There were some fantastic presentations with interesting results presented throughout the few days of presentations, and I came away feeling excited to think about and try out some new ideas. On the other hand I also came away incredibly frustrated – with all these incredibly smart people in the room we never had a chance to really sit down and talk about and digest all of these presentations. I wanted to be a fly on the wall for every conversation that researchers had at the poster session and try and tease out what all the professors were thinking of and talking about with their colleagues. But why can’t we make this happen?

This popcorn represents what could happen if a brainstorming session between scientists… ok it’s a stretch. I just wanted to use this somewhere.

I mulled this over with some fellow graduate students and identified some problems and solutions with these type of scientific conferences. I want to address the structure of these events, which is pretty typical:

1. Speaker presents recent results from their lab for 20-30 min
2. Questions to the speaker, 5-10 min
3. Repeat
4. Poster session + alcohol

While this does work fairly well as a way to disseminate research results quickly to an audience, it really cuts down on the most important part of these conferences: the discussions and debates between the researchers! Sometimes this begins to happen in the questions session after a talk as happened this most recent conference. There are some rather difficult questions to be addressed in the singlet fission community and there is disagreement between certain mechanisms and pathways. After a talk presenting data supporting one side or the other a pretty healthy discussion would begin to emerge between the audience and the speaker and between audience members themselves. However just as it was getting interesting it was typically cut off in the interest of time and to get the next speaker started.

Certainly there is ample time for informal discussion between researchers during poster sessions and food breaks, but with even a small number of attendees (~50) it’s already difficult to talk in depth with everyone you would like. In addition, the conversations happen in small clusters of 2-5 individuals, who may come up with some really good ideas or may hit some problem that they can’t solve right there. There may be some other group of individuals across the room that could benefit greatly from those ideas or have some data that could solve their problems but they’re not in the same conversation!

I propose that for a “Workshop” style conference the amount of presentations be reduced while the amount of formal discussions with the whole group be increased. Potentially three or four researchers working on similar systems or problems present short 15 min presentations highlighting their important findings, and then there is a half hour long moderated session that is focused on the topic of those presentations with all the presenters available for discussion with each other and with the audience.

It’s an incredibly rare event to get some of the leading researchers in a specific field working on a specific scientific problem and it seems like a waste not to have them all talk to each other at the same time! It could be just a large brainstorming session. For instance these discussions could focus on questions like: How do we explain the differing results from two different experiments? What are the most important questions to focus on with future experiments? What sorts of experiments would be most useful for the rest of the community?

In a sense, this appears to me to be an extension of the relative isolation of scientific research. Most researchers have their lab and they run their experiments, they’re focused on earning grants for their lab, tenure, publishing papers as the primary investigator. This is completely understandable though, as those are the priorities in the reserach community. Even though I believe it results in better science, there’s no inherent incentive  for the researcher. I think there’s much more to be explored here about how scientists tend to work in isolation – or even in competition with one another – despite the widespread availability of communication tools facility collaboration. I can imagine something like a shared online space or dropbox tool but for data to be instantly shared between research groups working in the same area.

I say wrong. To borrow a term from FakeElsevier, the publisher’s one job is to disseminate scientific results to the scientific community and the world at large. If modern societies are now communicating in new and different ways through the internet and the publishers think that printing physical journals is still going to be critical  in the near future, those publishers are going to be left behind.

To be fair, publishers have put a large amount of effort into digitizing all of their previous journals and making them available online in pdf form. While this is great for older papers, the publishers are still in the mental mindset of a print journal. Yes, new papers get put up online ASAP, but again it’s just a pre-print pdf of what will be in the physical journal. This doesn’t take advantage of all the tools available online and makes it seem tacked-on.

So, here’s a few ideas of what could be if publishers decided to seriously pursue all the tools online publishing offers:

Comments and Questions Section:

It’s almost a given nowadays that if you look at any article, blog, tweet, post, what-have-you, scroll down to the bottom and there will be the ability for you to leave a comment or ask a question about what you have just read. Why can’t there be something similar for scientific articles online?

