Andy’s Los Alamos Blog

With the arrival of a bunch of stuff I ordered, I can finally get to work on some real labby stuff. Here (at last!) is what I’ve got cooking right now:

1. Resistor Mayhem

So, it turns out it’s really hard to find high-power resistors that work when it’s really cold out (like, 17 K above absolute zero). So, if you wanted to, say, control the temperature of a cryostat (really cold chamber) with a resistor for an experiment, you’d be out of luck. So, I got a few resistors and I’ll be testing them out to see how they perform at low temperatures. I’m not sure what to expect. They might work fine, might just die, might explode… who knows? We’ll see what these things are made of.

2. Photomultiplier Tube Angular Testing

I’ve talked quite a bit about PMTs. One thing that we’re interested in is how they are affected when light hits the face of the tube indirectly. Will we see more, the same, or fewer resultant photoelectrons? You can imagine that in an experiment like SNO (see my 6/27 post [http://lanlandy.edublogs.org/2007/06/27/caesura/]), where you don’t know where the light is coming from, this is an important effect to understand. As experiment push toward ever-lower energies, even tiny effects like this might have a significant impact.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress. I’m expecting a Nobel Prize sometime late next week.

Outside the Lab, I’ve been keeping busy as usual. On Saturday, I went rock climbing in nearby White Rock, NM. There are some canyons there that are really great for climbing. I’ll put a few pictures up on Flickr!. Sunday morning, I biked up to the Ski Hill (the one we climbed). From my apartment to the Ski Hill parking lot is about 7.5 miles, with a 2500 foot vertical gain in about the last 3 miles. Hard work on the way up, rather fast on the way down.

Thanks for reading.