Day 2

In the morning staff meeting, Mr. Callens and Director Pow gave us more information regarding the internship, including info about field trips and Friday cookouts. At around 9:02, my teammate and I went to meet Joe, who gave us a lesson on Electron Paramagnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (abbreviated as EPR). A spinning electron virtually acts as a bar magnet; its energy state is higher when it's out of alignment with the magnetic field it is in. When a photon of the right frequency hits an electron in alignment with the field, the electron is excited and goes out of alignment with the field (to a higher energy level, that is). As the external magnetic field varies, the energy difference between the two states varies. What we would like to do, then, was to keep the photons that hit electrons at the same frequency, while changing the magnetic field. It would give us a spectrum; our photons would be of radio frequency (~350MHz).

After the lesson, we three went to the lab and cleaned the desks for future use: we sorted the utensils and put them away to corresponding places (drawers, chem lab, what not). Prof. Hornak then wanted us to search for Radio Frequency Amplifiers online, with certain restrictions (operating frequency needed to be between 100-500MHz; Input would be 9mW; preferably with SMA outlets). Cici and I found ten amplifiers online, before we went to have lunch (you gotta admit those refrigerated noodles are cold, man).

At around 14:00, Joe took us two to witness the refilling of liquid helium on the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance machine. It was very cool! White smokes appeared above the transfer tube. I noted that the room temperature dropped by 3.9 degrees after the liquid helium can was depressurized - totally the style of liquid Helium.

We then walked back to CIS building ('tis a hot day), and Joe took a look at our amplifiers. He kept three of them, and told us that it might be a good idea to keep looking for more. Exhausted and headache-plagued, I fell asleep for a few minutes, for which I still feel a bit sheepish. For the rest of the day, Cici and I just kept going through Google search results and listed another eight amplifiers.

At the end of the day, we emailed our results to Joe, and took the last half hour to write blogs (which, unfortunately, I forgot to save, so I ended up writing it again - classic me).