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The end of term that is. I was in uni from 9 this morning and only got back home at 9pm. That’s the longest I’ve ever been at uni in any one day and I was working for most of it. After last week’s 15 seconds of fame, I’ve had to carry on with my project. Yesterday I had to give a 6 minute presentation to the rest of my class about it, and today, we got some pretty pictures. I thought I’d post some pics of my experiment. We’re basically trying to trap particles with <2.5kV AC electric fields which we have done quite simply here:

So now we’re trying to see if it works in a medium vacuum:

Because we’re using high voltages and taking it down to vacuum we risk electrical breakdown so we’ve insulated the main part of our trap with plastic caps:

Now it’s in a vacuum and turned on, looks like we forgot to insulate the tops/bottoms – so now we have plasma discharge everywhere. Looks pretty!!

Well at least our insulation worked:

So we have 1 week to sort this all out and get ready for our viva interview with our supervisor and assessor. Final year is tough and hard work – but it’s actually quite “fun” too and I’ve learnt quite a lot. Pretty tired already, so think I’ll go to bed. Nite.