Things that break

Yesterday an important piece of equipment, our sample holder, broke. The part where the samples are is down in the cryostat, with those precious little black crystals that are the point of all this. And the rest is out here in the lab. A cryostat is nothing you can just open, get whatever you have inside, and close again. You have gases at low temperatures, vacuum, fragile parts. Before we even can think of starting the rescue mission for my samples we have to wait until the system gets to liquid nitrogen temperature, that is, 196 degrees below zero, or 77 K. In the meantime, I prepare the wires to repair the sample holder whenever we take it up. The soldering machine and I are best friends by now.