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The rock and ice mechanics lab at Lamont-Doherty is led by PIs Christine McCarthy and Ben Holtzman. Now, more than ever, we are in the process of growing our lab and building our experimental program. Along with a team of postdocs, undergrads, grads, techs, and longtime staff engineer Ted, we are rehabilitating and revamping some of the old equipment and building and buying new rigs for exciting new experiments on both rock and ice. You can follow along with our progress here.

Wednesday 20 March 2019

Is Rob making a still?

Came into the lab to find this. I have no idea what's going on here, but I love the looks of this curly tube funnel thing.

Friday 1 March 2019

Progress on Cryostat version 3.0

In our ongoing efforts to make our cryostat go colder and colder, Mike designed these.
They are the cooling blocks that go right next to the sample and have chilled fluid (coming from a custom LN-controlled chiller that Mike made) pumped into those channels. 
The inner side (closest to sample) is high thermal conductivity aluminum and the outer side is insulating PMMA. In order to seal them together, both sides needed to be roughened. But he left the little viewing window smooth. That way we can see (and potentially image) the sliding interfaces.