Perplexing Programs

2/1/13

Daniele and I hopped right into things, cleaning out a capsule from last week that Daniele had removed from the furnace. Daniele had let the molten sulfur cool with the capsule on its side, so this time, we avoided the problem of having the mineral buried within a solidified chunk of sulfur. After scraping out the tube with ethanol and a spatula and placing the powdery liquid under a heat lamp, I had successfully recycled our sample of sulfur-34. We then started to make anothetor capsule with one of the galena crystals Heather had polished. Using the tubes that I had half sealed last week, we hooked up the capsule with the galena and sulfur to the vacuum and then formed our capsule by melting the other end up the tube. Luckily, I have not been setting things on fire lately and Daniele says I am getting better. Next we went to the furnace to put in our new sample and adjust a different furnace for a sphalerite experiment we were going to run. After inserting the capsule and changing the temperature of a different furnace we headed  back to the lab to begin making our sphalerite sample. I used the last of the recycled sulfur-34 and some of the new sulfur Daniele had gotten to have enough sulfur to promote maximum diffusion through the sphalerite crystal. We hooked the sphalerite up to the vacuum and then headed off down the hall where I began to look at the simulation websites.
Though the simulation was confusing at first, I eventually began to get the gist of things.

The above is one of the graphs we were looking at. The blue line is the simulation generated by the computer and the darker line are the points found by the accelerator when examining a mineral. By changing certain things like the ratio of the sulfur to the other element that makes up the sulfide mineral or the thickness of the layer, we can make the simulation more closely match the actual graph. After editing layer after layer of the mineral to modify the simulation, the simulation will finally match the data and we can determine the concentration of sulfur molecules at each depth of the mineral. After determining the concentration of the sulfur at each layer, we can then make a graph showing this concentration slowly decreasing as you travel deeper within the molecule. With this data, we can begin to calculate the rate of the diffusion of the sulfur which will provide us with the necessary data for our experiment on sulfur diffusion. The graph above shows the data from a sphalerite mineral. The left side of the graph shows the smaller sulfur molecules while the right shows the larger zinc molecules that also make up the sphalerite sample.The little bump in the graph between the two represents the sulfur-34, the sulfur isotope we are working with in our experiment. Though I still only have a basic understanding of how to modify the simulation graph, after about an hour of practice with Heather and Daniele, I started getting better at manipulation numbers and adding data. Next week, I will not meet with Heather and Daniele, but Heather is going to send my articles and some calculations I can work on.