was on Monday, but cleaning did not go well at all and I basically made one sample all day. Got quite a few done on Tuesday though, and made some really nice samples on glass and silicon.
Also got a couple of palladium nanoparticle films deposited on some silicon and glass. Got promising AFM images from the silicon one, but then there was an accident when Andy copied the files to a zip disk for me and all but one of the files was lost. He said he would take some more with me next week though.
I finished my abstract for the ECOF2004 conference too. It has been checked and sent off now, which is great. Just hope they accept my abstract now. I still haven't finished off the new trough software though - I need to make/get an amplifier built for the area potentiometer. Still not managed to get much modelling done either.
The quiz is next week too, pretty much got that one sorted now. Also just about finished putting the Hicks Ball programme together too, Mark has put some excellent pictures together for it.
What a terrible day! Spent all day in the lab, but only actually managed to desposit 4 layers on to one glass slide. That particular glass slide does actually look very uniform, which is promising, but it took a whole day. The diamond glass cutter has also gone missing, and the trough took an absolute age to clean...
I did get the posters up for the staff-student quiz though, and they look pretty good. Let's hope for a more productive day tomorrow.