Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Dunking Crystal

One of my experiments has been to see what happens to calcite in liquid nitrogen. I'm trying to build a beamsplitter that will work in a cold vacuum. So I got to dunk a crystal.






































































5 Comments:

Blogger Liz said...

Did you feel like you needed to dunk all the calcite you have so none of them would feel neglected? =)

3:31 PM  
Blogger Jesse said...

SO? What happened? Any cracking? Will you be cooling it rapidly or slowly in the vacuum?

9:28 AM  
Blogger Claire said...

Yeah, more details please!

9:37 AM  
Blogger geekedout said...

so, this was obviously a very quick cooling - i don't know if you can see it, but it cracked a lot. but it cracked along previous weak planes. the IR spectrograph cools much much slower than insta-dunk. i'll be doing 2 things next - building a "jacket" for the next sample, and the next sample will be much nicer psudo-optical calcite. i've also just got some sample grease from dow corning that i've got to try out.

10:28 AM  
Blogger Liz said...

When are you going to bring some of the liq. nitrogen home so we can play with it?? ;)

4:38 PM  

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