It’s been a pretty interesting couple of days. On Wednesday, I (finally) took Rad(iation) Worker training, and Thursday morning took the practical exam, for which I actually had to dress up in a low-level radiation suit. It was actually pretty fun, even at 7:15 am. After the practical, I went to the annual Student-Mentor picnic. Free food (and cookies!), my picture in one of the crazy armored security trucks (maybe I’ll post that… maybe.), and of course bonding with the officemates. An all around good time. Following this, I returned to work, wrote up my abstract for the Student Symposium, a yearly opportunity for students to present their work, where I’ll be giving a short talk. I started my resistor testing on Tuesday per the last post, and apparently destroyed the first one I tested. I believe the problem was that without air to ventilate them, resistors can get really hot really fast. I’m working on ways to improve my methods.
Between more resistor testing, my angular PMT testing (and optical bench improvements), more simulations, preparing a talk, and writing a research paper, I should be keeping pretty busy. Which is good for you, because I’ll have a lot to talk about.
In other news, I continue to do neat non-work things. Last night I went climbing at the YMCA (testing out my new climbing harness and gear!). Looks like I’ll be doing a lot of climbing in the coming days, probably a bit this weekend. I’m also considering biking up the ski hill again; it’s now “monsoon season,” during which it rains every afternoon, so most outdoor activities must be confined to mornings 
. Hopefully people will want to hike somewhere this weekend as well; I wouldn’t mind going to Bandalier again…
Cheers, Andy
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.
Let me tell you about the Chicago Basin.
It’s in southwest Colorado, near Silverton. The only access to it is via a steam train, a tourist attraction running between Durango and Silverton, that happens to stop in the middle of nowhere. There are no roads. There are no cell towers. Nothing but trees and mountains and the people who love them. The train drops you off at what used to be Needleton, but isn’t a “-ton” any more; it’s a wooden bridge and a fast, clear river. Needleton is about 8,000 feet up. You hike about eight miles into the basin, along a narrow, winding path following the river as it snakes down from the mountains rushing away last winter’s snow. Eventually, you reach the basin at 11,000 feet. Mountains start peeking out above the trees, up where the clouds should be, still snow-covered in July. Nothing can describe the scale of this landscape. Everything is mind-blowingly vast and tall and green. Saturday afternoon, we hiked in, chose a camp site near a cold and vigorous stream of snowmelt, fed by the waterfalls and tributaries up the basin, and prepared for adventure.
Sunday morning, we awoke a 4:00 a.m. and hiked toward Mt. Eolus by the moonlight. By dawn, we had overcome the 1,000 foot headwall, and began our ascent. We soon encountered snow, whereupon I was trained in the use of an ice axe. Always wanted to use one of those. Within a few hours, having gained a few more thousand feet, we arrived at a peculiarity of Eolus, the “catwalk.” This forms a bridge between Mt. Eolus and North Eolus (its nearest neighbor), at places a meter wide with a hundreds-of-feet drop on each side; this was somewhat disconcerting. The final climb to the summit of Eolus consists of class 3 and 4 rock climbing. The classification can be tricky sometimes; it factors in both techincal difficulty and exposure (i.e. an easy move becomes dangerous if there is danger of a long fall). In my opinion, there was a lot of exposure. As a novice mountaineer, this was a trifle terrifying at times. The summit, however, makes it worth it. It’s 14,084 feet up. You can see the entire world. Hundreds of miles of mountains and basins, lakes and snow. There are no cities and no roads to be seen. There is no cell service. I had only imagined that places like this still existed.
North Eolus is right next to Mt. Eolus, and an easy climb from there. We quickly reached the summit, took in the view, and headed back toward camp. I learned another important mountaineering skill, the glissade, wherein one sits and, steering with feet and ice axe, slides down a snowy hill; like skiing without the skis… and sitting down…
We reached camp in the early evening, finding it surrounded by mountain goats who didn’t seem to care much about us, devoured our freeze-dried backpacker dinners, and headed to bed early.
