A whole weekend of summer vacation? Sweet!…. Seriously though, I already start work tomorrow? I feel like I just got out of my last final.

My summer research project is in a chemistry lab at Caltech. The project is to build a novel chemical reactor that can take samples of a solution in real-time to study time-dependent species of a reaction. To do this, we have constructed an acoustic levitation chamber to float micro-droplets of our sample. The floating drops are subjected to a pulsed electric field which ionizes them, creating tiny charged progeny droplets that a mass spectrometer can detect. Imagine the most futuristic piece of equipment for the kind of chemistry done in sci-fi movies and that’s what we are building.

Its gonna be a good summer.