09 October 2015

NOVA likes my video!

During my first year in graduate school, when I was working with the Yb ion trap lab (also in the Vuletic Group at MIT), then senior-graduate student Marko and I put together a little movie of what our ions could do the night before I went home for winter break. The idea was that, once set to music, these frames of ions in motion would give us a way to talk about what we were doing with our families.

And, now (actually in August, but I just saw it today), NOVA embedded the video in an article about the awesome work that lab has been doing in the five-ish years since we made it: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/physics/friction/

Neat!


20 September 2015

Periodic cake

Zoya baked this awesome cake to thematically (and culinarily) celebrate Alexei's successful thesis defense last Friday.

A cake-based model of the frict-ion simulator.

Yum! Science themed cake is especially delicious.