Well, I’ve made it home (don’t worry, it didn’t take me a week), and after a frenzy of packing and whatnot, I’m heading back to Lehigh tomorrow afternoon. Who takes breaks, anyway?
I was hoping to write a nice post summarizing my experience in New Mexico, but there really aren’t words to do it justice. The whole thing was ridiculously awesome. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and those parts alone are crazy. Working at a national lab as an undergraduate. Working on a project among the frontrunners in a race to solve one of the greatest mysteries in physics and cosmology. Climbing four 14,000 foot peaks in two days. Exploring northern New Mexico via biking and hiking. Just being in the same place as, and continuing the traditions of, some of the greatest scientists and innovators of the modern era. It seems like I was constantly in motion for the entire summer (at times not so good for the blog), but I wouldn’t change a thing. I have learned about a great deal, from rock climbing technique to nuclear and elementary particle physics to good experimental practice, and am excited to apply this to my life back at Lehigh. I’ll certainly be a better (and safer! Thank you entire week of training!) scientist… (and do a lot more extreme sports…?)
And yet, it gets better! I’ve been fortunate enough to arrange a continued relationship with the Lab. It’s not quite official yet, but it looks like I’ll be continuing this summer’s research, which I am of course very excited about. I couldn’t ask for a more interesting project, and I lucky to work for a team of wonderful and very dedicated individuals.
Unfortunately, once I’m back at school I’ll be balancing all of this plus a full courseload (including graduate-level mathematical physics. eek!), so I won’t have time to make regular blog posts as I did this summer. However, I’ll still be checking regularly to answer any questions anyone might have, and certainly if we get some involved ones I’d be happy to post a worthy reply. So, please, ask away. From tomorrow on, I’ll be back to campus and have my real computer back and be far more… here.
Ask anything. Technical physics questions, those about life as a researcher, New Mexico, “when am I ever going to use X topic,” whatever.
I hope everyone’s enjoyed my blog. And for those readers who happen to be undergraduates or younger and studying/interested in science, APPLY FOR AN REU PROGRAM as an undergrad. You won’t regret it. It’s probably the best summer job on the planet. You get money AND course credit most places, and it’s the greatest thing for resumes since paper. In most cases, you’ll be together with other like-minded students, providing an instant network and social life. A few words of warning: the application process has been described as a “highly chaotic stochastic process” (i.e. they just roll dice), so apply to lots. Also, some REU projects are just really lame, so make sure you find out what you’d actually be doing and get in touch with an advisor before agreeing to anything. If you play your cards right, you too will soon be telling everyone to apply for REU positions in capital letters.
As always, thank you for reading. Best wishes to all, and I hope to have some questions/comments to respond to when I get back to campus.
Cheers,
Andy
[EDIT: I'm not sure why, but comments were turned off. Fixed.]
Sorry again; I sort of disappeared there. Between working, packing, and generally tying up loose ends, life has been pretty hectic lately. It looks like I’ll be able to keep working on the dark matter detection project once I go back to Lehigh, running simulations and doing analysis work and whatnot, and I’m pretty excited about that. Coming back to the lab has also been discussed, which is pretty awesome.
As far as work goes, I haven’t a whole lot to report. I’ve been spending a good deal of my time figuring out issues of how I’ll keep working once I’m home… lots of paperwork. I’ve also been trying to finish up some of the sub-projects and simulations I have running, or at least package things so they’re managable when I get home. I think I have everything ready to go at this point so I can pick up where I left off with computer work, and those I work for can continue my experimental stuff.
Outside of work, I went on a nice, long final bike ride and went climbing at the Y for one last time. Now, I’m pretty well occupied by packing and “checking out” of the Lab. I finally received the form today that I need to fill out in order to present my talk in public and post my abstract (paper comes later), so hopefully that will just be a matter of days…
I’ll try to post again on Friday afternoon, then I’ll be away for a few days while in transit. Thanks for reading!
Sorry about the recent lack of posts. The student symposium was yesterday(ish), Thursday, and I’ve been pretty busy lately with that. As I said, I presented a talk there, “Simulation and Characterization of a Dark Matter Detector,” and it seems to have been pretty well-received. I’m looking forward to presenting it elsewhere (i.e. Lehigh), just as soon as I can get that pesky declassification review. My abstract should be coming along, too, and I’ll post that here as soon as I can. I won’t be able to put up my paper until a while after I leave; the deadline isn’t until 8/10, and it still has to be reviewed after that. Well, it should be a good read, anyway.
