MAT 251

So this is the latest machine I'm working on: The MAT 251

Isn't it great! Its an old mass spec and has all sorts of toggles and switches and push buttons to make it work.  Its brilliantly retro and when it works, it works like a treat. It is a carbonate mass spectrometer.  Carbonate samples (like stalagmite powders) 200mg in weight are put in vials.  Phosphoric acid is added and the resultant carbon dioxide gas is sent through the mass spectrometer and the proportions of each masses are recorded to give nice and shiny oxygen and carbon isotope ratios.  Or random numbers, depending on its mood.

Not that it works that often. Its been broken on and off for a long time. Its starting to run out of legs. In the last month or so its hardly run at all after a series of faults. We have a new machine waiting in the wings, the shiny, the new, the imaginatively named MAT 253, but we've yet to get it up and running (for reasons which thoroughly perplex and frequently annoy me!).  So we're stuck with this aging beauty and her temper for a little while longer.

The MAT 251 and the new 253 will run the vast majority of the analyses I will run over the course of my PhD.  Its the bread and butter of my PhD if you will.