About my job

Maybe just a few words about what I'm doing for my daily outcome. I'm a scientist, or being more exact a physicist, doing optical experiments now for more than 10 years. Part of my job is taking pictures like the one you can see here. In principle I'm doing something like tabletop macro photography, beside the setup is a little bit special. As light source I'm using a laser shining on a crystal where by some magic the frequency of the light is doubled. That means shining in red light and afterwards I got blue light.

Manganite

Behind my crytal is just an old Nikon lens with about 100 mm focal length to image the light on the camera. The camera itself is half a meter away, so the picture is about 3 or 4 times larger than the crystal itself. The camera is very special, cooled by liquid nitrogen to -100°C, so the readout noise is almost neglectable, making it possible to detect almost every single photon coming from my crystal. Or in other words: In a practically totaly dark room I could get good images in seconds :)

In principle this would be the perfect tool for infrared photography, cause it's sensitive up to wavelengths of more than 1000 nm, but unfortunately you have to connect it to a special power device and a computer. So it's nothing what I would call mobile :(

But maybe once I'll try to make images from my laboratory with it...

The job in genaral is really interesting, we are investigating mainly magnetic materials, like the one in the picture. It's Yttriummanganite, and from the family name of these crystals I took my user name, manganite.

If you ask for any purpose of my research, than I can tell you the usual story we have for this: It's i.e investigating how fast I can switch magnetism, so what is the limit of the speed of my harddisc? Or looking for new materials which allow different ways of data storage. But that's far away, so basicaly I'm doing, what is called basic research with no practical immediate use. Therefor it's not so very different from hanging around at a photosharing site :)

Hope, that makes it more transparent who I am. I think it's good thing to know at least a little bit about each other.