ILL

Jul

2013

Some extra time on IN12

Since some of our last beamtime on the inelastic neutron instrument IN12 was wasted because of missing and non-prepared equipment, we got an extra piece of beam time, continuing the last experiment we did there in May. We had from June 30th to July 3rd, although the first day was really only to check the alignment on the sample – while the last day was only until the early morning.

More cool airport visits!

On my way home, I had to switch planes in the Charles de Gaulle airport, which I’ve never done before. What interesting architecture they have! And there were security guards and police on segways, I’ve never seen that before…

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May

2013

Beam time on IN12

From May 11 to 17, I’ve been at the ILL in Grenoble, France, to do an experiment on the triple-axis neutron instrument IN12, where we did inelastic measurements on one of our LCO+O crystals.

We had to spend a whole day on the OrientExpress instrument to co-align our samples, since there were four of them to be used at the same time… It was a horrible puzzle to get them matching up, but we got it done!

The actual measurements on IN12 was done between May 14 and 17, and despite a lot of problems with some of the instrument components not being delivered on time (wasting us a lot of time in the end), we got some great measurements.

The view from my hotel room in the city

ILL

Instrument hall

Aligning!

Four co-aligned samples

Smokey cooling gasses

One absolutely awesome thing on this trip, was that one of our local contacts at the ILL managed to give us a little tour of the reactor hall. We got to have a look at all of the neutron instruments inside of the inner instrument hall, and we got to stand above the reactor and see the Cherenkov radiation. It was so beautiful. I’m sorry about not having any pictures for here, but their rules are pretty strict about taking photos…

Some extra photo time in Frankfurt

On the way to France, I had a 4 hour layover between planes in Frankfurt airport, and I took the opportunity to walk around in the huge airport and take pictures of airplanes and fun architecture and decorations.

Frankfurt is a Lufthansa home port

A380

Rainy day

Fun models in one of the transfer areas

Shiny metal

Scale

Matching tails

This terminal was almost empty

747 taking off

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Mar

2013

ADD2013 workshop at ILL

During the last week, I’ve been in France, participating in the ADD workshop at the ILL in Grenoble. It has been a week of tutorials and lectures on different programs and methods that are used for real-space analysis of diffraction data. I got to test out the PDFgui program, which was interesting – since I’d heard about it at the conference in Santa Fe last October.

I got to present a poster as well, but simply used the same poster as the one I presented at the Flipper workshop back in January. I still did not get much of a response in terms of ideas on how to refine my superstructures, but did get plenty of friendly – although slightly unoptimistic – encouragement to continue my work. Sigh.

I also got a bit of time in the evenings to go explore Grenoble, and I found myself getting on the cable cars to the Bastille on top of one of the mountains surrounding the city. The view from up there was spectacular!

Heavy gears

The view of ILL

Ruins

Prime climbing grounds

Cable cars

Inside the mountain

When I was done exploring and wandering around, I took the cable car down – and basically got the whole thing to myself. That prompted me to record the descent, with the view of the city in the early sunset – so if you’re interested, have a look at the video below!

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Jan

2013

Flipper2013 workshop at ILL

Since Tuesday, I’ve been at the ILL, attending this years Flipper workshop on the use of polarized neutrons. I was primarily there to learn, since I still haven’t gone much into polarized neutrons, and I have never used them for any experiments.

It was a great workshop, and I learned a lot of new things. I’m still not sure how relevant the things I learned actually are for my PhD project, but at least I met a lot of interesting people. I also presented a poster on the work I’ve done so far on my LCO crystal system – but since we haven’t been able to refine the structure yet, it was mostly a presentation of our awesome data. A few people had a look at it, and openly said that it was going to take a while to get that solved.. so that’s not comforting at all.

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Jul

2012

OrientExpress beamtime over

I’ve just returned from the Institute Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, France, where I’ve been on a super-short beamtime at the neutron Laue instrument OrientExpress. This was my first time to the ILL, and I was going there on my own. That was confusing! The airport in Lyon has really bad signing, but I found my way (after a while of wandering around not understanding anything, I might add..).

I was measuring on two new LSCO crystals, to see how many single crystals was in them. Both of them actually came from one crystal, but it broke into two during the oxygenation process. It seems like they are possibly full single crystals, a great result, but they might have a splitting in the length direction (they are cylindrical) – which is kind of a mess to cut up. I guess I will have to do some X-ray Laue images to see if that is the case.

The absolutely stunning rail station at Lyon-Saint Exupéry Airport

On the way back home, I went to the airport in Lyon a little early, to go explore the train station connected to the airport. I have never seen a more alien building – it’s absolutely stunning!