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Eye witness report from the Hands-On PlasmaLab@TU/e Course 2012, part 2

Eye witness report from the Hands-On PlasmaLab@TU/e Course 2012, part 2

FUSENET sponsors the Hands-On PlasmaLab@TU/e course in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Three of the students present, David, João and Sören, report:

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The second day (28/08) started after enjoying the night in the huge and luxurious Hotel Koningshof located a bit outside of Eindhoven.

We took the wrong bus to the city, which unfortunately made a large tour through the suburbs of Eindhoven, so in the end we arrived half an hour later than planned.

Once we got to the lab, we directly received a short explanation about today's experiment. It was dealing with laser spectroscopy of a Rubidium sample. Directly after switching on the device, we already could see some absportion curves. In contrast to the experiment of the day before, we managed to obtain quite reasonable results from the start. 

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Our measurement were just interrupted by another free cake that was offered because of a professor's birthday and later by lunch.

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So far, there was nice cake everyday, but today much more than yesterday! Extrapolation based on current data tells tomorrow's cake should be even better!

So we continued measuring absorption and emission spectra of the rubidium cell and in the afternoon, one hour behind the schedule, we managed to analyze the data spectra to get the temperature of the gas, the isotope ratio in cell and we even identified some hyperfine structure transition of the Rubidium D-line, the data on the density of the gas still has to be evaluated.

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We are looking forward to tomorrow's cake and another fun experiment!