Driving to and My First Week at Purdue

The Drive

**I would have posted this sooner, but I was (and still am) having trouble accessing the internet in my room**

I arrived at Purdue around 9:30pm Saturday evening (May 22, 2010), after about 12 hours driving the 630 miles or so from Gaithersburg, MD to West Lafayette, IN (see Google Map below). And it only cost me about $65.00 too.

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The drive wasn't as bad, nor as tiring, as I expected it to be. I rather enjoyed going through western Maryland and West Virginia, especially going up, down, and through the mountains, but after that, it was pretty boring. Driving through Ohio and Indiana, I found both those states to be pretty flat with lots of wide open spaces and 65/70 mph speed limits.

Driving through western Maryland.

Arriving at Hawkins Hall (room 252), where I'll be staying for the 10 weeks of the REU, I found the dorm and the room to be quite nice. The room is larger, cleaner, and comes with more furniture/storage space. Apparently, it's a dorm for graduate students, complete with (from what I've heard) weekly laundered sheets.

My room in Hawkins 252.

Having had the option of flying, I'm glad I decided to drive. It's VERY helpful when the nearest department store is a 10 min drive away and you need to buy food to supplement the $300 meal plan (which works out to be a little over $4.00/day if you buy food everyday).

First Week of Research

For the most part, my first week in the lab was about what I expected it to be with John, the graduate student I'm working with, being at the DAMOP (Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics) conference in Texas. Most of my time involved me searching for various parts on the internet, such as Acousto-Optic Modulators and obtaining price quotes and shipping times. The rest of my time was spent teaching myself quantum mechanics (or at least attempting to). During this time, two other graduate students working in the same lab, Adeel Altaf and Dionysios Antypas, have been instrumental in getting me acquainted with the lab, the physical concepts involved in the research being done, and any other questions I had.

My space in SB45.

Outside of computer work, I spent some time yesterday on a laser setup to practice locking a laser to hyperfine transition frequencies. The purpose of locking the laser to a particular hyperfine transition is to keep atoms in the MOT (magneto-optical trap) that will be used for photoassociation out of a state which another laser will be unable to access. The laser I worked with will provide the frequency which pumps atoms out of the undesired ground state by exciting atoms which de-excite to that undesired ground state back to the same excited energy level. The spectroscopy technique used to find the hyperfine transition frequencies of the Rb is quite ingenious, (mostly) eliminating Doppler broadening (an excellent explanation can be found at DOPPLER-FREE SATURATED ABSORPTION SPECTROSCOPY: LASER SPECTROSCOPY).

After my first week, I am both excited and intimidated about the coming weeks. I am intimidated from my interactions with the graduate students, I feel that I would be unable to reach their level of expertise and knowledge of physics, even after many years of study. This has me questioning my own ability to get into, let alone succeed, in graduate school. I am also excited to be able to have the opportunity of working in the lab with such talented people. During the 10 weeks, I hope that I will be able to both fill in gaps in my knowledge (such as optics training which St. Mary's does not offer) as well as contribute something meaningful to the project(s).