Well, not a whole lot to report… My first weekend in Los Alamos was very nice. The town held its annual music festival, ChamberFest, featuring live local music and delicious local funnel cakes. Saturday night, I taught some of my friends to swing dance, Sunday I rode my bike to the lab (downhill on the way there…), and explored a bit. There’s some pretty amazing stuff going on in my work area, LANSCE. For instance, this thing. This, too.
Today was the first day of our normal summer schedule, two lectures in the morning given by LANL scientists on their research, followed by own research in the afternoon. Today’s lectures were about turbulence and superfluids (which may not be so super after all, due to some interesting quantum effects).
At the lab, I had my first group meeting experience, where we discussed some of the design aspects of a pretty big dark matter detector. Seems it’s quite challenging… but I guess that’s not really surprising. It looks like tomorrow I’ll probably actually get working on some real research. My first task is to test out some photomultiplier tubes and see how good they are.
Photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) are a pretty neat technology. They take advantage of the photoelectric effect to create an extremely fast and accurate light sensor. In a nutshell, incoming photons (bits of light) hit the light-bulb-shaped detector, coated with a metal or semiconductor, and kick electrons off the metal’s surface. The interaction is pretty small, so it doesn’t make many electrons; however, the few it does make get accelerated down a maze of other metal plates, each kicking out more electrons, ending up with a pretty respectable output signal. A good PMT can see just a few individual photons and give you an easily measurable electric signal.
I’m very excited about this project. Going into it, I admittedly didn’t know a whole lot about dark matter, weakly interacting massive particles (or anything beyond the Standard Model of particles). I am not only learning a ton about some cutting-edge physics, but I’m applying just about everything I’ve ever learned physics-wise. Mechanics, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, particle physics, nuclear physics, calculus, differential equations, computational physics, … It’s all here. The dark matter detection project is a beautiful agglomeration of almost every topic in physics.
I’ll keep you posted as I get going on my research!
Thanks for reading. Post comments!!!
2 responses so far ↓
1
chs
// Jun 12, 2007 at 9:19 am
Are there questions an interested kid should ask in physics class that would help him/her understand where the dark matter project and other-than-standard models fit into what is going on in class? I don’t mean to put a teacher on the spot, but are there parts of what happens in HS that only HINT at some of the more obscure or cutting edge aspects of “real” research happening out there? Any “If I had known then what I know now” thoughts?
Just picking your brain…
2
Dad
// Jun 17, 2007 at 8:06 am
Just wanted to chime in here to say “hi” and comment on chs’s comment about High School Classes (or college, or even grad school classes). As the state of research continues with the folks at Los Alamos, and other research centers throughout the world can the HS Science teacher keep up with everything? No more than a doctor can keep up with what is going on in medical research. Should they be expected to? Probalby not. The more general a topic is – “Intro. to Physics” for example the less the teacher is going to be able to keep up with every single aspect of the subject. My opinion is that questions can and should be asked of the teacher, but the onus of responsibility should not necissarily be put on him for the answer. Perhaps the student asking the question could do a mini-research project on the subject and bring a report back to class for extra credit.
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