The Symposium was a pretty good time. Following a light (and free!) breakfast, we browsed student-created posters, and saw some pretty awesome stuff. Then, following a light (and free!) lunch, student talks began. I was able to see a few of my fellow LASS-ers speak, and it was very impressive. Both through posters and talks, it was great to learn about what my friends have been doing all summer in a bit more detail. People had some really awesome projects even, admittedly, in T division.
So, today I continued my resistor torture, probing what it will take to destroy these things, and my subject is holding strong. If it’s going to give up, it had better do so soon, because I have to go home. Also, this afternoon, I started running a few more simulations in RAT that will test a few more parameters of the dark matter detector, and give me a few more interesting things to talk about in my paper. More as the story unfolds.
Regarding the last post, Kate asked about how the resistive heating thing is going to work if the PMT is in a vacuum (the whole point of which is to stop heat flow). I too was puzzled by this, but I asked, and it turns out the setup isn’t at all complete yet. The PMT will go in an inner chamber, through which we flow cold gas (cooled by the cold head), and the vacuum between this inner chamber and the outer chamber wall will keep the whole apparatus from becoming an ice cube, as always. So, what’s really happening is that the resistor is indirectly controlling the temperature of the gas, which is controlling the temperature of the PMT. In related news, the new power supply I ordered came today, causing much new-gadget elation.
After work, I met up with other LASS people, had Thai for dinner, hung out at Ashley Pond for a surprisingly good outdoor concert, and then went to see the Bourne Ultimatum, which was a pretty rockin movie. It was no Transformers, but a good time indeed.
I am, as usual, not sure what the weekend has in store, but I’m hoping to get outside and enjoy New Mexico and some LASS bonding for my (sniffle) last weekend here.
So, I spent most of today down in the lab at work, waiting for my new resistor victim to fail, and it never did! It seems my modifications to the setup have worked, and I’m now figuring out how we’re really going to control the temperature accurately using resistive heating. Well, at least the concept is proven. Now we’re just awaiting a new, bigger power supply and chamber; unfortunately, I’ll be long gone by the time the real testing gets underway, but at least the temperature regulation issue is pretty much solved.
I’ve also been working on finishing up my speech. I think I’ve gotten it pared down to approximately the right time limit. Good thing — they want me to practice before the team tomorrow afternoon. It’s a shame about the length, though; it would have made such a fine half-hour talk, too. Well, when I deliver it elsewhere, it’ll be longer.
In addition to these projects, it seems I’ve been assigned a slew of simulation and analysis tasks during a recent collaboration meeting. Hopefully, they’ll let me keep working once I’m back at Lehigh… there’s no way that’s all getting done in two weeks, especially with a talk to give and a paper to write, not to mention packing and coming home. We shall see.
As I mentioned, we went climbing in El Rito yesterday, and it was amazing. I think we were out there for about ten hours total; I climbed more than I ever have before in a day. I led a few 5.9 routes (and took my first lead fall [15-20 feet], and it was fun), practiced a lot of lead belay, virtually walked up a 5.10b route because they lied to me and told me it was a (much easier) 5.8… funny how that works. All in all, it was a fantastic day of climbing, and the most amazing New Mexican food ever (from a tiny, disheveled-looking cash-only place in El Rito) was icing on the cake.
My overambitious plan to get up early and bike this morning was foiled by said 10 hours of climbing, so I’m aiming for tomorrow morning biking, followed by work, followed by climbing at the gym. It’ll be an adventure…
Thanks for reading. Post a comment. Ask me something. I love questions.
So, since my last post I’ve gotten a bit of work done. My Los Alamos Summer School paper is almost done, and my speech for the Student Symposium is coming along. I practiced it today and it was over a half hour… too bad about that fifteen minute time limit. Well, I have until Thursday to figure that out.
I also started my next series of resistor-torturing tests, having improved the setup to accomodate thermal expansion and allow better heat transfer… hopefully I won’t toast any more poor resistors. Actually, if this works, it means we can start the cold testing of PMTs, which would be pretty exciting. I’m hoping we get that started before I have to leave.
Angular PMT testing is waiting on some hardware, and should be up and running next week; I’ll keep you posted.
