Method in Madness

Reporting live from the Advanced Photon Source near Chicago, where we're currently conducting Nuclear Resonant Inelastic X-ray Scattering (NRIXS) experiments while riding around on industrial trikes. This isn't actually our beamline but someone else's setup that I photographed while riding around the circular facility to keep awake sometime after midnight.

I was much more worried about things going wrong this time around, bringing two of everything and making triple and quadruple sure that airport security will be convinced about the weird powder vials in my carry-on being harmless. In the end, we had no trouble, flew on a classic BA 747-400, got through immigration in half an hour thanks to being repeated ESTA users, getting our samples to the beamline safe and sound.

One day in and the measurements are going well! The signal is 4 times stronger than last time thanks to a higher degree of enrichment with ⁵⁷Fe (an iron isotope) and even though we had some trouble with parts of our setup that we are planning to use in th next few days, everything is progressing as planned.