Grotesque’s Conquest

Today is shaping up to be a day for the absurd! I’ve been up for four hours, and I’ve had three “what the hell?” moments already!

1. our network workgroup has one particular favorite customer: The guy is a paranoid screwup, aggressive and pretending to be litigation-happy; he keeps sending us letters purportedly from his lawyers that are so illogical that any lawyer would rather put a gun in his mouth than have his name written under it. What does this guy do today?
   He invites us to friend his facebook account.
2. Opening a cable tie without a knife is a little bit tricky, but fortunately, my house key is pretty sharp-edge. I put it through the tie, pull up and back, cut the tie, and then thanks to leftover momentum, I cut myself in the nose. I now have an exterior nose-bleed.
3. Taking a trolley is simple when you have the right coin (some rattling may be required). I saw an old man today, standing in front of a trolley with a 20 cent piece (decidedly not the right coin, ever) and complaining about technology never working right. He actually called the coin blockade in trolleys “technology”, like it was his hearing aid or something. Surreal.

I’m really guessing what the rest of the day could bring to continue this. So far, it’s been fun (the cut on the nose was light).

Grotesque’s Conquest

Today is shaping up to be a day for the absurd! I’ve been up for four hours, and I’ve had three “what the hell?” moments already!

1. our network workgroup has one particular favorite customer: The guy is a paranoid screwup, aggressive and pretending to be litigation-happy; he keeps sending us letters purportedly from his lawyers that are so illogical that any lawyer would rather put a gun in his mouth than have his name written under it. What does this guy do today?
   He invites us to friend his facebook account.
2. Opening a cable tie without a knife is a little bit tricky, but fortunately, my house key is pretty sharp-edge. I put it through the tie, pull up and back, cut the tie, and then thanks to leftover momentum, I cut myself in the nose. I now have an exterior nose-bleed.
3. Taking a trolley is simple when you have the right coin (some rattling may be required). I saw an old man today, standing in front of a trolley with a 20 cent piece (decidedly not the right coin, ever) and complaining about technology never working right. He actually called the coin blockade in trolleys “technology”, like it was his hearing aid or something. Surreal.

I’m really guessing what the rest of the day could bring to continue this. So far, it’s been fun (the cut on the nose was light).

Final exam!

Today I sat my final exam, a 45-minutes oral examination on condensed matter physics. I spent six weeks preparing, and the result is a (close) 1.0, the best grade possible. This concludes my studies of physics in Aachen, and once the paperwork is done (and the grade for my thesis finally confirmed), I will have the right to call myself “Dipl.Phys.”. Until then, I’ll be chilling out.

Bleaaaach

I had bit of an accident yesterday. I have dark blond hair, but I like to bleach it a little bit lighter once in a while. Yesterday, however, I overshot by a mile. It’s not quite platinum yet, but a pretty unnatural light yellow. Maybe I picked the wrong bleaching agent, maybe the formula is not as constant as it should be. Whatever the case, I look pretty funny at the moment. It’ll be hard to pull this one of with aplomb.

A (Capital) Decision Made

I have been thinking about my PhD options for the last few days; I had offers from Bonn and Kühlungsborn, and applications sent to DLR in Göttingen and PTB in Berlin. I managed to clear up the status of these last two by phone: DLR has been delayed and will not pick a candidate for a while yet, and PTB has recently made their choice. So, both are out for me. That boils it down to the two first candidates.

In the blue corner: Prof. Meschede, Institute for Applied Physics, Bonn

• topic: quantum optics, single atom manipulation with laser fields, state-selective quantum walk, two-atom entanglement
• salary: 1450€ per month, 250€ grad school on top, possible stipend due to good diploma
• group: friendly, two postdocs heading the administration and writing grant applications. Prof. has moderate amount of time, other grad students unremarkable. Founding seems sufficient, but moderate. Well-known due to book, but also good rep.
• surroundings: Bonn is the former capital, holds a ton of great museums, is pretty, has a lively student culture and many theaters, cinemas, choirs… Cologne is easily reachable. OTOH, pretty close to where I’ve always been.
• extra: a good friend of mine will probably work there, too

In the red corner: Prof. Lübken, Institute for Atmospheric Physics, Kühlungsborn

• topic: daylight capability to Rayleigh-Mie-Raman LIDAR, multi-day temperature measurement, correlation with radar wind field
• salary: 1350€ per month
• group: quite friendly, many postdocs with significant experience and quality standards. High publication count, high prestige. Institute has high base funding from the state.
• surroundings: Slim. Either holiday village on the beach, or Rostock with long commute. Somewhat cheaper than Bonn, very nice coast, but much fewer cultural possibilities.
• extra: multi-week measurements at ALOMAR, Andøya (Norway!!!)

I have today, after some final deliberation, decided on Bonn. The main part in this is the surroundings issue; frankly, I fear for my social life if I were to move to Kühlungsborn, and long commutes are not the hottest thing. A higher salary might counter-balance this, but that is not the case, as you can see. The multi-layered nature of the research at Kühlungsborn and the interesting combination of techniques are causing me significant regret, but I think that Bonn will be able to offer such problems as well, albeit maybe to a lesser degree.

Time to write two e-mails.

Thought on IAP & Rostock

IAP Kühlungsborn
I just got a six hour tour of the institute for atmosphere physics in Kühlungsborn, an institute of the Leibniz society. The institute has a very nice budget: 4 mio. EUR from state and federal sources, another million from grants. This money pays for twenty-something postdocs, some of which have been with the IAP for a long time and have a corresponding amount of practice and knowledge. There are a good dozen grad students, few undergrads, only a handful of technicians. This is a contrast to institutes like the ITA which runs on its grad students and has only two postdocs at all.

