For board games, I’m a big fan of Wavelength, Decrypto, and No Thanks!, along with Codenames.
Wavelength is a game where you try to get your teammates to guess a position on a spectrum, like “cold” to “hot” by giving them a clue, like “ice” or “the surface of the sun”. Decrypto is a lot like Codenames, but you’re also trying to disguise your clues from the other team. No Thanks! is a light, quick game which centers around pushing your luck as much as possible.
Our beamline is still very new (my main focus was actually on building/commissioning it), so for now, we’ve just been looking at relatively simple processes like the Debye-Waller effect, where the diffraction spots become weaker as the temperature rises.
The ultrafast capability comes from the electron beam having a sub-picosecond duration, which essentially corresponds to the shutter speed of a camera. By varying the delay between a pump laser and the electron probe and observing the change in intensity of the diffraction spots, we can figure out how the heat deposited by the laser diffuses through the sample, and make a “molecular movie” of this process. It’s in the same spirit as other pump-probe experiments, like what @Salamander does.
My username comes from the Endless Space 2 soundtrack!
I’m a postdoc, working on laser-plasma/ interactions and electron accelerators. My PhD work was on ultrafast electron diffraction.
This is a good explanation. Fields are really the fundamental object in QED (quantum electrodynamics) and QCD (quantum chromodynamics), the best theories we have for the electromagnetic and strong forces respectively. In fact, that entire branch of physics is usually called QFT (quantum field theory) to reflect that.