Monday morning again found us awake at 4 am, hiking in the cold, dark mountain morning by headlamp and moonlight. Today we headed for Windom and Sunlight peaks. At the top of the headwall are the Twin Lakes, still largely frozen over in July. Beyond these lakes is a vast snow field, still clinging to life in the summer heat, yet bringing the basin to life with its meltwater (there is a constant subtle roar in the valley. It sounds at first like traffic, but there aren’t any roads. It is the river flowing down the basin and the countless streams and waterfalls that feed it.). Yesterday, we had turned left here, headed toward Eolus. Today, we turned right, into what was at this time of morning a field of ice. At times using our ice axes to cut steps into the ice for ourselves, we slowly progessed toward Windom. We were soon out of the basin, hiking and climbing up through the peak’s slope of increasingly large rocks. By late morning, we had reached our third or four 14,000 foot summits. Windom peak is 14,083 feet. It offers an unparalleled view of the Chicago Basin, and the ranges beyond. There wasn’t any cell service here, either. After a short time at the summit, we headed onward to Sunlight Peak, reportedly the scariest summit of the Colorado 14′ers (14,000+ ft. mountains). Contouring along the softening snow field of the basin between Windom and Sunlight (see pictures), we eventually began our ascent, starting with a long climb straight up the snowy side of Sunlight. Reaching the rocks nearer the summit, we found an interesting terrain blending hiking, class 4 (and occasionally 5, when we made our own routes) rock climbing, and snow. It was wonderfully challenging and exciting. Upon reaching the summit, we found that it lived up to its reputation. The summit is a single rock, about two feet on a side, with sheer cliffs of hundreds of (perhaps over a thousand) feet on three sides. Furthermore, it is separated from you by a few-foot gap. Most people find they have to jump across it, toward the cliff. A bit of exploration led me to find a slightly better approach, using a more technical approach but avoiding the jump. It seemed safer. I made it, and there’s even a video of me doing so. Sunlight Peak is 14,059 feet, and lives up to its reputation quite well.
After regaining composure for a bit, we began our descent. We hiked through chest-deep snow, traversed long distances to maximize glissading fun, and came down along the Twin Lakes, beginning to thaw in the early afternoon sun. We hiked down the mountain back to camp, profoundly exhausted but in awe of both the mountains and our ability to conquer four of them in two days. I can only hope to someday experience such thrill again.
Back at camp, we enjoyed more freeze-dried delicacies, recounted the day, and fell asleep to the river, wind, and occasional coyote. The following morning we were on the trail by mid-morning, hiking back toward the train. We sat by the river and read and waited, time having lost much of its meaning in the woods. The train came, mostly full of tourist retirees, and was descended upon by backpackers wearing dirty clothes and tired, contented smiles.
Two and a half hours later, we were back in Durango. I had an entire pizza for dinner at a local pub. A four-hour car ride brought us back to Los Alamos, and back to reality. Please take a look at my pictures on Flickr! (coming soon). They can’t do it justice, but they try.
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For the 4th of July, we had a cookout and watched the fireworks in White Rock, NM., not too far from Los Alamos. A bit of a thunderstorm hardly slowed us down (the beginning of monsoon season unhappily coincides with early July), and we all enjoyed a great night of camaraderie, patriotism, and pyrotechnics.
Today I was back at work, and my optics stuff has indeed arrived, as I had hoped, and should be operational soon. For now, I’m doing more computer simulations and analysis.
So, I’ll be out of the office for a few days. I’m going up to Colorado’s Chicago Basin this weekend and half of next week hiking, backpacking, and climbing 14,000 ft. mountains. I’ll be back on Thursday, and promise exciting tales and lots of pictures.
Hopefully by the time I get back to work some of the cool stuff I ordered will be there and I can do some awesome PMT testing…
See you on Thursday!
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.
Sorry about the downtime, and thanks for your patience. Edublogs.org is still in the process of changing servers, but everything looks functional (though slow) at this point.
I’ve had a pretty exciting week since my last post, full of good times in and out of the lab. I’ve taken a ton of pictures for you, which you’ll find in my Flickr! albums (see right).
Thanks to those who commented on the last post; you make some interesting points. There are very few classes at universities, and none in high schools, that are likely to discuss anything beyond the Standard Model. And rightfully so; whether dark matter is really WIMPs, axions, or something else entirely, has yet to be shown. That is one thing that makes being a part of this project so exciting. It is absolutely cutting edge, and something you can’t get in school. If it turns out that dark matter is indeed WIMPs, as we suspect, it will prove that there is something more fundamental than the Standard Model (what they teach in university particle physics classes), and revolutionize the field.