Say I want to duplicate the authors published measurement techniques and I have a question about their experimental procedure. I could always email the contacted author, but I have a hard enough time getting my own advisor to respond to my emails. Typically these emails go into the inbox abyss and are never heard from again.

Instead, what if there were a mini-forum at the bottom of the article’s webpage where I could simply write “Hi, I have a question, how did you calibrate your instrument?” Then all the authors get a little ping saying “someone has a question about your paper” and one of them could come answer it. The benefit here being that it is open. Anyone can see this communication and if anyone else has the same question about their instrument calibration, the answer will always be there on the page under a Communication and Correspondence heading.

The other benefit is that even if the authors don’t respond to my question, someone else could still come by and say “Hey, I don’t know exactly what type of calibration they used but here is what I do in my lab…”

Something like this would not be difficult to implement (from reddit.com/r/askscience)

Space for Files – Not Just More Paper:

With data storage being ridiculously cheap and manuscripts freed from the confines of physical paper, publishers still only limit authors to a Supplemental Information paper. Supplemental information is useful, but it’s akin to just saying “here are some more pages for you to write on.”

This is the digital age folks – what if I want to share information and resources that isn’t appropriate to put in a digital paper format? I have loads of stuff that other researchers interested in my paper and who want to reproduce my results or my technique might be interested in such as: calculation results for various molecules, labview code I wrote that runs my laser pulse-shaper with an evolutionary algorithm, or the full crystal structure of a molecule in an easy to download and open file format. These are things that I can’t just plop down in a PDF and call it “supplemental information.” Give me a little tiny bit of web server space to share these extra files with interested colleagues.

How exactly am I supposed to fit this into a Supporting Information pdf?

Open Notebook Support:

The open notebook was an idea put forth a few years ago. The basic concept is that published papers only really disseminate knowledge about the minority of experiments that worked. There is a large volume of data and information about experiments that didn’t work but isn’t made available anywhere. This so-called “Dark Data” (ominous!) is extremely useful for other researchers, who may end up wasting time and resources accidentally repeating failed experiments that the authors did not talk about.

Similar to the above point, there’s essentially unlimited page space online, so there’s no reason publishers couldn’t provide authors with additional space to talk about failed experiments and dead ends. While the “Supplemental Information” section provided to authors is nice, I think there could be a more organized place to put up all the information that could potentially be useful for other researchers.

These are just a few ideas I had. What all can you come up with? How can science communication be improved by digital tools?

Experts previously thought that Greenland’s ice sheet was the major source of water causing increased sea levels in the Earth’s warmer past. However, information locked in cores of ice drilled from Greenland’s ice sheet indicates that this is not true, according to James White, director of the University of Colorado’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. These preliminary results have important implications for predicting the timing and severity of future sea level rise on those living in at-risk areas.

“Miami doesn’t have a future beyond the end of this century” White warns. By that time, sea level is expected to rise by at least one meter sea, which would put Miami underwater. “The big question is: how fast are we going to get there?”

NEEM Ice core. Photo: NEEM ice core drilling project, http://www.neem.ku.dk.

To answer this question, White and a team of international researchers involved in the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling project (NEEM) have been working over the past three years to obtain ice cores going 1.5 miles deep into the ice sheet, right down to bedrock — and probing over 150,000 years of climate history. Using chemical clues in the ice along with radar imaging of the ice sheet and data from previous drilling projects, researchers can determine which layers in the ice were on the surface at different points in history. They can then “reverse time,” as White puts it, and build a picture of what the ice sheet looked like in the past.

White and his NEEM colleagues are focusing on the most recent “interglacial” period, known as the Eemian period, which occurred about 100,000 years ago. Interglacial periods represent eras of warmer global temperatures that occur sandwiched between times when the planet was covered with glaciers.

During the Eemian, the planet was actually 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average than it is today, and the sea level was 5-8 meters higher.

