Day 3

Monday is always a hard day to get up on time.


This morning Cayla taught Henry and me about the Fourier transform. After that, I finished the two papers Dr. Qiao sent me earlier and understood how to tell the period of solidification a surface through the photos. Then I was thinking instead of analyzing the laser beam, analyzing the solidification of a surface might be a great project. Then suddenly realize this would become a visual perception task if I needed to write code to analyze the change in the photos over time.


After a while, Henry told me that he had learned Fourier Series, and he started sharing the coefficients formulas with me. I felt so interested in the topic, "Can you really write a function by only using 'sin' and 'cos'?" The curiosity drove me to start learning Fourier Series. I was learning by reading an online tutorial written by MIT. The ways to derive the coefficients were so smart. Perhaps I felt it was smart since it made the idea look so simple, comparing to complicated explanations from textbooks.


Since I will work with Zhila on Dr. Han's project, I got some references from Zhila about autocorrelation. I felt that autocorrelation is a process that uses Beamsplitter and BBO to retrieve the Fourier-transform phase for the waves, or simply to make Gaussian look "better". Then I read a reference sent from Dr. Qiao about the SPIDER which was also related to the autocorrelation.


Unfortunately, I left my lunch bag in my mom's car this morning, so I had to walk to the "Global Village" to buy a pizza. It took about 20 minutes to buy the food, and 10 minutes to eat. Hope I'll never forget lunch bag again!


At about 4 pm Henry and I went to watch a conference meeting, where I got confused on the topic for about 45 minutes. I left early at 4:45 since I would have a concert with Brighton Symphony at night.

Tomorrow I will definitely start working with Dr. Han if I can meet her.