In other news, I went on a long bike ride today, gearing up for my goal of doing a century (100 miles) when I get home and have the added benefit of 6,000 feet worth of oxygen.Tomorrow I’ll be climbing in El Rito again, practicing lead climbing a bit; I’ll try to get some good pictures.
I hope everyone’s having a good weekend!
The titles are almost completely meaningless, it just looks bad without them.
Another interesting day. I got up early and biked around town hoping to avoid the afternoon storms brought daily by the “monsoon season,” enjoyed a nice little ride, then spent a whopping 63 minutes on Los Alamos’ public transportation getting to work. I mean, at least they’re trying, but I could have probably walked to work faster. It’s only 5 miles… For those who have played Sierra’s Half Life computer game, the only disappointing thing about Black Mesa - I mean Los Alamos - National Lab is the lack of the awesome employee rail system. Oh, well.
Today I worked on my final paper for the Los Alamos Summer School for most of the day. I had to keep decreasing my font size to keep it under control… it’s nine pages so far and I’ve hardly even talked about my experiments. When I leave for home, I’ll get it approved by the declassification people and post it up here for your reading pleasure. I should have at least my abstract up soon, but it’s up to the reviewers.
I’ve received a mixed response on that last post. I’ll try to clear things up a bit, I’ll need to think a bit about how to else to approach particle physics. In the mean time, there was a question about neutrino oscillations, which is a pretty neat modern physics topic. I’m afraid this’ll be unavoidably more technical than the last post…
Neutrino Oscillations:
Neutrinos are tricky particles, painfully quantum-mechanical in nature, and free neutrinos absolutely do change flavor (among electron-, muon-, and tau-neutrino). This weirdness was originally observed in the Homestake Experiment, due to a discrepancy between the theorized and observed number of neutrinos coming from the Sun, but not explained until 2001, when the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) proved the existence of neutrino flavor charge. Since, a good deal of theoretical work has brought the theory of neutrino oscillation to its current, well-developed state. Technically speaking, free neutrinos exist as superposition of mass eigenstates, meaning that at any time each neutrino is sort of all three at once. If you detect it, however, you only detect one type. This is the “quantumness” of the system; quantum physically, it’s perfectly legit for a particle to be three particles at once, but once you observe it it can of course only be one (there’s a hot and ongoing debate about what constitutes observation). In the words of quantum mechanics, the neutrino has a certain wavefunction, and when you observe it, you collapse the wavefunction to the observed condition. Anyway, this begs the question: if neutrinos are all three at once, how can we define the three separately? It turns out that they are not equal parts all three, but, strangely perhaps, an individual neutrino is defined by the one it has the greatest probability of being observed as. So, an electron neutrino is mostly electron neutrino with a little muon- and tau-neutrino. When you observe it, you’ll probably see an electron neutrino but there’s a slight chance you won’t. The oscillation bit adds another layer of complication: these probabilities change over time. So what is mostly electron neutrino now might be mostly muon neutrino later, for example. Below is a graph from the Wikipedia page on neutrino oscillation, showing these probabilities over time in the case of relatively slow solar electron neutrino oscillation (electron-neutrino-ness=black, muon=blue, tau=red). This should help with visualizing the oscillations.
A few references for more neutrino oscillation information:
Another exciting day at the lab, as always. I can’t believe that I’m only here for about another 2.5 weeks. Tempus fugit indeed.
Today, I finished up my symposium presentation, worked a little on testing our power meters, and received the part I was waiting for for the angular PMT testing. So, I should be getting that started tomorrow, at last. Perhaps if I’m very lucky my new part for the cryogenic testing setup will be done as well…
After work I went climbing at the YMCA. It’s always a good time, but I’m really looking forward to getting back outside this weekend.
It seems I have received another question! This, fresh from the comments: “Are the neutrinos something that is found in dark matter? Or are they an altogether different ‘animal’???” In retrospect, I guess I hadn’t been too clear on this. So, here’s a bit about elementary particle physics. I’m sorry if this gets techincal… if you have any questions post a comment and I’ll try to clear things up.
