Sunday, July 3, 2022
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I went back to work! Having largely finished the code I needed to work on last week, this week back at NIST we have started the next phase of my internship. The lab is now equipped to perform spectroscopic interferometry experiments, so instead of only studying tetracene, we are now planning on investigating more materials. Specifically, a few indirect semiconductors and possibly a BGO crystal. For indirect semiconductors, there is a photon energy regime where photons of said energy could excite the electrons in the crystal but would need the help of a phonon to simultaneously change the momentum to make it into a possible state. Eventually when the photon energy gets high enough, it can excite the electrons on their own. We are setting up experiments on investigating the rate of two photon absorption in the regime where a photon and a phonon would be necessary, because two photons together could also excite the material without needing a phonon. In addition, as a function of light intensity, the index of refraction of the material changes. We wish to also explore that using spectroscopic interferometry. We started looking into the feasibility of these experiments during the week, and there is more to come this week!
In addition, my friend and my boyfriend came to visit me this weekend from Illinois. They arrived on Saturday and left Monday after the Fourth of July Independence Day Parade. When they first got here, we went out to eat at Residents Cafe & Bar, then did the monument walk during a thunderstorm. It was windy and wet, but the lightning and lighting was very pretty around the monuments for the duration of the outing. The next morning, we went to the National Museum of African American History and Culture for several hours and then went to Independence’s Samba at Bossa Bistro & Lounge. The samba was a live music venue showing Brazilian music, food, and cocktails, and encouraged samba dancing. I went with Justin and my friends, and we had a good time. To celebrate my boyfriend’s birthday, we made him a birthday dinner of Cajun butter steak bites with onions, fresh sweet corn we picked up from the farmer’s market that morning, avocados, crispy potato bites, and tomato slices. Some banana bread to top it off that I made with the help of Matangi. Overall, my health has been a lot better this week thankfully! In the coming week I hope to further this new path the research has taken, and I have a lot to look into as that unfolds.
Valeria Viteri-Pflucker