That said, one can understand a lot of the concepts of direct detection of dark matter solely from high school physics. As I described the detector before, WIMPs come in from space and pass through the detector (filled with a bunch of atoms), and occasionally one hits a nucleus, releasing a tiny bit of electromagnetic energy. If you’ve had high school mechanics and electricity/magnetism, you can recognize this as an energy conservation problem. Actually being able to see the energy released in this reaction, and be sure that it’s a WIMP and not anything else, is difficult in practice, but conceptually easy. If you really want to get a better handle on what’s going on, read up on atomic and nuclear physics; you can understand a lot more than you’d think based on HS or introductory college electricity and magnetism.
I really like the suggestion of doing outside research and getting extra credit to learn more about this stuff. If you’re in a position to do so, ask your teacher if that’s an option. It’s important to learn the fundamentals of physics first, because everything builds up. However, it’s equally important to look ahead, and get perspective on why what you’re learning is so important and worthwhile.
Here in LA, the morning lectures continue, and we’ve heard about such things as climate modeling, quark-gluon plasmas, superfluids, and more. The lectures are pretty interesting, and cover an incredible range of topics; it’s unfortunate, though, that things must be discussed in very general terms and that it takes away so much would-be lab time.
In the lab, I’ve been continuing my work with photomultiplier tubes, and got to design a pretty sweet optics setup for testing them. I’m looking forward to getting all my parts and putting everything together. Frankly, I’m still waiting to hear what’s legit for public disclosure, so please pardon my lack of specifics on my research so far. More physics soon, really.
Outside the lab, I’m had a very active week. On Wednesday, I hiked up Pajarito Mountain Ski Area, Los Alamos’ 10,400 ft. local ski hill, with people from work. From the top, one can see a tiny Los Alamos from one side, and the beautiful Valles Caldera from the other. Hence, on Saturday, I made the same hike with some fellow summer students, and brought two cameras. Still waiting on the non-digital pictures (which I’ll also post), but I have a bunch of digital ones up on Flickr!. The views were pretty stunning, with some neat shadows from the thunderstorm (and hail storm) we barely missed. Friday, Sunday, and Monday, I took the bike out for a ride, and have some pictures from Saturday up on Flickr! as well.
Thanks for reading. Please post some comments, and stay tuned for physicsier things…
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!!!
Sorry I’m a bit late posting; things have been pretty crazy between training and getting involved in research. Training is a big deal around here. I had general employee training on Tuesday, computer and drug abuse training on Wednesday morning, electricity training today, and I still have RF (radio frequency), chemical, cryogen, pressure, gas, lead, and radiation safety training to look forward to! A lot of people (including myself, sometimes) complain about the amount of training required to do anything around the lab, but it’s good that they get everyone on the same page, and I’ve certainly picked up of safety tips a lot that I can take back the university lab.
My research work thus far has consisted mostly of reading papers written about my project and former/similar ones. If you’re more scientifically inclined, I urge you to check out the research archive at http://www.arxiv.org. Do a search for “dark matter WIMP” and you’ll get a wealth of excellent papers on my topic. arXiv.org is a phenomenal tool for students doing research; bookmark it for later if you’ll be doing any technical research in physics, math, computer, science, or quantitative biology.
I actually did get to help work on an actual dark matter detector (exciting!), and I’m learning a great deal about the state of the art in this field. A major problem, I’ve learned, is background radiation. Everything is radioactive to some extent; people, bricks, and many other things you encounter daily are actually significantly so. Enormous amounts of radiation emanate from the Sun, imparting warmth and sunburns. The common terrestrial sources (e.g. bricks) are all relatively low-level emitters (compared with, say, enriched uranium), and quite innocuous. However, when you’re looking for a particle that will probably come only about once a year and carries a pretty low kinetic energy, your observations can quickly become flooded with even the tiniest source of radioactive contamination. It’s like listening for a pin drop when someone’s yelling in your ear with a megaphone. A major difficulty of detecting WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), which we believe comprise the universe’s dark matter content, is eliminating or filtering out this background radiation.
