June 28th- Day 7

Happy News!!

Right as we walked in Alex said he had 'happy news' for us. He had needed to use our detector to compare some other data to and our detector had broken. This was the reason why we were having so many problems. We had examined the detector using a Fe-55 sample. The temperature of the detector was reading to be around 230K when it was sitting at room temperature and should have been somewhere around 220K. Alex took our detector and was going to have AMPtek fix the problem. After talking to Zewu he gave us a XR-100CR Si x-ray detector. This was an analog detector unlike the digital detector we were using before. This meant it had to be hooked up differently and didn't have a USB to plug into the computer. Instead it had to be hooked up to the middle tower under where the stages were hooked up and the tv and run using a different software. The new detector was then calibrated with Fe-55 like before. After we scanned at full power without the pin hole and with the Cu filter to look for the Cu K alpha peak around 140 channel. We scanned at a lesser power in x and set to zero. We ran into some problems trying to find the spot when scanning in y and couldn't see the spot. We ended up having more alignment issues. However, we didn't realize this until after we had already attempted taking some spot size measurements. This makes sense because our spot sizes were fairly large.