Our time in Vancouver is wrapping up and coming to an end. Now, as I write this, Chris and I have just a little more than a day left in BC. In the past ten days our schedule has really been topsy-turvy. We started the early morning shift with Carlos, and so we had to wake up at 5 o’clock AM every morning and bike in to TRIUMF. It is actually rather pleasant, riding in the morning light, since the area is very quiet and there are few cars. Unfortunately, sometimes we would come in and the beam would be down for repairs. During times like those Chris and I would sit in the counting room, reading papers and discussing µSR with Carlos, among other things. We received access to the lecture slides of Prof. Uemura’s solid state physics class, so we were progressively making our way through them.
However, when the beam was up and running Chris and I were proactively doing things in the counting room. We ran the software, changing fields and regulating temperatures, which was very convenient for Carlos, who previously had to do everything by himself for six hours on end. I think Chris and I were better at reducing standard deviation than most of the grad students, but then again it would be old hat for them. Everything in µSR is based off of statistics and probability anyway. There is no way to guarantee that on muon will imbed itself in the sample, precess, and then decay in the manner it is supposed too. Muons, however, in the millions, will on average behave a certain way, which is why these experiments take so long to run: you need to let millions of muons go through one at a time. Only a few adjustments need to be made during this entire process, mostly to prepare for a different sample anyway. Jeremy showed how to do most of these, and explained the mechanics of what was going on. We changed samples and turned on or off the transverse or longitudinal fields when it was necessary.
Later on, however, we switched to the night shift, running from midnight to six in the morning. Suddenly we were waking up at around 2 PM instead of 5 AM; the switch was a little jarring. One thing is for sure: it feels a lot better to ride in to TRIUMF in the day and leave at night than the other way around. But we weren’t working/sleeping all of the time. In the past 10 days we really got an opportunity to look around Vancouver. Chris and I did some things on our own, such as visiting the UBC Museum of Anthropology. They have a fantastic collection of native masks and artwork. We also went up and down the beaches, exploring the local tails. One evening we bumped into a UBC student in the lobby of Gage Towers by the name of Johannes. Johannes is a raising senior at UBC and a prominent member of the student government. He also seems to know everyone and anyone worth knowing on campus. After a long conversation we got to know him and he took us on a great tour of campus. He showed us some of the stranger and more unexpected areas of the UBC campus: interesting architecture, art, and hidden rooms. One of the coolest things he showed us was in the UBC botanical garden. In the center of the garden is a door that leads to a rope ladder that rises into the sky. If you follow that sequence of rope ladders you eventually end up to a tree top observatory, which has a wonderful view.



Together we went to Richmond and explored the Chinese community there. Johannes showed us this unassuming Chinese place that looked like a Denny’s, but was packed with Chinese locals. There you could have a massive and very, let’s say, “cost effective” meal as well as interesting drinks such as hot Coca-Cola with ginger and lemon. Johannes joined us for one of Chris’s favorite New York pastimes: parkour. For the uninitiated, parkour is the practice of moving from point a to point b as quickly, efficiently, and elegantly as possible.



I am pretty rubbish at it, but Chris has a decent grasp of the basics: breaking falls, rolls, wall jumps, and so on. You do it a bit roughed up though; a few scrapes and bruises come with the territory. All in all the UBC campus is a veritable playground for parkour enthusiasts. The architecture is varied and allows for lots of interesting movement. Johannes and I were not as intense as Chris, but we did climb on some buildings, a tradition among UBC students.



While the beam was down we had a bit of spare time. We explored the down town area, the Vancouver library and the trendy Granville avenue. When Johannes heard we had some time he invited us to join him and his friend Mark to “do the Grind”. The Grind is a hiking trail up one of the mountains surrounding Vancouver. It is famous for being entirely and unrelentingly steep and uphill. Some locals do the Grind as a sort of athletic challenge, keeping a track of their times and trying to out do themselves. We learned first hand that the Grind is no Sunday afternoon hike, and without the shorts that Mark lent us we probably both would have had heatstroke. However, with shorts we completed the Grind in under an hour, fast enough to qualify for the competitive hiking club at UBC. I finished in 53 minutes, Chris finished in 56 minutes with Johannes, but we were nowhere close to Mark who finished in 42 minutes. And even still, the fastest time of this season for men was around 24 minutes, which is practically sprinting up the mountain. At the top there are a few touristy places, a ski lift, and a giant windmill that would have made Don Quixote think twice. When we went back town we met up with another of Johannes’s friends and went to a cool vegetarian restaurant, a healthy way to wrap up a healthy day. There’s just no rest for diligent undergrads, is there?

We spent the last day and a half packing and preparing for our flights. It was a little bit hectic getting everything ready, but once we dropped off our bags with Dr. Ning we had a bit more room to breathe. So, in that time we had a farewell dinner with Johannes, our guide to Vancouver and newfound friend. Goodbyes were said and then we turned in our room keys and biked off to TRIUMF one last time in the dark.

