Hitting the 'snooze' button on real life

Image (c) Jorge Cham, PhD Comics

Long time, no post.

Apparently, five years of undergrad have not crushed my soul so completely as to have kept me from coming back for more. Hence, grad school. I am working in the Jones lab at UBC, which is an applied physics lab that uses ultrafast optics in order to do a whole bunch of things. It all relies on the huge peak intensity of light that you get when you pulse a laser: Roughly speaking, think of some amount of energy put out by, say, a light bulb. Now imagine that instead of the lightbulb staying lit all the time, you compress all of that energy into a tiny pulse, one millionth of a billionth of a second long. Femtosecond lasers are being investigated for applications into things such as micromachining and even dental surgery. As for me, I'm going to use it to make a source for extreme ultraviolet light:

Outside of work and school, I'm back in the band again (this is my sixth year in the UBC bands...), and I've lately taken up swing dancing -- but I'll leave that for another post; it's getting late and I want to get out of the lab.