I agree. I think it's trying to make the most of a horrible situation. It absolutely sucks for the students most affected this year, especially sr and jr. Hopefully APS can say the experiment failed and with more certainty on support, go back to the regional model next yr

The timing was horrible. Host bids were due early 2025 when grants were being pulled for DEI wording. Was uncertain if the typical NSF and DOE support would be available. Each site requires 50-100K in fundraising. Maybe time to rethink the "free" registration if big $ isn't available?

Sounds like a solid summer vacation day!

Finally please reach out to lead author Zechariah or me if you have a laser color marking application that could benefit from a low-energy, low-cost method! We also have some ideas about how this method could treat metals to be more corrosion resistant or even antibacterial!

What’s next? We’d like to know exactly what chemicals lead to what color. If we can develop a relationship between the energy, the oxide layers formed, & the final color, we could save lots of time by calculating the parameters for a color instead of relying on trial & error as is currently standard

What’s special about what we’re doing here? We use lower power lasers than ever before use to color mark steel. A lot lower power. Five orders of magnitude lower. This difference is essentially the same difference between a cat toy and a laser cutter.

How do know this reaction is happening? We bounced X-rays off the laser-exposed areas & measured the Binding Energy of electrons shooting off from the metal surface to tell us which elements & oxidation state are present on the surface, which can distinguish between Cr(OH)3 & Cr2O3

Unlike the conventional methods, we were able to do this without any external O2. All the chemistry is happening from material inside the metal & it’s oxide film

Lasers & voltage are sources of energy. W/ the right amounts of energy, we cause chemical rxns that wouldn’t happen otherwise. Here, we’re dehydrating Cr(OH)3 into Cr ions which react with Cr0 metal to form Cr2O3.

So what’s happening? Turns out there’s a whole field of engineering called “laser color marking.” Brilliant marks on metals can be produced for product identification with high-power, pulsed lasers. Compounds like chromium oxide can have bright, striking colors like this green powder

We did a few experiments and realized the glowing spots only appeared where we shined the laser and only when we applied a voltage to the metal

In our quest to image corrosion at the nanoscale, we observed a strange thing, spontaneously formed particles we could see glowing under the microscope! Like a lot of great science, we didn’t understand what was happening at first youtube.com/shorts/gyh_A...

Learning more about county government from speaker @chrisronayne.bsky.social. The @lwvgreatercle.bsky.social provides this guide too of you are interested:

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