This week!

This week was a lot of fun for so many different reasons, but by FAR the most fun I had all week (as is always the case, of course) was when I met up with Dr. Hassel to dig deeper into our codes and run more simulations based off of our previous data accumulations. What myself and Dr. Hassel are trying to do is to compare our computational results, and thus our graphs for those results, with what Dr. Gianfranco Vidali has been able to accomplish at Syracuse University. Dr. Vidali has performed years of tests in the field of surface science, and was graced with a generous NSF grant to continue conducting his research in the future. I am very hopeful that, since he is at Syracuse, we will be able to go over as a group to look at his setup and learn some new and exciting things about our own project. So, yes, our goal is to try and replicate, comprehend and improve on the results Dr. Vidali has gotten in the past. Our binding energy data set, VidaliOld, is simply assumed old binding energies that Dr. Vidali has used in the past to procure his own results. These binding energies are vital in measuring the diffusion energy of OH, O and O2 (for now)! That is because binding energies are much more reliable and less time consuming to calculate than diffusion energies, which have a tendency to be harder to detect directly. Dr. Hassel explained it to me by comparing the diffusion energy to the game of Plinko from The Price is Right, where the results can be extremely uncertain without the intermediate step of determining the binding energy. After running our codes and creating simulations for O, OH and O2, we then copied our results into a comparison script which allows us to easier compare Dr. Vidali's results to our own. In Fortran, we plug our numbers into our "gg_compare" code to compute the differential rank percentage of the elements and compound I mentioned earlier. Essentially, we can then look at our results and rank them by differential rank percentage (as well as by raw amount by running another file) from elements that are making more parts per million and elements that are making fewer parts per million by percentage. And that is how far we got last week! I'm excited to see what this week is gonna bring!