Gathering ends

Work seems to be wrapping up now.  Mélanie suggests that I begin to prepare my final summary and presentation, which seems like a good idea.  I'll write up a one-page summary for the Michigan program and something a bit more detailed for LPQM, and prepare slides for a 10-minute talk next Thursday at Ecole Polytechnique.  It'll take me a while to sort through all the various data I've taken and collect the analyses and make things pretty and so on.  It may wind up a bit of a scattered talk; I've done lots of little exploratory projects and wound up with a whole lot of data and not too much in the way of firm conclusions or interpretations.  But certainly I have enough about which to talk, and too much to fit in a one-page summary.  I shall strive for brevity!  Omit needless words.

The whole lab is slowing down as the August holidays approach.  At the end of last week, the on-campus cafeteria closed for the summer, so I've been bringing my lunch for the past few days.  After July, the campus will be closed the way Mudd is over the summer, or even more so - you need special permission to come in to the labs or stay in the dorms.  Many of the other interns in my group will be finishing up and leaving anyway this week or next week.  It will be sad to see them go.

Maxime leaves on Friday, though he'll be back during the fall semester.  Our last hurrah will likely be the detailed data on the dependence of the emitted amplitude on the polar angle of the detector around the sample.  After much trouble yesterday and today, we seem to have the setup working as we'd like.  In fact, we took some data this morning that we thought good, until Mélanie told us that we should really re-align the center of rotation on the rotation stage so that we didn't have to mess with the translational alignment every half-degree or so.  And so Maxime figured out that part while I began making an outline for my presentation.  He's written some very helpful Igor routines as well that almost entirely automate the tedious crunching through the copious text files of data that result from these measurements (I made a few contributions to the routines too, though most of the work is his).  So I hope tomorrow we'll get all the data we want for the tilted Fabry-Perots, and then take a close look at the interesting trends we're already noticing.

Tonight I spent a relaxing evening reading, doing laundry, and cooking dinner/lunch for tomorrow.  Yesterday, however, I decided to go out to La Défense to see what that was like.  So I rode the familiar M1 line all the way to its terminus, walked outside, and saw the Grande Arche.  "Arche" is not quite the term I would use, but it makes enough sense in the context of its location, directly on a line with the Arc de Triomph and the mini-Arc in the Tuileries.

It's like a huge picture frame.  The sides are buildings; you can see the windows marching up them if you look closely at the second photo.  And all around are sleek, strangely-shaped, futuristic skyscrapers.

I enjoyed walking through the large empty plaza up to the Arche, and down the boardwalk on the other side.  I suspect that the architects of these buildings achieved at least some of their goals: I was very conscious of the space around me, the size and shape and three-dimensionality of the air in the plaza.  The relative silence and emptiness contributed to the rather surreal atmosphere.  And the weather was exceptional, warm and breezy as the sun set behind the Arche.  Quite pleasant.

So pleasant, in fact, that it didn't seem like the evening should be over when I got back on the metro.  So I popped by the St. Michel area on the way back, where I knew I could walk a bit through the streets and along the Seine without feeling intimidated by being out alone after dark.  The streets are always bustling with tourists and merchants.  So I ate a crêpe and strolled and eventually went back to the dorms.  Hurrah for moderate self-sufficiency!