This is important because due to human-induced warming from greenhouse gases, the future for the planet’s climate will approach the temperatures last seen during the Eemain period. The behavior of Greenland’s ice sheet during past warm periods holds information that helps climate modelers predict their future behavior.

“It is critical that scientists understand how the ice sheets responded in the past, so they can begin to predict the future effects of climate change” said White.

Before the NEEM research, experts had theorized that during the Eemian period the Greenland ice sheet melted out to half of its current size, causing 50 to 70 percent of the sea level rise that occurred. However, the results from the NEEM cores do not support this theory, as only a 25 percent reduction of the ice sheet was observed, according to White.

This means that researchers need to start looking elsewhere for unstable ice sheets that could have caused the sea levels to be 5 to 8 meters higher – most likely Antarctica. This could be catastrophic for coastal cities like Miami. That’s because, unlike Greenland’s ice sheet, the bottom of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, or WAIS, lies below sea level, indicating that the ice sheet could be prone to sudden collapse with a concurrent rapid sea level rise. Perhaps too rapid for heavily populated coastal areas like Miami — and entire countries like Bangladesh — to adapt.

“A lot of our attention has been focused on Greenland and now the time has come to focus our attention on Antarctica,” White said. “We need to know where melting will come from and how fast it is going to melt today to answer questions like how long Miami has and after Miami – what is next?”

Space Weather – And You!

Coronal Mass Ejection - Boom! Source: NASA

On November 3^rdmassive sunspots, some more than 17 times the size of the earth, spewed a dangerous combination of radiation, magnetic fields, and charged particles out into space. Luckily, this discharge from the Sun was not aimed towards Earth – this time.

These solar events, called Coronal Mass Ejections, or (CMEs), – can disrupt electronic, communication, and navigation systems that modern society relies upon. Luckily, scientists with The Space Weather Prediction Center monitor this ‘space weather’ to give us enough time to prepare. Part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado, the center focuses on monitoring the sun and predicting when major events like the November 3^rd eruption will affect Earth.

“We dodged a bullet,” remarked Joe Kunches, a space scientist at the center. “There was a big coronal mass ejection but because it was on the edge of the sun it was no problem to us.”

When an eruption sends a CME past Earth it disrupts the planet’s magnetic field causing what are called geomagnetic storms. While the magnetic field protects us from potentially harmful health effects from the particles and radiation in a CME, the geomagnetic storm can severely disrupt – or even destroy in extreme cases – critical infrastructure such as the electric grid and the satellite network used for global communication and navigation.

In 1989 a geomagnetic storm melted transformers in New Jersey and brought down the power grid in northern Quebec, leaving six million people without power for nine hours. The largest solar eruption recorded occurred in 1859 and is referred to as the Carrington Super Flare. It produced a storm that was energetic enough to cause sparks to fly out of telegraph equipment and start fires. It was mostly a scientific curiosity back then. But a storm of that size today could cripple our electricity-dependent society, according to Kunches.

“It’s a little scary because there are so many dependencies on plain old electricity,” he says. Large electric transformers and communications satellites are not off-the-shelf items that can be easily and quickly replaced in the event that many are damaged simultaneously. “Think about what would happen if it went out for a month. Where would you get your food? What about people in the hospital?”

Aurora observed in WI from Oct 24th solar storms. Source: Spaceweather.com

The space weather center produces forecasts that go out to administrators of systems that are affected by geomagnetic storms, providing warning about any solar activity and allowing sufficient time to take necessary precautions. Kunches likens the job of space weather experts like himself to hurricane trackers as they try to predict the trajectory and severity of solar storms.

Unlike hurricanes however, space weather forecasters have no way of predicting exactly when an unstable sunspot – like the current sunspot group that produced the November 3^rd CME – will erupt. Once a CME event occurs, the storm could reach Earth in as little as 24 hours giving forecasters a short amount of time to predict the path and severity.

