Igor and Rain in Cachan

Mélanie wasn't in today, so I just carried on as best as I could.  While going through yesterday afternoon's spectra this morning, it occurred to me that fitting each peak with a Gaussian and averaging over all the line widths was a rather tedious and repetitive task that was perfectly suited to my computer's talents.  So I spent a few hours writing an Igor function that accomplishes in seconds what was taking me several minutes to complete yesterday.  It was fun to code, and since I'll be looking at many, many spectra over the next two months, I consider the morning to be a good investment.

Luckily I brought my umbrella with me today, as it was raining heavily at lunchtime, and the cafeteria is in another building.  Today I met Sylvia, a Brazilian researcher who's lived in Paris for seven years.  She's very kind and speaks English with hardly an accent.  At this rate, I will not get the chance to practice my French!  My grasp of the language has slipped enough that anyone listening to me would have to be quite patient anyway.

After lunch, I went down to the lab (three tall flights of stairs down to the lab) and worked there for the rest of the day.  I'm trying to take spectra for one single Fabry-Perot cavity, but with the pump laser aligned at various positions along the cavity.  I got concerned yesterday and this morning that I wasn't very good at aligning the samples yet, and so my measurements were not very repeatable.  So this afternoon I went slowly and carefully, and got a bit of useful data...before the recorded intensity suddenly dropped by a factor of three from the previous spectrum.  Clèment was very helpful - he reassured me that I hadn't broken anything, and that the samples are extremely fickle in their emitted intensity.  I only hope they prove more reliable in terms of spectral width.

I took the RER back to the Cité Universitaire around 5:40, and bought a baguette from a boulangerie a few blocks down the street.  The sun was shining happily by then, so I explored the Parc Montsouris, a lovely park just across the street.  Many Parisians and many, many birds thought it was also a good day to go to the park.  There are rumors of a possible visit to the Champs Elysées this evening...hurrah for physics and Paris.