Currently, everything we know about particle physics (arguably everything we know) is summed up in the Standard Model. There are hundreds of different types of particles that we’ve observed so far, and every observed particle can be explained by the Standard Model as of today. The Model is really pretty neat and tidy; it’s simple and does its job well. Fermilab sums it up in this little table (a nicer, more copywritten table can be found here):
You’ll notice in the third row down and first three columns the three neutrinos, one associated with each of electrons, muons, and taus. Most people have heard of electrons; muons and taus are just heavy, electron-like particles that we see in various interactions. The neutrinos (meaning “little neutral one”) are very light particles (thought to be completely massless until the 1990s), and are created in a lot of interactions, and so tell us a great deal about certain particle processes. SNO (the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory) was looking for neutrinos from the sun, for example, and has yielded a wealth of information about the sun’s core. Note that for each neutrino, there is a corresponding antineutrino (this is antimatter) not listed on the chart.
The Standard Model neutrinos, however, are just “plain old matter.” Part of what makes the dark matter search so exciting is that the dark matter particle can’t be anything currently described in the Standard Model. So, if projects like the one I’m working on are successful, it will rewrite textbooks and herald the first real development in particle physics since 1973 (when the Standard Model was formulated. String theory doesn’t count as an acheivement). If found, WIMP dark matter will be a new and revolutionary particle. For those so interested, WIMP dark matter is predicted in the MSSM, the Minimal Supersymmetic Standard Model, a theoretical extension to the current Model. In this model, WIMPs would be the lightest superparticle (LSP).
Curiously, there is another dark matter theory which posits that the dark matter is in fact a new and different (also non-Standard Model) kind of neutrino. The hypothetical “sterile neutrino” is a (right-handed) neutrino that interacts only gravitationally. The MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab that I talked about yesterday is, I think, looking for them in the lab. Sterile neutrinos are, like WIMPs, a frontrunner among dark matter particle candidates. We, of course, like WIMPs better.
So, long story short, dark matter and regular neutrinos are fundamentally different creatures. Neutrinos, though very interesting, are normal Standard Model physics, whereas dark matter is something new entirely.
There’s another question I get a lot that also deserves attention, and that is whether dark matter and antimatter are the same. They aren’t, but that’s another story, so I think I’ll tackle that one tomorrow.
Thanks for reading, and as I said, if any of this is unclear, please ask in a comment and I’ll clarify.
Sorry about the long delay. It turned out to be a pretty busy weekend, and quite active. Saturday we went climbing at Las Conchas, just outside of the Lab past Pajarito Ski Area, and got some great climbing in. Flickr! pictures forthcoming.
Sunday, we tried to go to Fenton Lake, about an hour from Los Alamos, to go swimming, but apparently it is fishing-only. Disheartened, we ate lunch there and headed back to Las Conchas, where there was reportedly a lake. We couldn’t find the lake, but went on a ~4 mile hike, finding a neat place where a stream went through a small canyon, and played in the water for a bit. It was a great time and again, pictures will be up momentarily.
Today’s lecture was quite interesting. The MiniBooNE project co-spokesperson (and P-division chum) talked about the MiniBooNE project at Fermilab (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) near Chicago. MiniBooNe, short for Booster Neutrino Experiment, uses the particle accelerator at Fermilab to probe the details of neutrinos, a very light fundamental particle that is incredible abundant in our universe. Neutrinos were thought to be massless (like photons, which are particles of light) until the 1990s, when it was shown that they indeed have a small mass. MiniBooNE aims to measure this mass by measuring neutrino oscillations, a quantum mechanic process by which neutrinos can change species and mass over time. MiniBooNE uses some of the same PMTs we do (over 1000 of them, in fact), so we’ve been using some of their PMT bases for testing, and learning from their experiences.
At work today I just wrote up notes for my upcoming talk at the 2007 Student Symposium. I’ll be giving an overview of the direct detection of dark matter project and my work in simulation and component testing. For those readers at Lehigh, I might have a chance to present my talk there (I think they have a student symposium type thing as well). I’ll post details here if that’s the case.
Tomorrow, I will hopefully receive my last parts from the machine shop, and be able to finish the angular and cold PMT testing setups. If everything goes well, I might even get to torture more resistors. Failing that, I’ll probably finish up my speech and work on my final paper (which I’ll post here at the end of the summer).
At last, someone has asked a question! Chs asks about the geology of rock climbing: do I ever think back to my Earth Science classes? How does rock formation factor into climbing?