Information in the forecasts relies heavily on observations from a handful of satellites. The ACE satellite sits roughly a million miles away from the Earth in the direction of the sun acting as a sentinel giving advance notice of CMEs heading our way. A pair of identical satellites, part of a system called STEREO, is positioned ahead of and behind the Earth in its orbit. This allows forecasters to monitor the entire surface of the sun for the formation of unstable sunspots which produce solar eruptions.

What about the current status of the large cluster of sunspots?

“It has been quiet,” Kunches says. “But now it’s located centrally on the sun so should we have an eruption from this particular group expect that we are going to get hit pretty hard.”

Scientists have probably explained this joke poorly

One of the basic tenets of science journalism is that a more informed public will make better decisions. While scientists are doing a stellar job – if I may say so as a scientists myself – performing the necessary research, there are still barriers that prevent common understanding of what the scientists are finding out.

I recently came across this article at Physics Today entitled “Communicating the Science of Climate Change” part of which addresses this problem in terms of the common language used by scientists to communicate their results. Part of the problem is that scientists typically use words that are not in the common vernacular to describe their results when sometimes a clearer substitute could be used. From the article:

Scientists tend to speak in code. We encourage them to speak in plain language and choose their words with care. Many words that seem perfectly normal to scientists are incomprehensible jargon to the wider world. And there are usually simpler substitutes. Rather than “anthropogenic,” scientists can say “human-caused.” Instead of “spatial” and “temporal,” they could say “space” and “time.”

The other, and I think more interesting, part of the problem arises when scientists use words that are use commonly in everyday language – but they have a different meaning for scientists than they do for those in the general public. Here’s a short table of some of these offending words, again from the Physics Today article:

It’s easy to see where the break in communication between scientists and non-scientists can arise. If a researcher referrs to “the error in the measurement” a non-scientist could – taken to the extreme – arrive at the conclusion that there is something incorrect about the results and therefore the conclusions cannot be trusted!

I’m not sure how often this happens in reality, but I can certainly see the potential for some confusion. I can also see the potential for hilarity:

Scientists: “Now if you’ll direct your attention to Scheme 1…”
Public: “Aha! Those devious scientists are scheming against us! I knew it all along!”

While these scenarios are probably far fetched, it certainly can’t hurt for scientists to be as clear as possible when writing for a broader audience than just their peers. This also highlights the need for science journalists – people who can translate scientists’ sometimes confusing speech in to clear statements.

Fourmile fire burns in 2010. Source: DailyCamera

Here’s some background info on the Fourmile fire.

One year after the devastating Fourmile Canyon fire, scientists are still trying to determine the full impact of the burn on the local water supply.

Some findings are already in: As summer thunderstorms pounded the scorched land in July, mud and ash were washed into Fourmile Creek, potentially contaminating the water with chemicals and heavy metals and affecting the drinking water of those downstream.

“The stream was black” noted United States Geological Survey (USGS) hydrologist Sheila Murphy, recalling the condition of Fourmile creek during an intense thunderstorm in early July.

“Our goal is to capture data during these storm events,” Murphy said. So she and her USGS co-workers have installed a handful of automated monitoring stations along Fourmile Creek that take samples during and after significant rainfall.

So far, her research has shown that erosion is particularly severe during big thunderstorms.

Samples are analyzed for a number of indicators of water quality. One is “turbidity,” a measure of how much light can pass through the sample. The more sediment in the water, the more light is scattered by the particles,. Water providers have quality standards that are directly related to turbidity. Large amounts of sediment in the water prevents effective disinfection, and the suspended particles provide attachment points for chemical contaminants.

The samples are also analyzed for a suite of chemicals, including partially burned carbon compounds, soil nutrients like nitrates and phosphates, and dangerous heavy metals like lead and arsenic, which can be washed away from old mine tailings in the region freshly exposed by the fire.

