I had a scientific discovery! In our weekly meeting today Neel asked me about what the samples are. In looking them up, I noticed that there seemed to be a trend - as more methly groups where added to the benzene ring the slope of the absolute light yield as a function of boron increased. This is really exciting (in case you were wondering), because our current paper provides only characterization and having a physical backing would be awesome.
Ideally I hope to associate the change in the pi cloud of the benzene with the changes in the slopes - but other than being a neat little fact I don't know what it would imply. I have to learn a lot of chemistry. Most of it seems to be easy enough to pick up and qualitative. I think at some point I should revisit my chemistry career and get over my lingering hate of freshman chem.
It is all rather confusing, actually. We want to detect a neutron interaction with boron, so two fluors are used to transfer the ultraviolet photons emitted from the when boron reacts with a neutron to visible light, and from there the benzene+methyl groups transfer the photon. So really the above trend could be because of the methyl groups interacting with the fluors . . . at which point its time for whiskey.
In other news, I learned a really cool command for dos, 'tree'. It prints out the file structure as a tree structure. This was very useful as I tried to find the settings that were used for the previous rounds.
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