Andy’s Los Alamos Blog

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.