My first beamtime

Last Tuesday – my birthday was extremely tiring, I didn’t celebrate as I came home from Latvia at around 3 pm and had to unpack and repack again, as I was going to the Diamond Light Source the following day. I was extremely tired so went to sleep at 9 pm. However, I couldn’t sleep, so my next day was totally messed up. I had a train to the Diamond at 6 am and when I came I was extremely tired. I barely managed to go though the day. We have started working at 10 am and I have stayed there until 9 pm. My supervisor has stayed even longer, as we had to ensure that the setup was working efficiently. The next day was much better as I had a great night’s rest. The rest of the week we were working from 9:30 am until midnight, few times I have stayed until 1 am or 2 am. The week was really busy but I really enjoyed it. My second supervisor also came and I managed to spend a lot of time with them which gave me an opportunity to get to know them better. We managed to get a lot of good data and for the past day I was exporting it all to the hard drive, its 2.5 TB of data. By the way, one of the last days that I was there, there was an explosion in our building. The vacuum tube has exploded on the beamline which is just behind our hatch (room). The bang was really loud and I felt the whole building shaking and dust falling from the celling. :D Well no one was hurt which is good, especially taking into account that there was a lady inside just a few minutes before.

By the way, the trip was paid for me and I will be able to claim all my food expenses when I come back to Manchester.

Now I am on the train to Manchester. I need to sort out my access to Henrey Mosley, where all lab µCT are and where I can work on all my data. I was briefly showed how to analyse fibres on Avizo and ImageJ. I hope I will be able to analyse it efficiently, as this will gave me a publication. Also while at the Diamond I managed to talk with a last year CDT student who similarly to me is using Diamond to analyse her samples. She kind of calmed me down by saying that she did not have a lot of knowledge or experience in any of those techniques and she survived her viva. So fingers crossed that I will also be ok.

Overall, the trip was amazing, the people there are really nice and friendly. I made a ton of new contacts which is awesome. I am really looking forward coming back again. We will try to write a proposal for the end of this month to apply for Diamond Manchester Collaboration beamtime.

This Friday I should get induction to the labs and I will start fully working on my project. To be honest I just can’t wait to start. J