Sunday, June 5, 2022
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Today is Sunday, June 5 th , 2022, and it marks the first full week of my participation in the SPS Summer Internship, working at NIST. Last Sunday I drove to Washington DC from Bloomington, Illinois, where I recently acquired a BA in physics from Illinois Wesleyan University. The move-in process at George Washington University went much easier than expected (except the parking was a bit confusing for a few days), and on my first night I did the monument walk for the first time. On Tuesday we had orientation, and my first day at NIST was Wednesday.
At NIST, my mentor is Jared Wahlstrand who works in the Nanoscale Spectroscopy Group. His research interests are primarily in time-resolved optical spectroscopy for characterization of materials. On the first day I got to see the lab he is working in, some new equipment, and around the NIST campus. I also received a lot of reading material to help me understand the set-up for the experiment and the materials being characterized.
The experiment I will be working on is a study of the organic semiconductor tetracene using different ultrafast optical techniques. Specifically, I will be working on a pump-probe study of this material. Tetracene crystals are biaxial and the polarization of light that enters the material is changed by the propagation. The goal of the experiments as I currently understand it is to isolate the polarization- dependent signal from triplet excitons that arise in the material when pumped to extract the full dielectric matrix as a function of time delay between pump and probe beams. I may also work on experiments dealing with nonlinear optical properties, which may be easier to do in the time frame I have. Since this week was introductory, more discussions need to be made in the future about what my goals within this overarching project will be.
Outside of the research I was introduced to this week, I also had a great time meeting the other interns. A few of us went out to eat together a few days ago, we went to a water park, and played games. I’m excited to explore museums in the coming weeks and experience more of the city!
Valeria Viteri-Pflucker