New barrel!!

Well, I finished all the neodymium samples today. Everything is looking great!  I've been able to calculate a few ages so far and they are awesome.  I can't tell you quite how awesome they are just yet in case someone steals my data before I publish it........just kidding, they're outstandingly awesome; to our knowledge they are the best garnet ages from sample sizes this small.  Some of them are only 2 nanograms, and all are less than 12 nanograms of Nd.

So, I changed the barrel today.  The cold trap was still full of liquid nitrogen so we had to take that off and put the other one on.  When you have a cold trap in a machine under vacuum nothing condenses on the outside, but when you bring that machine up to atmospheric pressure, water from the air freezes to the cold trap almost immediately.  The outside of the trap gets really really cold and we have to use special gloves to hold it.  I didn't get any pictures of removing the trap, but here's a picture of it just afterwards.

You can see ice is already forming on it just a few minutes after coming to atmospheric pressure.  Check out all that nitrogen venting out!  That's also the gloves I use...they look kind of like incredible hulk hands.

Here's a photo of the trap after a few more minutes.

It's got a few millimeters of frost on it at this point.  You can see a bit of nitrogen still steaming near the bottom and out of the top.

Early night home tonight....leaving at 9pm!  woo hoo!!!  Although, this early night is also the end of 60 hours in the lab.....sooooo.....not that early.

That's all for now.  See you tomorrow, hopefully with all my new ages collected!