These cartoons were done for my mother, so she could show them to friends who wanted to know what the heck I was doing. The first set was done when I was in graduate school at Penn State, studying experimental physics.
What Sabrina Does (in four-part harmony, with pictures) I'm a physicist, but that's just the general description. If you want specifics, I'm a solid-state experimental physicist, specializing in surfaces, thin films, and photoelectron spectroscopy. What's that, you say? I thought you'd never ask ....
| Basically, everything has electrons. Very slippery, very useful, and as slippery as a bar of wet soap. | |
| So, why look at electrons? Because they have information about the materials they float around in! | |
| But to pry them loose from where they are, and extract this information, you have to excite them. This isn't as hard as it seems, electrons get excited by just about anything -- including light | |
| So I shine light on them, and they come out in droves. Now things get interesting, because you can't stop there. You have to collect them. | |
| In addition, electrons have this slight problem with air. To them, it's like running into a brick wall. | |
| So if they are going to get anywhere, you have to take all the air away where they are! Enter the dread vacuum chamber! The care, feeding, and psychological intimidation of these monsters is a full-time job. | |
| So, if I pull all of *this* off, and the computers don't have seizures, I measure the electrons. | |
| Then I get to think up a reasonable explaination of why the electrons behaved in that *particular* way, and present this to my advisor. If all goes well, I should have my PhD before the end of the millenium. | |
The next set of cartoons was done after I graduated with my
PhD and received a fellowship working at the Naval Research Lab
in Washington DC, with excursions to the Brookhaven National
Synchrotron Light Source.
Postdoc
When last we left our heroine (me) she had successfully escaped from the State Penn (aka Penn State) with a PhD and a job. This job involves doing research at a synchrotron! Synchrotrons are used as giant sources of photons ....
| Imagine a stainless-steel jelly doughnut. Now imagine the jelly is made of electrons! OK, now imagine the electrons are running around the inside ... |  |
| Synchrotrons need to be fed electrons on a regular basis. |  |
| Electric fields and magnets make the electrons move faster around the ring. |  |
| Sometimes the synchrotron loses control of the beam of electrons, and they smash into the wall and stop moving. |  |
| When electrons go really fast around a curve, they emit light! This is what we use for our experiments. |  |
| X-rays can be hard (high energy) or soft (low energy). We use soft x-rays. |  |
| We select the energy of the x-rays by using a filter. |  |
| Synchrotron research would be impossible without Chinese takeout. |  |