Monday, March 26, 2012

What a day, What a day!!



When I got up this AM I thought we were going to town. We got a frantic call from one of the guys who went out crystal digging a few days ago. Phillip almost didn't answer it because he thought i wanted to go to town. I told him to answer it and see what the guy wanted. We can always go to town another day, it's not something that couldn't be put off to a later day.

As it turned out, he wanted to go back out to get crystals. Said he went out by himself one day and couldn't find any. He knew we would find a place for him to dig or give him stock of ours.

We met him out there and he had his wife and another gal with him. The 2 gals had cleared out a place under a palo verde tree and had set up camp as I call it. Folding table and chairs, big cooler. and a few other things. I thought to myself, Damn ! Damn! I will be babysitting. But as it turned out they started knitting and told me I didn't have to cater to them. If I wanted to look for crystals, to go right ahead. I started to look around when another car came and another gal got out and joined the other 2. She knew them but she had come out to look for crystals. She picked around on the surface a bit but spent most of her time talking to the other 2 gals. I never even found out what their names were. Phillip took the old dude back to the same hole he had the digging in before and dug the hole out deeper. Sure enough there was more crystals down below. Kept him busy until lunch time. The old gals had went all out and had fixed a big lunch. Wanted us to join them but Phillip had already packed a lunch for us because when we go to Prescott we usually stop somewhere on the way home a look for arrowheads. Any way they left shortly after lunch. Meantime I had gotten into a big pocket of crystals and didn't say anything to anybody. Phillip came and opened the hole deeper and we were still pulling out crystals at 5;00 And time to head back. Phillip caved the hole in and scattered fresh dirt over the tailings so no one would think we found anything there. I will clean it out the next time we go back out that way. I think the old guy wants to go back out this thursday.

Hey Jake! You never did say what you were trying to prove with that graph thing. I was wondering. This is your weird granny who dreams of two different kinds of meteorites that are so violently anti magnetic toward each other that they create a very strong antimagnetic power even stronger than magnets. Remember I wrote about that dream back last year. Anyway I was thinking of magnetic power used in your experiment. Too weird?? I don't always remember my brain-echos but I seem to remember the weird ones.

Getting late now so I'm out of here and into bed.

Granny.

1 comment:

Jake said...

Hi Grandma. To answer your question about my PL... I was hoping to see sharp 'cone like' signals (peaks with widths about 0.02 eV) right around 1.58 eV. This would be indicative of "band edge" emission. I was hoping one set would have cones around 1.59 or so and another set around 1.56. Then I could say "see, look, that's proof of an alloy because the band edge emission shifted toward lower energies, because of band bending this is evidence of an alloy of intermixing of sulfur and tellurium across the junction."

buuuuuut..... instead I got these freekin' super wide PL peaks which are round, not cone, and are about 0.3 eV wide (not 0.02 eV wide). To top it off they are not even close to the band edge of CdTe ~1.6 eV.

So I have round wide blobs at low energy. I'm getting light but not where I want it to come from. My official answer: "grain boundaries are providing recombination paths that are not radiative, also these grain boundaries contain deep level defects with a large number of phonon replicas with huge Rhys-Huang values which is why the peaks are so smooth and wide, in fact in some cases I think I'm looking at a super position of multiple DAP defect centers also with associated phonon replicas which is why some peaks appear to have a 'shoulder' that changes shape with temperature"

My committee will ask "does that show evidence of an alloy?"

I will answer "uhh.... er.... well... not really." So I'm hoping they can chock it up to something I tried (spent way too much time on, not by my choosing) but didn't succeed at.

However, this answer is dull, I like the "protons connected to ion; the ions connected to the neutron; the fermions connected to the upside down absorption curve; da da ne na ne a ta ta" that's way more fun and interesting than DAP centers and admitting defeat.