Andy’s Los Alamos Blog

Hello. Sorry about the lack of updates. You probably noticed that Edublogs was running very slowly over the past week and a half or so; it also (as I learned the hard way) lost and deleted attempts to post updates. Everything looks to be operational now, and hopefully will stay that way.

I’ve been up to all kinds of things. Over the weekend, we (summer school students) went hiking in Bandalier National Monument. It’s quite a beautiful place. I put up some pictures on Flickr! on Sunday, and more are on the way as soon as I get my (gasp!) real film developed. I went rock climbing yesterday, too; I’ve been keeping myself pretty busy and going through a frightening amount of Clif bars and Gatorade…

This coming weekend is shaping up to be pretty exciting. I’ll either be going to White Sands National Monument for the weekend, or backpacking through the Chicago Basin in Colorado for the weekend and half of next week. More as the situation unfolds…

Things have been getting pretty interesting at the Lab. I’m still waiting for all the optics stuff I ordered to arrive so I can start testing those PMTs, but there’s a lot going on in the mean time. We’ve been working on some pretty interesting problems, and I’ve been spending most of my time in front of the computer figuring out how various software works. A few really cool packages I’ve been working with are ROOT (and PROOF), GEANT4, and RAT. ROOT was written by a bunch of scientists at CERN, the world’s foremost particle accelerator laboratory, and is the best data acquisition and analysis package out there. It can process ridiculous amounts of experimental data, and make lots of pretty graphs. If you’re going into science (or going to college in the natural sciences, especially physics), ROOT is worth learning. It’s based on C++, so if you’ve got some programming experience, you’re halfway there. PROOF let you use root on a cluster computer, taking advantage of multiple processors to make calculations faster. GEANT4 is a simulation package, where you create a world (e.g. put a cube of water here, put a stainless steel sphere inside it, …), pick which laws of physics you want, and it tells you what happens. Scientists at CERN and Fermilab are using it to predict what happens in their particle accelerators when they smash together atoms, for instance. RAT is a bit more specific, but a neat little tool. It interfaces ROOT, GEANT4, and a couple of other physics packages to simulate what happens in the scintillation detectors I’ve previously described.

Curiously, I had the opportunity to meet one of the authors of RAT today, when he visited my group at work. Quite a neat guy; turns out he wrote RAT in his spare time… impressive. His work was part of SNO project, which I’m not sure I’ve mentioned, but is so cool it deserves some attention. Plus, the team I work for was part of the collaboration responsible for it. SNO, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, was a gigantic detector array to find solar neutrinos. Located 2 kilometers underground in an old mine, it was basically a big sphere of (1000 tonnes of) heavy water (among other things) with a bunch of PMTs mounted around it, looking for neutrinos colliding with the matter inside. The experiment was extremely successful, gathering an unprecedented amount of data with unprecedented accuracy, and it’s just really, really cool. If you get a chance, check out the SNO collaboration web site, or their image gallery. It’s some pretty cool science.

As always, thanks for reading. Please post comments and ask questions! Let me know what you’d like to hear about.