Andy’s Los Alamos Blog

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).