Third year PhD student Ryan McMullen has progressed beyond the screening talk to enter the qualifying exam phase of his PhD. His talk was on recent liquid ammonia microjet x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy results and comparisons to solid and gaseous/cluster ammonia PE spectra.

In other news, Ryan and Steve are travelling back to BESSY II in November for three weeks in order to tackle the very tricky quest of forming microjets of alkali metal dissolved in liquid ammonia in vacuo. We will be linking back up with Robert Seidel (HZB), Bernd Winter’s group (the FHI of the Max Planck Society) and Pavel Jungwirth’s band of merry men (IOCB; Prague). Ryan is crafting nozzles especially for the occasion.

Challenge accepted.