Indeed I do think about geology. I actually took, in addition to my high school classes, and introductory earth and environmental science class my freshman year of college. (If you have a free elective, it’s a cool thing to take; you’ll learn to notice a lot of cool things). Around here, it’s sometimes hard to believe that the walls we climb are naturally formed. Though it’s not easy, there do seem to be nicely hand-sized handholds most of the way up them. At first I thought sure people had come along with pickaxes and made them, but it turns out that they’re a result of this area’s unique geology. So, this whole place used to be a giant volcano, as tall as 16,000 feet. When it erupted, creating the Valles Caldera I have pictures of on Flickr!, it created the Los Alamos area’s unique mesa structure (the area is situated on five finger-like mesas, with canyons between) and deposited up to 600 meters of volcanic tuff. The tuff is pinkish and tan, and relatively soft, so canyons formed easily. In many places, the vertical canyon walls have become pitted, forming those neat handholds. The rock has also fractured over the years, creating cracks of various widths that are fun to climb as well as interesting notches, ledges, and overhangs.
The rock at the Chicago Basin was quite different. It was primarily granite (mostly quartz, feldspar, and biotite), but like no other I’ve seen. The crystals were pretty large, about a centimeter wide, and it (the quartz, mostly) was really, really sharp. It was great for traction, as we were climbing in hiking boots, but not so good on the hands. Ah well, in that situation, it’s worth it for the extra grip.
| Chicago Basin (CO) |
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| White Rock, NM |
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| El Rito, NM |
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So, in sum, rock type is a huge consideration in climbing. Operationally, I guess it doesn’t make much of a difference to a climber, but I can’t help but wonder how such formations come about. It’s certainly interesting academically to understand what makes a particular wall great from a quantitative, scientific perspective.
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Today’s lecture was quite interesting; among my favorites so far. The talk was about using sports as a relatively simple of jumping-off point to applying the tools of statistical physics, formerly confined to tracking particles and such, to modeling more complex competitive systems like evolution, business, and social dynamics. He presented a surprisingly simple mathematical model that can replicate the probabilities of league and tournament competition from a purely theoretical basis. He also proposed a quantitative metric for competitiveness, and deduced that soccer is the most competitive sport. Football is the least. Thought provoking, anyway.
Today at the lab, I spent some time preparing and running some new simulations in RAT. My first attempt proved a little computationally intensive, clocking in at about two and a half months of CPU time. Considering that I’m only here until mid-August, that wasn’t going to work. I managed to get it down to about six hours, hopefully without losing the integrity of the simulation data. So far, so good…
I also finally started building my angular PMT testing setup on our optics workbench, after doing some minor optics upgrades, and as soon as my last part is ready from the machine shop I’ll be able to start my experiments. I’m pretty excited, but I’m afraid it’ll come across as pretty dry here… I’ll do my best.
Thanks for reading. Ask more questions!
EDIT: I finally put descriptions on my Chicago Basin pictures on Flickr!, and added a bunch of new ones.
Friday at work was pretty fun. I’m getting to the bottom of the resistor-destruction case; I hadn’t thought of it before, but when resistors get hot (which is what we want), they dissipate most of their heat by heating up the air around them. When there isn’t any air (it’s in a really strong vacuum), and it can’t get rid of heat through contact (e.g. it’s mounted to a poor thermal conductor), it gets really hot, expands, and breaks itself. Sounds like a reasonable explanation; I’ll do a bit more research on this on Monday.
I think I’m one part away from my angular PMT testing, and it should be ready from the machine shop soon. So, hopefully I’ll be getting started on that mid next week. I’ll keep you posted.
I had a very exciting, action-packed weekend! As I said, I got to test out my new climbing gear at the YMCA on Friday. On Saturday, I went climbing in lovely White Rock, NM, at the town’s scenic overlook. White Rock climbing is pretty cool. Usually you come to a mountain and climb up it; White Rock is all canyons, so you instead rappel or hike down, then climb back up. We had fun, but most of WR’s walls are in the sun all day, so it was pretty toasty. Following climbing, I took a bike ride, cooked out for dinner, and played tennis until 11. Quite a day. Today, we drove out to El Rito, NM, and did some pretty sweet outdoor climbing there. Hopefully my climbing shoes will get here this week; I’ve been climbing in hiking boots, which is pretty tough. Even so, I’ve been managing to pull off 5.10’s, which is pretty cool.
Tomorrow, following a lecture on “Statistical Physics of Competitions,” I’ll be back to the Lab for more dark matter fun and excitement. Or maybe just torturing more resistors.
