June 30th- Day 9

Repeatable results is what we aim for!

Even though, we were able to obtain a fairly small spot size yesterday, we did not realize how bad the astigmatism was until this morning after going back and looking at our results. Alex suggested increasing the input focal distance, but was not all too sure if that would help. After running a scan of x and y of the detector to try and find the spot again, it was unsuccessful. The detector was all out of wack and we could not find the peak. Nothing was changed since yesterday and we are not too sure what is causing this to happen. We even 'went to home' with all the axis before turning everything off so when the equipment was turned on today everything would be in place. We double-checked the set up and the detector, optic and source were all aligned correctly. We tried looking up potential problems and solutions, but were unsuccessful. Alex was extremely busy, so we did not want to take him away from his work. In the mean time we read through the website you sent us the other day and tried looking up some answers to the questions we need to address for our outline/ poster. When Alex came to check on us we told him the problem and he suggested trying to recalibrate the detector and to restart everything. The calibration check was unsuccessful; the gain was extremely off. It took a while to get anything to show up on the screen after restarting the software. Then we tried restarting the entire computer and it worked! Once that was all squared away we scanned at the appropriate OFDs to see if we could obtain the small spot sizes we had gotten yesterday. The vertical spot size was almost dead on. While the horizontal spot size was slightly larger, the values were acceptable due to the fact that these scans were only rough measurements. Tomorrow we will start experimenting with the input focal length and work on correcting the astigmatism.