The First Day!

So today I received a high five from a rubber chicken. After our debriefing and staff meeting in the morning, we walked over to the Red Barn, where we did some team-building exercises, in which we learned the importance of communication and collaboration, as well as being mindful that we don't assume certain constraints exist when they may not. It particularly struck me, as we reflected on a challenge in which we had to flip over two carpets while 7 of us stood on each of them, that we had automatically assumed that our two groups were to work separately of each other; and yet, our task would have been far easier, had we all simply stepped onto one carpet, and then flipped the other.

After our team building exercises, we had lunch together and got to know each other better over the pizza and juice, before splitting up into our smaller groups for each department. When we met up with Dmitry, he showed me, Peter, and Ashley around the lab, and to our offices, just across the hall. The offices didn't have swipe access so we headed back upstairs to collect our keys from Joe. Shortly after, Dmitry showed us to our "classroom" of sorts, where he spent the next couple hours teaching us the basics of the physics of light and answering any questions we had.

I found this really fascinating, as it gave me a chance to expand upon the instruction I had received this past year in physics and chemistry. Dmitry taught us about various ways of detecting light, the general nature of the wave function as a series of sine and cosine curves, polarization and scattering of light, semiconductors (the most common/famous of which is Silicon), the band gap, CCDs (charge-coupled detectors), quantum efficiency and yield, and the operation of pixels and why the minimization of pixel size and increase in number of pixels will produce a sharper, clearer image. To learn more, we each continued at home and did some research on a couple topics that interested us. I personally pursued further research of semiconductors and CCDs in C. Kittel's Introduction to Solid State Physics.