The findings are not yet complete, but from samples already collected Murphy has documented significant effects. Water samples taken upstream of the burned area during storms show low turbidity: a bit cloudy but still translucent. In stark contrast, samples from within and downstream of land scorched by the fire showed extremely high turbidity during two big thunderstorms in July. The water samples were nearly opaque with the soil and silt that has washed into the stream.

The impact of the storms on water quality was sudden and severe, but the effects persisted. “Some of the July storms moved so much sediment to the stream that we saw elevated turbidity levels for weeks.”

In addition, the storms caused the concentration of dissolved materials to spike in the water. But she has not yet completed an analysis of the exact chemical composition of the materials.

Thunderstorms are damaging because the intensity of the raindrops hitting the exposed soil kicks up and frees large amounts of sediment. Just how much can be seen near one of her monitoring sites, where a partly burned area directly adjacent to the creek measuring about 20 by 50 feet is blanketed in a thick layer of dried mud and sand that washed down from surrounding slopes during a storm earlier this summer.

The damaging effect of fires on watersheds is not unknown to water providers in the area. Years after the 2002 Hayman Fire burned 138,000 acres southwest of Denver, Denver Water is still dealing with mud and debris that wash into a number of reservoirs, Murphy said. The work is on-going and costly.

As reported by the Denver Post, the Hayman restoration project is attempting to raise $4.6 million to revegetate burned slopes that are still destabilized by the nine-year old fire. While the Fourmile fire was smaller in size, and Fourmile creek does not feed directly into any reservoirs, the creek is a source of water for Pine Brook hills, a community of 400 homes just west of Boulder.

Murphy hopes that the information gathered here will assist communities in future burn zones. “If you are a [water treatment] plant removing a lot of water from the stream and you get these huge sediment loads to your plant or reservoir – that really impacts your ability to treat your water to a level that is good for households.”

It is highly unlikely you will ever be as cool as Niels Bohr. Image: Benjamin Arthur for NPR. Sunglasses added for extra-cool effect.

Chemistry 1 – Nazis 0

Let’s start with this great story that was just featured on NPR. You should read the whole thing but I’ll summarize the details below.

Bohr, at his institute in Copenhagen, has in his possession two Nobel prizes, given to him for safe keeping by scientists who found themselves at odds with the Nazi party. Unfortunately Nazi Germany had just taken over Denmark and the gold metals are no longer safe.

Convinced that burying the metals will not work, Bohr and a visiting Hungarian chemist Georgy de Hevesy decide to dissolve the metals in Aqua Regia. While this sounds like a fancy mixed drink you’d be better off not tasting it because it’s actually an extremely acidic mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid which is typically used in refining metals because of it’s remarkable property to dissolve metals which are typically extremely stable and non-reactive such as gold and platinum.

They drop the metals in the aqua regia solution and soon it is just a flask of murky orange liquid that they place inconspicuously on top of a shelf in the lab. Bohr and his family later flee to Sweeden on a fishing boat, and from there eventually to the USA to help with the Manhattan Project.

After the war, de Hevesy found the solution untouched in the lab just where they had left it. He precipitated the gold back out, sent it to Sweden where new metals were then recast! (While it makes for a nicer story to say that the new metals were made from the same gold that was dissolved in aqua regia, this source says that the Swedish mint preferred to use fresh gold because it was easier to work with.)

Other Bohr Bad-Assery During WWII

Some of the more astute readers may wonder – “didn’t Bohr win his own Nobel Prize in 1922? Where did he hide that?” It is true that he had already won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work in elucidating the structure of the atom, but by the time the Nazis had reached Denmark he had already auctioned off the gold metal and donated the money to a fund helping Finns displaced by the War.

