Summer Time!
I hope you’re having a good summer!
I’m working in the Microelectronics Research Center on the campus of Georgia Tech again this summer. I get to spend my summer working around and with expensive and dangerous equipment. I practically had a heart attack this afternoon when I was afraid that I was about to drop a $4,000 piece of electrical equipment smaller than a Coke can! It’s a lot of fun!
Here’s the device I’m working on: My job is to come up with a mechanism to move a sample back and forth across a laser beam to measure the light coming from the sample. The sample is housed inside that tall tower in the picture below. The tower will have electrical wires, vacuum lines and liquid nitrogen lines attached to it. The sample has to be several hundred degrees below zero at an ultra-high vacuum (77 Kelvin if you’re counting). The computer will move the sample 1/1000th of a millimeter at a time. You can just see where the sample is mounted - look at the copper triangle in the circular window at the center. That’s an expensive piece of glass that can take the vacuum and temperature extremes. The table that’s sitting on is 4′ x 6′, weighs just under a ton and is floating on a cushion of air to dampen out vibrations. Pretty cool! 
