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On Plasmas

First Published: 2023 May 15

Draft 1

Today I updated my twenty four for twenty four goal1, which feels like as good of a reason to restart this blog as any. On an impulse, I copied an old blog post, because I was intrigued by what the title meant. Interestingly, while discussing the definitions of in my life, I didn’t discuss the diving/gymnastics centered meaning of the word.

Anyways, one experiment that I was given to rebuild as a part of my PhD progress has the goal of creating a standing plasma. Last week I successfully produced a plasma for the first time in the instrument in over half a decade, which is incredible to me. Now I need to optimize the plasma and make it usable for what we need.2


  1. the short version is I want to do twenty four new things while I am twenty four years old↩︎

  2. read: it won’t strike below around 200 mTorr of pressure, and our spectroscopic tools need generally sub 100 mTorr of pressure↩︎