In addition his position as director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen (now called the Niels Bohr Institute in his honor) allowed him to bring colleagues out of dangerous situations in Nazi Germany. He also used his connections to the Danish resistance movement to then send these people to Sweden.  Later, upon receiving a message from the UK (on microfilm hidden inside s secret compartment of a key) inviting him to come join the atomic weapon effort, he refused saying:

“I feel it to be my duty in our desperate situation to help resist the threat against the freedom of our institutions and to assist in the protection of the exiled scientists who have sought refuge here.” ¹

After receiving information that he was to be arrested by German authorities shortly, Bohr and his entire family made the dangerous trip to Sweden via a fishing boat. Instead of proceeding to the USA, Bohr went directly to the King of Sweden and apparently convinced him to publicly announce that Sweden would offer asylum to Jews fleeing Denmark.

Did you ride in the cockpit? No - I rode in the unpressurized bomb-bay where I took a little nap while we evaded German fighters... Image: Wikipedia

And then when he did decide to go join the Manhattan Project, he had to be smuggled out in the bomb-bay of a small, unarmed RAF Mosquito plane.  The plane apparently had to fly to a higher altitude to avoid detection by Germans. The pilot radioed to Bohr that he should put on his oxygen mask as the bomb-bay was not pressurized, but Bohr was not wearing the helmet with the radio headset as it did not fit his head. Bohr then passed out and almost died from lack of oxygen but the pilot went to a lower altitude after failing to receive any response back from Bohr. He apparently recalled none of this claiming that he “slept like a baby” the whole flight.¹

Another bit of information that was told to me by my old chem professor Dr. Geiger - but which I could not find any other sources for – was that the pilot of the plane was under orders to open the bomb bay doors and drop Niels Bohr into the sea if he to come under attack by Nazi fighters so that Bohr did not fall into enemy hands.

So, the Chemistry Nobel Prize winner for 2011 will be announced tomorrow. I’m sure they will be wonderful people, but not nearly as cool as Niels Bohr.

Other References

1. S. Rozental. Niels Bohr: His Life and Work as Seen By His Friends and Colleagues.  1967

• Gill Sans
• Calibri
• Trebuchet

The hatred of Comic Sans is well documented elsewhere. Today I am going to inform you all of the special science rage I get whenever I see Comic Sans used in any sort of professional science setting.

Last month I went to the American Chemical Society’s fall meeting in Denver, CO. I learned a great deal, some some amazing presentations, some meh presentations, and then some gouge-my-eyes-out-with-a-pipette awful presentations. I also saw way, waaay, waaaaaaaaaay too many presentations using the infamous Comic Sans font. Even just walking by doors to other sessions I spied nearly 1 out of every 4 presentations as using Comic Sans in some way.

Now let me put it to you straight. Every font has its appropriate uses – even Comic Sans. Say for instance you’re making an invitation to your three year old son’s birthday party. Comic Sans is probably fine. Maybe you’re making a flyer for puppies that are up for adoption. Also a fine use of Comic Sans.

But if you are going to give a professional scientific presentation in front of your peers from across the country where you want to impress them and show them what kind of researcher you are and how awesome your results are – Comic Sans is not the font you want to use. It makes you look like you have no clue as to what you’re doing. And you do want to impress these people – they could be future bosses or people who you want to do a collaboration with or maybe even will be on the reviewing committee for your next big grant proposal to the NSF.

It’s not just graduate students and post docs making this egregious error –  big name researchers do it all the freaking time (*cough Dan Nocera cough*). 

Some people will say “hey, maybe I like comic sans!” and to them I will say that I like cute pictures of kittens as well but I wouldn’t put them in my science presentation.

I made a helpful comic to show you the difference. Enjoy. (Click to embiggen)

Stop eating your cookie right now – put it down on the desk and save it. There are enough carbon atoms in it to make it worth more than your rapidly dwindling retirement account. In fact there are enough carbon atoms around you right now that – properly rearranged – to make you rich enough to retire immediately! Am I talking about transmuting carbon into gold? No – just rearranging them to make graphene! I’ve written briefly about graphene here before, and its wide variety of interesting properties and uses – so interesting that its discoverers were awarded the Nobel prize in physics last year. High quality graphene in bulk quantities is still fairly expensive to produce – until now that is.

This equation is 100% accurate.

