On Monday, John Nees accompanied everybody to Ecole Poly so that we could meet with our advisers. Johanna and I both have Bianca as our adviser, so we met with her. I also have the privilege of meeting and shaking the hand of Dr. Gérard Mourou. I was actually a bit surprised that he was around, as I gather he's very widely desired by more important members of the scientific community.
Since our badges weren't ready due to some bureaucratic/paperwork black hole, Johanna and I went to a student picnic with Bianca and Julien (one of the graduate students working with Bianca).
In the afternoon, Bianca showed me around one of the labs. It seems like I'll be spending some time spending another researcher there do experiments related to laser damage, which will tie in pretty well to my project related to laser cleaning. We're using a ~1% tap from Rodrigo's Ti:Sapphire ~20fs pulse laser; I think Bianca said we'd be working with 10 micro-joules at a 1000 kHz rep rate. One of the biggest problems would be separating the pulse train to make sure we isolate a single pulse, but Rodrigo managed to snag an electric shutter for the project, which simplifies life a bit.
I was a bit late to work on Tuesday because some idiot (me) had his ATM card eaten by a BNP Paribas ATM. Sean, John, and I went to the bank and got it straightened out pretty easily. When we got the Ecole, we found that ID cards had arrived, so Bianca, Johanna, and myself went and dealt with that before lunch. In the afternoon I started reading a paper on laser-material interaction, and was shown a terahertz lab run by another researcher who's name I forget. I have to do laser safety training before I can work in the lab, and apparently the guy who does it, Ivain, is on holiday, so it will be next week until I can do labwork. I'll spend the rest of the week reading papers most likely.
On either Thursday or Friday I intent to make a post here detailing what I've learned from the week's readings.
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