End week 1

The weekend was pretty unproductive for me. Lee, Sean, and myself tried to figure out what sort of sports/activities are available at the Cité on Saturday, and were severely disappointed. You need a membership card to use the pool. The membership card costs 20e and is available at some office which is closed over the weekends, and quite possibly is open 9-5 during the week, which means we'll have to either go in late or leave work massively early to get a pass. You also need a membership card to play tennis or basketball, or pretty much anything. The only thing free is pick-up games on the fields, so we went jogging and then played frisbee for a while on Saturday.

I went to mass again this week at the Irish chapel by the Luxembourg RER stop. On the way back, I successfully gave directions to an Irish guy I met at mass, so I guess I'm finding my way around pretty well at this point. I also did laundry (quite an adventure when there's 2 washers and 1 dryer for several buildings) and skyped with people at home.

On a more work related note, this is a schematic of the layout I'll be playing with for the next few weeks.
Light is emitted from the cleaning laser (which in our case is a pretty small tap off of the laser being used by another group). The light, which is initially linearly polarized, is shot through a half-wave plate and a linear polarizer, the combination of which functions as a variable attenuator. The pulsed beam is then shot through an electronic shutter, which ensures that only one pulse makes it through the rest of the system. The pulse is then reflected off of two dielectric mirrors (reflective at IR wavelengths the pulsed laser is operating at, but mostly transmissive at visible wavelengths) and focused on the sample/subject of cleaning. Simultaneously, a HeNe laser is used to illuminate the sample, and the reflections of said HeNe off of the sample are imaged to a CCD. The reflection profile will be used to monitor changes to the sample.