A group of researchers at Rice University published in Nano Letters a method for creating high quality graphene from any source of carbon. Yes any source of carbon. Considering all organic material is primarily carbon based, this means that you can make graphene from nearly everything around you right now. Your half eaten sandwich, the fly buzzing around you, the wood in your desk… any source of carbon. In the paper they demonstrate using a number of materials, such as a cockroach leg and even some dog crap (I wonder which graduate student was tasked with retrieving that source of carbon…) to create graphene. The method is also surprisingly straight forward. The carbon source is placed on a thin piece of  copper foil and heated up to 1000° Celsius under an atmosphere of hydrogen and argon. High quality Graphene is then deposited on the backside of the copper foil!

Why is graphene formed over some other form of carbon, like diamonds, or just the blackened soot you get when your burn your dinner? The soot or other “burned” products will not form because there is no oxygen available in the atmosphere when they heat the carbon source up. Thus the carbon cannot oxidize and “burn”. Also, it turns out graphene is the most stable form of elemental carbon, so when it is in graphene it is in the lowest energy state that carbon can be in. Sweet! They have not quite worked out the exact mechanisms of graphene formation yet so, some of this is speculation on my part.

Even better though is this short video where the researchers demonstrate to a troop of girl scouts how they can use a girl scout cookie to make graphene. They note that the going rate for a 2-inch square sheet of graphene is approximately $250, so accounting for all the carbon available in girl scout cookies , the typical box of shortbread transformed into graphene would be worth over $15 billion dollars – which certainly got some attention from the scouts in attendance! Here is the video – make sure to watch out for the expression on one of the scouts when the researcher tells her that the small amount of graphene they just made was worth a couple hundred dollars…

In conclusion: I might convert shortbread to graphene, but a a thin mint? I don’t think so.

References:

Ruan, G., Sun, Z., Peng, Z., & Tour, J. (2011). Growth of Graphene from Food, Insects, and Waste ACS Nano DOI: 10.1021/nn202625c

For instance, here is a picture of a titanium doped sapphire crystal which is used in amplification of the laser that I am using. Looks pretty good you say. I would agree.

Normal titanium doped sapphire laser crystal

Now examine this next picture carefully and see if you can spot the difference between it and the first picture:

Same laser crystal, but something is not quite right...

For all those who noticed that the crystal and its housing are now encased in a thick layer of frost and ice, congratulations! You’ve earned a cookie! As you can guess, the laser does not work quite right when the crystal is in such a state. When the laser won’t turn on and I open it up to see this, I bet you can hear “FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU…” from all the way across campus.

WTF is Going On?

“Wait just a sec” you’re saying. “I thought lasers were hot and produced lots of energy. That crystal must be pretty warm when it is running,” and you’d be entirely correct! In order to get rid of the excess heat and keep the crystal at a constant temperature while lasing, the crystal is surrounded by a peltier cooler. Basically a voltage is applied to a special type of material that can efficiently create a temperature difference between different sides of the peltier. In this case the peltier moves heat away from the crystal and dumps it into the water which is cycling through the crystal housing (you can see the water tubes in the pictures above).

Here’s the issue – the peltier is programmed to maintain the crystal at a certain temperature. The red wire coming up from the bottom in the picture is actually a probe for a digital thermometer. That thermometer probe is attached to the crystal housing via an extremely high tech piece of thermal tape. Sometimes the tape gets loose and the thermometer probe is not in contact with the crystal housing anymore. When this happens the peltier thinks “uh oh, the crystal is hot!” and applies a voltage to cool it down. However, because the probe is just measuring room temperature instead of the crystal, the peltier has no way of knowing when to stop cooling. So it just happily keeps applying a voltage, continually cooling the crystal, oblivious to the fact that the crystal is now so cold that it is condensing and freezing water right out of the air!

Luckly the fix is pretty easy – spray the whole thing down with methanol and stick the tape back on! Unfortunately this means I now have a days worth (or more) of re-alignment of the laser to do. Yay science!