Visits to Diamond

I have made 3 week long trips to Diamond Light Source so far (written in July 2018). The first was in January when I started developing software with Laila Al-Madhagi, a PhD student. In this week we designed a software package of python scripts and wrote pseudo-code for the most important scripts. Photos of the doughnut shaped synchrotron building are in my flickr Diamond Light Source album.

The next trip was in May. This was a coding sprint where we finished the first in the set of 6 scripts. This script is a wrapper for orca which is an open source quantum chemistry code that is particularly good for analysing the spectroscopic properties of open-shell molecules. We are using it to automate XES (X-ray Edge Spectroscopy) Analyses. We finished by adding command line options and a log file so that we can run it more flexibly and collect metadata on how it performs. We also improved the pseudo-code for the other scripts and made good head way on writing 2 more scripts.

For the third trip in June we finalised the further 2 scripts so that Laila could start using them in full force. We also wrote pseudo-code for 2 more of the scripts. Alex White from the data capture team gave me a tour of the synchrotron which I put in a flickr album.