Tongs anyone?

Hello,

A mounted capillary

So, I came in on Tuesday certain of how to use the SQUID machine and thus wasted no time in setting a new cycle going and went to have chat with my supervisor about some new data I've have - yesterday evening, it seems, there was time for a new capillary of my salt mix to be placed in the beamline and scans taken of it heating and cooling. The results are... interesting. They bear little resemblance to my other samples, but they do at least show why the oxygen and air are necessary; a sealed capillary can't make YBCO.

Coming back to my scans though proved a minor disaster. It would seem that even a place as high-tech as Diamond has computer issues and unfortunately a crashed computer can't make scans. Waiting for IT support, I set another boat of superconductor cooking, this time in the box furnace.

By mid-afternoon, I was able to set new scans going and had a good time looking over the data I'd got. It would seem the salt capillary underwent a near-reversible process.

An unmounted capillary.

 Wednesday was spent on the beamline computers (where they have some very good graphical software) analysing all the X-ray data for the various samples I now have. It's certainly an interesting story of my successes and failures, and the levitating sample sticks out like a sore thumb in terms of its scan.

Finally, I was also trying to find a non-magnetic set of tweezers or tongs over 12" long. If anyone knows where I can get these, PLEASE COMMENT!! 

Thursday has allowed me to split my time 3 ways. Firstly, I'm setting the SQUID on many long-period scans. Secondly, I had the privilege of sitting in the post-doc presentations about their research. This ranged from geometry to star dust to iron crystals and showed the diversity of research around.

Finally, I was back in my homely lab, where I was filling capillaries, like the one shown below, for a beamline experiment (its not my experiment so I need to find out precisely what they're for). These weren't sealed like the one above, but stuffed with quartz wool ready for gas to be pumped through them.
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Type soon!