Month: June 2012

29
Jun
2012
Another workshop

Another workshop

This whole week I have been participating in the Second Annual Niels Bohr International Academy Workshop on ESS Science (yeah, that’s a long name, I know) held here at the Niels Bohr Institute.

During the lectures, we were told a lot about current neutron instruments, and the programming used to analyze data. I also participated in tutorial sessions in the program RMCProfile, and I was really happy to get to know that particular program. I might use it during my Ph.D., if I get the time (and beam time!).

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Posted by PJR in Workshops, schools, and courses, 0 comments
22
Jun
2012

Experimental Physics exams, finally over!

Today and yesterday we had the final exams of the Experimental Physics course. The students used the last couple of weeks on doing experiments around in the actual research groups at the Niels Bohr Institute. These experiments were then documented in small 4-page articles (PRL style), and the final exam was then individual oral presentations of their projects, using slides. The idea was to make it small konferences, and the students were split up into different teams where they held the presentations for each other (as well as the teachers, being there both as chairmen and examinators).

It went really well for most of the students, and it seems like they’ve learned at lot during the course. I feel like the course has been a success again this year – although I haven’t looked at the student evaluations yet..

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Posted by PJR in Teaching, 0 comments
15
Jun
2012

Another RITA-II beamtime

This was a hard couple of weeks! Just the day after getting home from the DanScatt meeting in Odense, I took a plane to Switzerland super-early in the morning, for a new round of beamtime at the RITA-II instrument at PSI.

Helium and nitrogen refill

Helium and nitrogen refill gives a lot of smoke

With a little help from Christof Niedermayer, I used the first couple of days to get our sample aligned and get it on a new holder (it was already aligned in the ac-plane from the last beamtime, but we needed it in the ab-plane with a certain tilt out of the plane). Astrid showed up Sunday to help. Unfortunately, somewhere in the research phase we had found the wrong diameter of the magnet we were going to use, and it turned out that we had to start all over with a much smaller holder! That was a huge setback, and we had to start almost all over with the alignment. We weren’t done yet when Linda showed up on Monday.

But we did get it working in the end, and did a lot of cool measurements on an incommensurate magnetic peak, and how it changed with applied magnetic field.

A little weekend trip to Basel

Astrid went home after the first week, leaving Linda and I to finalize the experiment (even though I guess this experiment was mostly for her project). Luckily, it was possible to script a large amount of the scans, and we actually took a whole day off to go to Basel Saturday June 9th. That was a really great little trip, and we saw a lot of fun museums and architecture – especially the Tinguely museum was interesting, with so many odd sculptures!

Another fun thing that happened was that I met Ivana (who I met at the PSI summer school in 2011) in the instrument hall! She was at a beamtime at the SANS-I instrument, doing some measurements that I really didn’t understand. But we had a little time to get some coffee at talk things over, that was nice.

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Posted by PJR in Experiments, Travel, 0 comments
01
Jun
2012
DanScatt 2012 meeting in Odense

DanScatt 2012 meeting in Odense

This Thursday and Friday the group went to the yearly meeting of the Danish Centre for the use of Synchrotron X-ray and Neutron facilities (DanScatt). This year it was held at the university in Odense (Syddansk Universitet), and it was the first time that I was there.

Some of us went together in one of the minibuses owned by the institute, and had a nice trip with lots of joking around and meeting new people.

The meeting itself consisted of lectures and some poster-sessions, but was in general quite boring. I brought my poster over my bachelor project, but it didn’t really fit in: Most of the other posters were centered around the use of neutrons and X-rays on crystals or biological systems, so a poster about neutron moderators was a bit out of focus..

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Posted by PJR in Conferences, Travel, 0 comments
01
Jun
2012

I published a new note collection as a small book!

I’ve now gotten a new version of my older notes collection for the MatIntro course published. It contains more equations, more and better solution approaches, and reworked illustrations – and it’s printed in color this time! Oh, and it’s published with a new publisher, since the old one was slow to print more copies… I actually got contacted by Polyteknisk directly, because people kept asking about my “little blue” note collection in their stores, and the old publisher couldn’t deliver copies fast enough – so they arranged for a takeover contract of a new version, and even made this beautiful graphics for the front page of the book!

One thing that I really like, is that the book binding is an actual paperback book binding this time, instead of the stapled together binding that the old publisher did. It makes it so much nicer to go through it, plus you can actually have it on a book shelf and find it again…

It is published as “Den lille blå – En grundlæggende matematisk formelsamling til MatIntro på KU“, by Polyteknisk Forlag (June 2012), with ISBN10: 8770782407, and ISBN13: 9788770782401.

They even, somehow, managed to set the price point a little lower than the price that the old one sells for at the moment. So a hint, if you want to buy my note collection for the course – you might as well get the new one. The old one is just getting pricier every day!

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Posted by PJR in Publications, 0 comments