Day 7

After the morning meeting today, I went down to the lab. Dr Hornak tried to set up the RF probe and find the signal to start characterizing it's sensitivity. However, the signal kept disappearing and there were a lot of other signals & noise as well. We eventually figured out why the signal kept disappearing—we had used superglue to stick the DPPH sample to the RF probe (DPPH has a paramagnetic signal so it can be used to determine the sensitivity of the probe). The superglue apparently reacted with the free radical in the DPPH which impacted the signal. To solve this we used a glue stick to stick the DPPH to the probe—the glue from the glue stick did not react with the DPPH.  Even after solving this issue, it was still difficult to see the signal, and we had difficulty in characterizing the RF probe's sensitivity with this signal. Dr Hornak started to look at this issue more closely,  trying to figure out how to fix the RF probe. After lunch, I generated some data using another RF probe and began graphing the data. On Monday we will look more closely at this data to determine the center of the probe.