First Hurdle

Obstacles are to come right after my decision. I had expected no less. True enough, immediately on Monday we were informed that we have been banned from using the analysis equipments that we have been borrowing for the past some years. A student made a mistake and left the power of an very expensive equipment on for 1 hour. The professor from that lab was outraged and issued a ban for all of the Waki lab members thereon.

This would create a big inconvenience for me since I really rely on those equipment to obtain results of my experiments. The only way would be to travel all the way to the Tokyo campus and use the joint analysis lab. I don't feel over negative about it and didn't want to blame the student at all because a few months ago I also made a mistake that possibly caused the equipment to break in our own lab, although later on it was proven that the equipment had been flaky all these times waiting to break. If I didn't go through that incident, I would've been upset at him.

Since the decision, I have been working extremely hard on my experiments. On Tuesday, my professor called me over and presented the research of Ohgai-san to me. I know a lot about his research since we've been in the same group for a long time. The professor presented me with something very peculiar. By some freak of nature, part of his result defied our common sense. In the past I had always regarded that phenomenon as an error of experiments or attribute it to unreliability of our equipments. She insisted this is a phenomenon that has never happened or explained and she suggested that I can change to this direction. She said that base on this research I could come up with a very innovative paper, that woulc be extremely benefitical to my pursuit to phD. I gave her the answer of, "If I have time..."

Later on that afternoon, I continued my crazy experiment schedules. One of which was to make 8 solar cells at one try, and 13 in total. In the past the most I had made was 4 cells. When the cell came out, they turned out to be YELLOW. I am the most experienced in this lab in making the cells with the pre-made paste, and I had never ever encountered this problem in the past. The yellow appearance was beginning to worry me. Is everything failing right before my eyes?

I tried to stay positive and continued with my experiments. I made 2 more extra cells for reference. I searched online and realize that my cell might have been changed slightly because the lack of oxygen in the oven. I made so many cells at the same time, they were fighting for oxygen, some of them turned yellow!

After some searching online I realize there is a possibility that what happened to my samples is exactly what happened with Ohgai-san's research. It is very likely that my research may be heading into that direction with a different material after all!

I continued my own direction today afternoon, hoping to squeeze out some more data for the presentation next week. I followed a simple procedure from a paper written by Sri Lankans. It didn't work at all! Later on I tried to start the sputter equipment that I had been using a few days ago. It just refused to start at all. I've tried 2 other alternative ways to proceed my experiment, but all failed. I am hitting a dead end for my research. At the same time I am wondering if the other way had already been open to me.

I would have to put down my pride, put my topic on hold and pursue the new direction with less than 6 months to go. I hope tomorrow's experiment will confirm all these.