During this year’s SPIE conference in California, Jami Johnson presented work on GCLAD and her imaging efforts with our colleagues Joost van der Neut and Jeff Shragge. As you can see below, she also managed to find some time to visit two alumni of the PAL — and Geophysics programme at UoA — at their new home in Palo Alto, CA: our good friends Leighton Watson and Jackson MacFarlane!
Author: kvan637 (page 6 of 8)
One of our recent highlights is the graduation of Zoe Davidson. She completed her Btech in Opto-electronics with a project in the Physical Acoustics Lab on monitoring the ripeness of fruit. Every day, Zoe carefully recorded laser ultrasonic wavefields on a Braeburn apple. She was able to make quantitative inferences on the (an)elastic properties of the apple, and their time-lapse behaviour. She found, for example, that the elasticity of her apple deteriorated at roughly 1% per day at room conditions. The image above shows part of her wave fields for a suite of consecutive days (legend in hours); you can clearly see the systematic slowing of the waves as the apple grows older.
Last Friday, we had a small celebration of the opening of our newly renovated space in the basement (B50-B52) of building 301 for the PAL and Physics of Rocks (PORO) lab. Members of the labs showcased their research to guests that included our Dean and Deputy Dean of Science (Professors John Hosking and Jim Metson, respectively) as well as Professor Paul Kench, Head of School of Environment. Discussions spanning research on the state of the Alpine Fault, resonating ice cores, medical imaging, all the way to testing the ripeness of fruit from apple quakes made for a successful afternoon, and we hope this event showed our appreciation for the hard work of all the people who made our labs a reality.
Sam Hitchman‘s project on developing a laser Doppler vibrometer (LDV) has been published in the European Journal of Physics! This paper lays out the detailed workings, parts, and the design of this device as an open-source (OS) hardware project to measure particle velocities in a non-contacting way. We hope this paper will be the starting point for OSLDVs to be built, used, and improved by researchers around the world!
Prabhat Shrestha has embarked on a new adventure with the Schlumberger Gould Research, in Cambridge (UK), after handing in his MSc thesis on microseismic event relocation. It has been a great privilege to have Prabhat in our group. We are proud of all he has accomplished and wish him all the best in England!
Prabhat (right) and Kasper on his last day in Auckland!
This (kiwi) Summer, we were lucky enough to have Evan Rust from Boise join the PALs. Evan designed and developed a scanning system for our lasers, and implemented this into our data acquisition system, based on the PLACE open-source acquisition software suite. This ends a year-long work/holiday programme for Evan, and we wish him safe travels on his way back to the US!
Evan (left) and the omnipresent Sam Hitchman
After completing his BSc Honours degree with us on time-lapse measurements of carbonate-cemented sandstones, Jackson is starting PhD in the Geophysics Department of Stanford University. We want to congratulate another one of our students heading off to Stanford, where he will join former PALs Leighton Watson and Randi Walters.
Jackson (right) and Sam in the lab
In February of 2015, we will move into our new home of B52 of building 301. Here are pictures of the three areas, as of January, 2015.
Atrium of the PORO and PAL space
The Physics Of ROck lab
PAL space
A paper by Jami L Johnson, Kasper van Wijk, and Henrik tom Wörden was recently published in the Journal of Laboratory Automation describing the Python package we’re developing. The package is open-source, freely available, and designed for all things experimental: instrument automation, data acquisition, and data analysis. Check out the paper or contribute to the project!
Dr Ludmila Adam (Mila) was awarded one of the very prestigious 2014 Marsden grants from the Royal Society of New Zealand for her proposed research on rock physics of the Alpine Fault. The title of her work is “Getting inside the earthquake machine: fine-scale imaging of the Alpine Fault zone,” and her collaborators are Dan Faulkner, Virginia Toy and John Townend. Congratulations to this team!