One thing I’m starting to figure out with this project is how to think like an experimentalist. Sometimes the most intuitive approach is not the best one. Sometimes it’s not even really possible. For example, an engineer friend and I once were debating whether or not my ceiling was level. My proposal: simply place an anti-gravity marble on the ceiling, and observe which way it rolls. Engineer’s proposal: use a level. It’s difficult to get into so practical a frame of mind (”but the math all works out…”).
I’m back in training almost all day Friday, but hopefully I’ll be able to get some more hands-on experience at some point. I’m looking forward to my first real weekend in Los Alamos! Hopefully I’ll be able to get outside, ride the bike around, and get some pictures of the town and surrounding (unbelievably beautiful) country.
As always, thanks for reading.
Los Alamos at last!
I arrived in town on Saturday afternoon, following an interesting shuttle trip (it involved fording water), and have since been getting settled and getting to know my fellow researchers.
I’ve also learned that I will indeed be working on the dark matter project, as I’d hoped. It seems that Los Alamos scientists have invented a dark matter detector, which uses “WIMPs” for detection. Dark matter is believed to constitute the bulk of the universe’s “weight,” and has often been invoked for explaining universal expansion and otherwise-bizarre interactions between astronomical systems. It’s sort of like: “well, this thing is interacting as if there were more matter here; there must just be some we can’t see!” It’s been hypothesized that this elusive matter is actually WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. These are particles that have some finite mass, but don’t play well with others; they could easily pass through Earth, for example, without even noticing. They do interact with normal matter occassionally, and that is how this project tries to find them. I’ll be finding out more details and specifics later this week, when I meet my research group.
I actually went to the lab for the first time today, to get an ID badge and take a little tour. The place is daunting: 40 heavily wooded square miles, amid canyons and mountains. They also take security very seriously; no cell phones, no cameras (sorry, looks like my photos will be scenery, not research), and apparently if you leave luggage unattended, a SWAT team comes, evacuates the building, and sends a robot to blow it up. Many an innocent briefcase and laptop have thus met their untimely ends. Interesting place.
As an unfortunate side effect of the high security, my blog posts that discuss research will need to be cleared as nonclassified, which may delay posting of some information.
Tomorrow, I have lab employee orientation and training (joy), then on Wednesday I get to start working on my project!
I’ll keep you posted on my progress. Thanks for reading!
When planning my trip to Los Alamos, I opted to hang out in Albuquerque for a day, to do a little exploring and get a sense of the southwest. Yesterday morning, I arrived at the Albuquerque International Sunport, checked into my hotel, and set off to see the city. A few people had recommended that I see the city’s “Old Town” as well as the National Atomic Museum located therein, so there I headed.
I happened upon the University of New Mexico campus on the way and wandered around a bit. It’s a beautiful place: old southwest architecture, ponds, fountains, rose gardens, etc. I picked up a copy of the “Daily Lobo” student newspaper, and while eating lunch at a tiny “cash only” Mexican place near downtown, noticed an article about an interesting local art gallery. I stopped in, saw two wonderful exhibits (one of artists with obsessive attention to detail, the other a retiring UNM art professor who paints with masking tape), then proceeded to the Atomic Museum. What a wonderful place! There’s something for everyone. A three year old would get a lot out of it, and yet they talk about things like Cherenkov radiation, and have real graphs of nuclear packing fractions. I learned that the NaK molecule I was researching last semester is important in breeder reactors (nuclear reactors that re-use the plutonium generated from fission of uranium). Be sure to visit the Atomic Museum if you’re ever in the area.
On my way back from the museum and strolling down an alleyway, I heard music, and stumbled upon the three-hundred-first fiesta for the San Felipe de Neri church, the oldest church in Albuquerque. I listened to local music, watched local flamenco dancers dance to local flamenco artists, sampled the local cuisine, and met some very nice local people. Incredibly, when the priest who opened to fiesta called everyone “members of the San Felipe family,” he meant it. I, some kid from Pennsylvania amid people whose tradition this had been since they were born, was treated as part of the family. I am humbled by the strong sense of community, tradition, and cultural identity of the people of Old Town, and their graciousness in accepting others’ cultures. This was a truly wonderful and inpiring experience.
This afternoon, I leave Abluquerque to take a shuttle (?) up to Los Alamos, and move into my apartment for the rest of the summer. Look for more posts soon as I explore Los Alamos. The physics starts Monday!
