Corporate Express orders

During our last office supply order, I discovered a few things I thought I'd share

• We have a new catalog on the 4th floor. The old catalog has outdated page numbers.
• We are only allowed to order the following recycled printer paper: EXP8511RCY
• You should not use the old online form, but download a new version of the form from http://www-ssrl.slac.stanford.edu/staffresources/corpexform_nt.pdf, fill it out, and email it to Stephanie Carlson.
  

Heat resistant gloves

Covex gloves, that's what they are... Check out the amazing gloved-hand amidst leaping flames animation on the website http://www.polygenex.com/ :) The orange gloves used for the glass torch, that is - I couldn't find what kind they were all this while, and just managed to locate them.

The crystal growing tradition

Met Zach Fisk at a workshop - interesting, considering we've all descended from him. A couple of his off-the-cuff remarks were that fluxes he uses are sometimes binary: eg. to grow YbxCuyInz, he might use a Cu:In flux rather than just In as I would have guessed. Also, at one point I had considered using BeO crucibles instead of Al2O3 - I didn't actually end up doing this, but if one ever does, apparently BeO sucks up large quantities of water very quickly, and needs to be dried out before use each time. But apparently Zach Fisk's greatest asset is that he is very good at telling dinner party stories :)

Suchitra's famous!

Check out the NHMFL website: http://www.magnet.fsu.edu/
Or, in case they've removed it from the front page: http://www.magnet.fsu.edu/mediacenter/factsheets/mainattraction/index.aspx

Downstairs centrifuge rotor II

Here is an illustration to better explain what's going on with the centrifuge rotor capsule.

I took the capsules back to the machine shop today. The problem was that while the machine shop drawings show a slanted inside edge, there is no 'call-out' with numbers so it's easy to miss the slant. The machine shop will fix them for us; they will put in a 30 deg inside slant. I can pick them up Tuesday afternoon.

Chatted a bit with Carlheinz. His office is being remodeled and they are having walls put in to keep out the dust and noise. They've thrown out cabinets, papers, and books that have been there for as long as 40 years, making way for computers and the electronic age.

Diagnosing glovebox pump

Today Alan helped me use a pressure gauge to diagnose the glovebox pump. We concluded that our pump is very bad. Our pump only pumps down to 80 Torr whereas the KGB pump goes down to 20-30 mTorr. We didn't find any major leaks in the glovebox system itself.

Test details:
Our pump connected to gauge, with outlet filter: 100 Torr
Our pump connected to gauge w/o outlet filter: 80 Torr
--> we might need new outlet filter
KGB pump connected to gauge: 20-30 mTorr
KGB pump connected to gauge + glovebox: 20-30 mTorr
KGB pump connected to gauge + glovebox + mini-antechamber: 20-30 mTorr

Opening valve slowly (pressure not exceeding 100 Torr), it took about 4 minutes to pump down the mini-antechamber.

Tomorrow I will set up the KGP pump semi-permanently so that we can use it while we have our pump repaired.

Outstanding physics major

George Margulis has been awarded the David S. Levine award for outstanding junior physics major. According to the physics department website, this award recognizes "academic breadth and demonstrated abilities in experimental physics."

Congratulations George!