Pictures

Some photos of my setup and that of my labmate:

View of the lab

This is my labmate's experiment. His goal is to study aerosols; the final construction will be a long tube at a near-vacuum. A pressure gradient will suck gas (nitrogen) from one end of the tube to the other. Dust will be dropped into one end and pulled through a very small opening, letting him study its dispersion and other behavior. Eventually plasma would be added at some point, but I'm not exactly sure when or why.

Everybody who comes into the lab can't help but make a joke about the beer keg being used to contain and measure out gas. 

My workspace after some massive cleanup. The large box encloses the laser that I use to illuminate my dust clouds. The two boxes on top are the laser's power supply and the display for the pressure gauge. To the right is the incredibly expensive Phantom Miro camera that I use to record the dust clouds. It can record at over 100,000 frames per second, but the faster you shoot, the less light you get in each frame; our laser strength limits us to about 150 fps, and I usually shoot at 100.

These are the valves controlling flow into and out of the chamber. The thick hose on the right and left leads into the chamber, and the thin hose in the center leads to the vacuum pump. 
The black and white valve in the middle regulates the flow of argon, while the green valve in the top-left controls nitrogen. Argon is what the plasma is made of, while nitrogen is just used as a clean, cheap, and harmless gas for bringing the pressure in the chamber up to atmospheric pressure when I need to open it. If I were to just open the chamber, the air that would be sucked in would disperse the dust inside, in addition to bringing with it water vapor and other junk.

The back of the chamber. The plastic tubes on the right cover the two primary electrodes that we use to form the electric field, and the green plug connects the pressure gauge. The large T-shaped piece on the left side of the chamber is designed to disperse the laser once it hits the other side of the chamber, so we don't get any reflections or unwanted light from that side. The window on top (just like the primary window on the other side) has a piece of polycarbonate attached to it; this is designed to stop glass from flying everywhere if we were to accidentally overpressurize the chamber and it were to explode.
The probe that we use to produce pulses is usually attached to the middle opening, but I took it out to fix the leak in it.

This cabinet houses a server that connects to the Phantom camera (top), a waveform-generator that I use to send pulses to the probe (middle), and the power supplies for the two primary electrodes (bottom).

My desk, with a pile of CCD cameras and lenses that I was swapping out.