The two positions that would be open are:

1. daylight RMR LIDAR: using classical scattering, this laser backscatter method measures particle density and calculates temperature from that. Works between 20 and 70 km, so far night-only. Daylight capability could be achieved with better filtering, narrower field of vision, narrower laser wavelength variance. Once this works, take measurements of temperature over several days, correlate with radar windfield data, and find density waves in the results (this is prevented so far by the missing data from daytime).
2. mobile Fe LIDAR: using quantum transitions of meteoric iron atoms, works 80-110 km. requires even tighter filtering and exceptional lasers. Has recently achieved daylight capability, but is far from solid yet. Similar background as first position. The LIDAR is mobile (i.e., in a container) and will leave for Andøya soon. Improving it would amongst other things require work on etalon stabilization.

What’s so interesting about these density waves? They are thought to be the explaination for an unusual cooling phenomenon, where during summer, temperature between 80-100 km drops from 150 K to 100 K! This large drop is thought to be caused by scattering and bending of density waves, but their low periodicity means that they must be observed over several days continuously. The entire thing does sound interesting.

Rostock
I’ve just been in the largest city of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The drive from IAP takes rather long; 26 km but more than 40 minutes. There’s one road with a lot of traffic through several towns, with a few poorly-synchronized traffic lights in the way. Rostock itself has about 200,000 inhabitants, slightly less than Aachen, and does not offer quite the same possibilites, but is definitely nicer than, say, Düren. The problem is that if I move to Rostock, the commute will take long. If I move to Kühlungsborn, I could go to Rostock on the weekend. All told, however, I get the feeling that Bonn could offer more.

From Aachen to Rostock

Tomorrow, I have my second interview for a grad student position, this time at the institute of atmospheric physics in Kühlungsborn, near Rostock, which is at the extreme other end of the republic. I got a good start this morning: I went to my car, hit the Autobahn, and ran smack-wham into a traffic jam caused by a truck accident. By the time I hit the jam, it was about 6 km long. Two hours later, it was 15 km long and stretched back into the center of Aachen. Excellent!

So it took me almost two hours to leave the immediate vicinity of home. I did make it to the Ruhr valley fine, and despite numerous construction sites, there was little congestion. And then, I got to Lower Saxony. It’s the largest state in the republic, but not very many people live there. It’s Autobahnen are wide, and flat, and long, so you could go extremely fast. I say “could”, because Lower Saxony has a speed limit of 120 km/h almost anywhere. However, almost anywhere, nobody cares. I’ve been going 140 for a while now, and it’s not even using as much fuel as I had suspected. 7 l/100 km, that’s about 33.6 mpg. I’m making good progress. Just had my second stop of the day, drank some tea and called my mother. I’m closing in on Hamburg and expect to be in Rostock in two hours.

I’ll look at the small town of Kröpelin and the county seat of Bad Doberan, both of which are places where I might rent a cheap flat. I have dinner at the hotel at 19, so I gotta watch the scheduling. Rostock is so far not a viable option for living, because it’s 30 km away, which is a bit far to commute on those roads.

Later…

I have just discovered a worse case of traffic limits than Lower Saxony, and it’s called Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. This friggin state only has two Autobahnen, and this one is brand, squeaky new. There’s a limit of 100 km/h, despite the fact that it’s new, empty and straight. 140 km/h would be totally acceptable, but what makes it worse than Lower Saxony is not only the 20 km/h off, it’s the fact that some people actually stick to it, but still drive on the fast lane.

Later…

Kohl wanted flowering landscapes, right? As far as I can tell, everything is blooming here. Haven’t seen any people yet, but that’s fine now that the traffic limit is gone. Broooom… well, maybe not too fast, or my tank will be empty soon.

Results or riches?

I went to a job interview in Bonn yesterday, at prof. Meschede’s laser physics group. This guy is well known because he has been editing a respected general physics book for several years now; he also held a public lecture in Aachen a while back on fancy things he’s been doing with ultra-thin glass fibers.

I first got to talk with his two post-docs a bit (he has two more, but the first pair seemed to be the middle management and the grant writers). After that, I held my diploma presentation again in front of his entire group. Over twenty listeners and a pleased reception made for good going and I even got a few good questions. Lunch was had, and I embarked on a tour of the laboratories.

First off: These guys are excellent. Professional, systematic, careful and reasonable financed. You cannot fake a good optical setup that easily, and the results are impressive. The current experiments have grown over a number of years and are obviously the result of a great deal of hard and inspired work. They are operated by pairs or trios of grad students and sometimes a diploma student.

The experiment I could get a position at deals with manipulation of single neutral atoms for the purpose of quantum computing, employing molecular optical traps, dipole traps and laser conveyors. These techniques only work when tuned to extreme precision, so good experimental procedure, patience and thorough trouble-shooting would be on the menu. There’s probably some electronics aspects, lots of programming and a required basic understanding of the theory required, too.

The group, so far as I have seen it, seemed to have a pleasant working atmosphere. These people do not get paid very much, but there are upsides: The post-docs write all the grants, the professor has at least some time available and the results of the hard work are world-class. Also, the city is pretty nice; our former capital is a 300,000 place on the rhine, much like Aachen actually. There’d be some tasks outside research work, like supervising an exercise class and maybe a diploma student, but that is quite moderate and has its own rewards.

Tomorrow, I’m going to Rostock to visit the institute for atmosphere physics there. They’ll have to go far to trump Bonn.