First Post! Huzzah!

Hi, world! I'm sitting at the Advanced Photon Source, a giant circular particle accelerator in Lemont, IL. At about midnight, I'll start bombarding my sample with enough X-rays to kill a man in a millisecond.


(<- My workstation!)

The (perpetual) goal is to measure the melting temperature of potassium at high (>50GPa = ~500,000atm) pressures. Then, I'm off to Johnson Space Center to image semi-mythical dust structure in argon plasma in ZERO GRAVITY with the Yale Drop Team. Afterward, I'll set up camp at Caltech to study stability of ice/rock mixtures with application to Titan. My PI, Prof. David Stevenson, once proposed using a bunch of nuclear weapons to open a crack in Earth's crust to send a probe to the core. I won't be working on that, sadly.