immelmann loop

named after a german ww1 ace, max immelmann, the maneuver is in fact a half loop and a half twist, after which you end up the opposite direction from which you came (unlike in a regular loop). while this stunt isn´t very useful in a dogfight, it is a lot of fun on a rollercoaster.

i´ve had the luck to try out a rather fancy rollercoaster in copenhagen, in tivoli gardens (btw, tivoli means amusement park in icelandic). first of all, i had to discover that huge scary steel rolercoasters are much more pleasant than the puny wooden ones. they offer a much smoother ride, while the wooden ones bump you against the sides of the car as you aren´t strapped in properly.

my only regret is that i didn´t have an mp3 player with me so i could listen to manowar while riding ( power would have been quite an appropriate song); lacking the proper music all i could do was yell from the top of my lungs SATAaaa ANDAGIiii when i got to the top of the loop (i wonder how many of you get this joke!?).

ps: the pic was taken right after coming out of a zero g roll; you can see how calm i take it all (mostly cause it was my 3^rd time on that ride :p).

for great justice...

there you go claudiu.

these are gold wires, on a sub-micron scale fabricated by reducing chlorauric acid (HAuCl4) triggered by a two-photon absorption process (this was detailed in another post so i won't go into details).

the area of interest in this image is the top right corner where you can see the inscription "ayb", mirrored, though, as the sample is upside down relative to the objective. (the image was taken with a 100x oil immersion objective)

and no, claudiu. i don't have any "s" or "ncc-1701" inscriptions :p

the cleanroom

for lack of a better topic, i´ll just post a picture from the cleanroom. i´m the fat guy in the middle, right next to the ellipsometer. the cleanroom itself is somewhere between a class 100 and 1000 (this means the number of particles of 0.5 micron diameter per cubic feet).

there is a lot going on in there , but i myself, right now, am doing some thin gold strips on a specific polimer -benzocyclobuthene- by means of uv photolithography (they will serve as plasmonic waveguides).