Nerdy picture post

[nebel]

So i'm a geek, but i'm a vain geek. Besides i've been waiting to take pictures of this shirt forever and finally got my hands on a camera. I threw in some other pics just for shits and grins.

Comments

[wpl510]

Judging from the equipment I see in the last picture (oscilloscope, microwave synthesizer, and- is that a lock-in-amplifier in the middle?), I'd guess you do microwave spectroscopy, except that last time I checked, you can't do microwave spectroscopy on buckyballs, b/c they lack a dipole moment. So what do you do?

And, oh yeah: speaking as a p-chemist myself, that is one great shirt.

[nebel]

Ahah, the shirt coupled with the equipment is misleading. Although physical chemistry is my current love, my research over the summer was very analytical- i was (and currently am) studying electrochemical properties of different functionalized C60 and C70 compounds. I also did a little work with carbon nanotubes. The pile of equipment i'm standing in front of in that picture i didn't use too often, as my advisor just set it up because he thought it would be cool, so we played with it and took a couple of capacitance readings, then went back to the cyclic voltammetry :)

and that is indeed a lock in amplifier.

[counterword]

Hey do buckyballs superconduct above ludicrously low temperatures?

[nebel]

I don't really know. I asked my advisor and he says he doesn't think so, though he remembered hearing something about it. The work i do isn't really quite that cool :)

[chemchick]

I don't think so. BUT I read this article and it said that buckyballs give fish brain tumors and I was like, "WHO THE HELL DECIDED THEY WANTED TO STUDY THAT."

[nebel]

I think the importance there is the fact that buckyballs may be poisonous, because there's some talk of using them for drug delivery systems. I heard about that experiment... and i too was like WHY THE FUCK was that woman feeding her fish buckyballs?

Obviously, because they're cheaper than diamonds.

Wild guesses that prove I need a vacation

[wpl510]

I must be spending too much time in our own spectroscopy lab- I think I can even identify the brand on the lockin amp (Stanford rsrch systems?). If the bottom box is a microwave freq synthesizer, though, I'd guess HP/Agilent depending on age- we have one that looks just like it, and after Agilent spun off they didn't change the faceplate much- and as for the oscilloscope, I recommend begging your advisor on your knees for one of Tektronix's more modern models (see here for the one we have): given how much greater they are to use, I'm really surprised more labs aren't getting them.

Anyway, though, nice to know where the buckyball angle comes in- I suppose you could in principle do rotational measurements on them as long as they were functionalized asymmetrically to yield a dipole moment, come to think of it. Do you do all your own syntheses, too?

Re: Wild guesses that prove I need a vacation

[nebel]

No, that would be my research partner's job, though i might be getting into the sythetic aspect of it more next semester. As i'm currently an undergrad junior, i only have 4 hours a week to spend on this work. At any rate, the orgo isn't really my thing. Next year i'll be picking up this project again for my senior thesis, however, and i'll be getting a little more involved in the functionalization.