So...there goes most of the day, but I currently have a working computer. Since I still don't know what was actually wrong, just the symptoms (an apparently normal startup followed by immediate, crippling freezing), I can't be at all sure that the problem won't re-emerge sometime. [If Dad or Jake are reading this, hello! Also, if you happen to know exactly what is wrong with my computer, let me know? Virus/malware scans came up clean, and safe mode worked fine. CHKDSK did a lot of scanning and some "repairing" the first time I tried starting it in the morning.] I did make sure that everything I can back up is backed up. When I get home, I'm planning on buying a large flash drive and archiving a lot of files just in case. I hope they last that long!
There's a new intern at the lab. Ha! I have seniority! Except that he's a master's student and has been particularly studying lasers for the past few years, so he knows a lot more about the physics of this project than I do. And he speaks fluent French. And he'll be here for six months or so next semester, instead of a measly two. But I have seniority! Maxime is from Canada, clearly the French-speaking bit, and seems quite nice. I showed him the data I've collected over the course of the past month and explained what I've been doing. Neither of us are currently sure exactly what part of the project he'll wind up joining, but I guess we'll see.
At the end of the day, when my computer was working again, praise be to the invisible tech support fairies, I finished up the analysis of the thresholds for several tilted cavities. My calculation of the theoretical lasing threshold of the 140um true FP cavity was reasonably close to the experimental results. You can tell that I'm just doing preliminary exploration because I have on more than one occasion been told not to worry about error bars. But generally things are as expected. Hurrah! And, even better, the threshold is smaller than threshold values for some of the more-tilted cavities, indicating that the tiltedness probably does increase the threshold, as we'd expect.
Tomorrow I'll take a look at the stability of the tilted cavities when I rotate them a bit out of perfect alignment. And after that Mélanie wants to test an idea of Maxime's regarding the thermal expansion of the cavities as a result of the pump pulse, and possible, er, lensing sorts of effects. She described a method that I can use to change the spot size of the pump laser, but it's delicate and involved enough that she's going to help me implement it.
So that was work. This evening I ate, read some Dickens, and went on a mini-adventure because why not? I had originally planned to go out and see the strange skyscrapers at La Defense, but I couldn't find anyone to join me, and it was a long-ish trip to an unfamiliar part of the city near dusk, so I chose a more modest goal. I just took the RER two stops north to Port-Royal, the only stop in Zone 1 at which I had yet to disembark. Despite its proximity to the heart of the city, it's a fairly unpopular stop, but I decided to see what I could see. And, oh Paris. I saw a majestic fountain in a large garden, with rows of those cubic trees that they must have to prune constantly. In the way that some parks in the US have things like shuffleboard or volleyball courts, this park has outdoors, sturdy all-weather ping-pong tables, which were all in use. I followed the tributary of this garden all the way to the sea of the Jardin du Luxembourg, and walked there for a while as well. I like Paris.
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