All those historic moments

It's quite a memorable day.  Happy Fourth of July!  Not that anyone thought to express this sentiment at work today.  Happy Higgs Day!  I came into work early so that I could catch the whole live announcement of the 5-sigma data.  I'm lucky that I'm in Europe and didn't have to wake up at 3:00 am for it.  To be honest, I wasn't sure that they were ever going to find the Higgs.  I really hope they have indeed now, and that there are sufficient wrinkles in the results to provide theorists with years of happy head-scratching and also employment.

I don't have very much to do this week.  Mélanie is quite busy and can't help me and Maxime install a lens for changing the pump spot size, and I've run through all my other little projects in the meantime.  Fortunately Maxime is enthusiastic and has some ideas of his own that he wants to test in this free time, both experimental and theoretical.  This morning I tried to show him how to take spectra right at the lasing threshold of a cavity, but, of course, the setup chose this particular morning to be extra-difficult, and it wasn't until after lunch that I had discovered the problem (someone had changed the spectrometer slit width between yesterday and today) and the software decided to run properly.  He had hoped to catch the spectra right when only one mode can lase, but soon conceded that everyone else in the lab had been correct when they told him that the peaks fade into noise before that point.

We also worked together to calculate and plot the transmittance of the cavities.  The transmittance is a sinusoidal function of wavelength, with maxima corresponding to the positions of the cavity's spectral lines.  And that's what we saw, but just a bit off.  Mélanie says it's probably because we didn't take into account the dependence of the cavity's index of refraction on the wavelength.  Before we could make much headway on that issue, it was time for a special presentation by a visiting researcher who talked about sensors made using optical fibers.

Since it's a Wednesday, after work it was time for the Louvre!  Linda and I worked our way through the galleries on the first floor of the Denon wing, which was pretty crowded since the Mona Lisa is located there.  I decided it was time to make the obligatory pilgrimage.  There was a small crowd by the painting, but nothing nearly as bad as the daytime crowds, I expect.  So...yeah...the Mona Lisa!  It was cool to see, but in all honesty it's not one of the works that has made me stop and stare and lose my umbrella.  (I'm thinking it was absorbed into one of those Monet lady-with-parasol paintings at the Musee d'Orsay.)  It's so famous that I already knew exactly what it looked like.  Not that I am complaining!  I just saw the Mona Lisa in person!  That's a third, equally memorable, part of today.  What a Fourth of July it has been.