try it with the gas line and see if the membrane can exert any pressure.

With the correct regulator, it all works OK.

I also see now why I didn’t get any good acoustic waves in my sample previously—the liquid had all leaked out! Looking at the DAC now, the gasket hole collapsed completely and the only thing keeping it relatively intact was the presence of the ruby!

Oops…

Anyway, I did bring (at least portions of) the ruby up to 60kbar, and I could see the shift happen in real time on the spectrometer.

Cool. An iota closer to graduation. Now if only the damned laser would work.

After I return the cryostat and then help my labmate take some data for his masters thesis, I’ll do this and just get it off my list (I’d also like to try the phononic bandgap materials again, too…).

As a side note… man, I miss Lady of Manx, my original teammate on this goal, and the reason I adopted in the first place. LOM, if you’re out there, drop me a line!!!! Does anybody know where she went?

I just got a regulator that can put out 4000psi in pressure. Of course, I am not going to put 4000psi into the system, but I likely will put up to 3000psi. The only problem is that the connection from the regulator is female and I need it to be male. Now, all I need is the right female-female adapter…

Finally got some information back from the company that was sorely missing in the directions. Our pressure regulator is WAY too low pressure for this application.

But, this means all that I have to do is order the right one, do a pressure run, and then mark this goal off as done.

I tried it with the gas line. The membrane was not exerting any pressure on the cell.

I computed with Newton’s 3^rd that for every .7bar increase in pressure inside the membrane, the pressure of the anvil cell should go up by 1kbar. I raised the membrane pressure up to 7 bar and the ruby spectrum didn’t shift.

Tomorrow, I’m going to examine the line that feeds the membrane. Maybe something is wrong with it. Another course of action will be to try the spare that we have.

My (much) better half is abroad right now. What better way to spend a lonely Friday night apart from her than to stay in lab so that I can try it with the gas line and see if the membrane can exert any pressure?

I’ve got the damned thing all hooked up to the gas cylinder through the control box, and it’s sitting in the (newly) recalibrated spectrometer setup so that I can tell if the pressure is changing.

I may have to write some new fitting routines for the resulting fluorescence lines, but I should be able to tell if the spectrum is shifting.

Today I may get started with this. The cell’s membrane has a quick-release Swagelock that attaches to the pressure regulator box. The regulator is, in turn, attached to a cylinder of compressed gas via another pressure regulator.

Now, I got a cylinder a while ago, but I’m not sure it has much left in it as I had been using it to back-pressure a dewar that held LN₂ for the cryostat. Maybe I’ll have to rent another one, which may hold me up for a day or two.

But first, I should probably get the ruby fluorescence setup rebuilt so that I can see if the membrane is exerting any pressure.