End week 5

 This week was very lab-filled, but looking back, it feels like we accomplished very little. This is probably untrue, but the setup still isn't experiment ready. We couldn't get lenses of the focal length we wanted, so we have to settle for a slightly longer focal length. Also a bit of bad news; the timescale on the oscilloscope when we determined that a single pulse was coming through was too short. There are multiple pulses coming through per shot, and the number appears to vary between 1 and 3 almost randomly. Lei wants to use an energy meter to count the number of pulses, which is a good idea, but given low inbound energy, I'm worried that the meter might not be sensitive enough. Bianca and I found that we were getting ~4.5 microjoules into the system. The beam size is maybe 1 cm in diameter. We were about to measure that more precisely when the power went out, and given that the laser takes a while to reboot, we'll finish that on Monday.

The weather here makes me feel like I'm melting. I'm having a hard time thinking about work and not the chocolate/pistachio ice cream in my freezer.