<It's a stormy day here in Paris, France, and everyone needs to Thunder Up >
So the past couple days I've actually had to do physics at work. Which is why I haven't made posts about the physics of the X-men in a while. This week, I'm joined by my assistant Michael (who I thought was named William for the first couple of days, very awkward [and I'd like to deeply apologize]), who is a high school student right here in a good ol' Paris at a bilingual school. Luckily though, he's Australian by earth so he speaks good english and has even helped me with my Spanish some. He doesn't know too much about physics, but that's more because he's in the tenth grade than anything else, so it's been kind of neat explaining things to him.
What we've been working on has been a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. Which is where one takes a laser beam, passes it through a beam splitter (which allows half the beam to be transmitted, half to be reflected, ideally) then both beams are reflected, one from the target, one from a mirror parallel to the target. One then recombines the beams with another beam splitter so that they are equal intensity, or should roughly be. Which is very easy to say, much more difficult to do. However today, Michael and I achieved our goal. It is now displaying a very nice interference pattern on a wall down stairs in the basement. ....Just trust me on that.
What's the point? The point is that interference pattern occur due to wavelengths of light which are very small (~.0001 millimeters). Therefore, if the target moves by that amount or more, the pattern will change. (Interference patterns look like 1111, basically fringes of light with dark spots in between them, I'll post a picture of ours later) So they can be very useful in detecting the smallest of changes which is exactly what we need in order to make attosecond pulses because the laser has to hit a new part of the target each time.
In other news, I've been wandering around Paris at night, and it's still beautiful. I went to see the Grande Arche, which is like the Arc d'Triomphe only more modern and big. It was like wandering into a futuristic part of Paris. Yesterday I went and wandered the Tuillieres garden and the Champs-Elysses. C'est Magnifique! I also had a conversation with a French lady in French, despite my protests that I spoke none of it. I just guessed at answers to here questions until I was right. She was very insistent about it, and it was a lot of fun.
"I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're going, and hook up with 'em later."
-Mitch Hedberg.
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