4/12/13
Today I worked with Daniele at cleaning out two capsules that I had put in before break. Our capsules weren't labeled and Daniele couldn't find her notes from before the experiments were put in. After getting a little concerned, we looked more closely at the crystals within the capsules. Daniele reminded me how the barite and celestite crystals had different shapes even though they had similar clear coloring. I identified the more prism-shaped crystal as the celestite and Daniele agreed with me. We quickly cleaned out the two capsules and since Heather was going to be late, Daniele set me up on a computer in the lab. She had some barite results and she wanted me to make a curve to try and match the data.
The pink line is the line I eventually got to fit the results by manipulating data on excel. The y-values represent the counts a receptor received after an ion beam hit our sample to analyze it. The x-values represent the distance within the crystal, which as you can see from the data, the data the receptor receives decreases the deeper into the crystal you go. After I manipulated a few graphs to find the line of best fit, Heather showed up and we decided to run another sphalerite crystal at around 750 degrees Celsius to fill some holes in our data. My internship literally flew by today as the furnaces take forever to heat up to the correct temperature because they overshoot and then turn off, undershooting before turning back on. These fluctuations take a long time to regulate so sadly we ran out of time before we could put another experiment into the furnace. Hopefully next week I'll have some more data and can potentially work with manipulating more graphs.
Your graph signifies an important phase in your work: RESULTS! I am excited that you are at this stage, exactly when you should be. I look forward to following how this works into your internship as a whole.
ReplyDeleteKelsie, please write a blog post for 5 April.
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