Hey, Chris here. As you probably guessed, we have been spending a lot of time inside the lab learning as much as we can. And while learning about MuSR is fun, and getting to run the experiments is exciting, we haven't had much of a chance to meet people outside of the lab. So lately, we've been trying to get out more and explore more of Vancouver. The first step for us was to hang out with some people from the lab. We got to see Stanley Park with some of the scientists and Grad students from TRIUMF. There were copious amounts of Geese and and plenty of other birds as well.







Also, we discovered the ping-pong room in the lab. This has not helped out productivity, but Zach and I have greatly increased our ping pong abilities, and if we stay here for another month or so, I think we could eventually be like this guy.



Not exactly the same.



A few days later, we found the local UBC swimming pool, and decided to try it out. While there were 3 meter and 5 meter diving boards, Zach and I practiced out diving off of the lowest board. In hindsight, this was probably a good idea. We also managed to get pictures without ruining the camera, which would have ended this blog right there.











We also used a Geiger counter to discover the radiation levels in the facility.



Well, thats all for now, but I'm sure we will have a lot more to talk about soon.
Later
-Chris

Hi, this is Zach writing. For all you following at home we have been in Vancouver for a week now. Things have settled in a TRIUMF. Chris and I now have a pretty regular routine where we wake up, get breakfast at around 8 and then bike off to TRIUMF. Once there we go down to the counting room and get debriefed by Carlos, the grad student accompanying us on our travels, on the samples we are testing that day.


From left to right, Graeme, Carlos, and Zach

Today particularly the beam line was turned off at about midday, but it was right in time for a facility wide party celebrating a recent condensed matter physics conference. Afterwards we took footage of those magnetic field aligning paperclips and I edited up as a little video on youtube.




Progress in terms of paper reading comes slowly. We have been averaging little more than a paper a day so far, but it is difficult when we know so little about the field. It is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Each paper is about a specific topic but has links and references to other related topics. Slowly, as we understand the terms and definitions, we can begin to put these pieces into place. Even know we are beginning to see the complex effects of doping percentages, amount of hydration, temperature, layer spacing and more on the super conductance, magnetism, ion aligning, etc. So much of it depends on the structure itself of these compounds, the complex geometries in which the atoms structure themselves. These interrelationships have so many effects on the system that experiment is the only practical way of investigating them, since a theoretical approach would require consideration of thousands of details.

The hidden joke being that no one has really put together the puzzle yet. If they had then there wouldn’t be a need for TRIUMF, or the study of physics. Everyone is just expanding the puzzle, working it out from the corners. It seems that about a third of the time when Chris or I ask a question about this or that we are told “I’m not sure” or “I don’t actually know what is going on there”. That’s not to say that Carlos, Dr. Falong Ning, or Graeme don’t know their physics, because they do. It’s just that everything is so specialized that there is a lot to know, and often it only tangentially relates to the work that you are doing.

But, when not cooling down steaming sample holders with a heat gun or learning how to fiddle with ridiculously expensive equipment, Chris and I are out and about, taking in Vancouver. Unfortunately, one of the disappointments of this trip so far has been the food. We have really failed to find interesting places to eat around the UBC campus, which is surprising since restaurants would want to profit off of the large campus population. Most of the restaurants close pretty early (around 8 or 9) and so far we have only found one decent burger place and one decent sandwich place. All the San Francisco style burrito joints we tried have been inferior to places on the East cost, which is weird since this kind of burrito was invented on the west coast. Professor Uemura knows where to get fantastic food, but now he is off to Italy for a conference. He took us to this great Ramen restaurant and it blew me away. I will no longer think of ramen as those dinky dry noodles that everyone has in college. I really wanted to just drink down the whole bowl but I followed Prof. Uemura’s ramen etiquette and resisted slurping down the last few drops.



We’ve also been eying the UBC pool, planning to go swimming there. Chris and I were going to go yesterday but Chris feel into a deep sleep from which no amount of banging on his door could wake him. I ended up going alone. The pool was actually pretty awesome: lane swimming, diving boards on ground level, at 3 meters and at 5 meters and a sauna and steam room. When I came back Chris was up and we made the greatest pizza that ever burnt its crust.

Hey, Chris here. Yesterday, Zach and I managed to move into our new rooms at the Gage Residence. We were not expecting it to be luxurious, but we were surprised by how nice the lodgings were. We even got a balcony and a flat screen TV.



Also, we finally met Mr. Fanlong Ning. He is a post-doc also working for Professor Uemura. He gave us some good background papers to study, I've posted them below. including "Spin-Polarized muons in condensed matter physics," "Superconductivity phase diagram of NaxCoO2 . 1.3H2O," and "Chemical instability of the cobalt oxyhydrate superconductor under ambient conditions."



Mr. Ning was nice enough to take us shopping for our new crib, but we realized that we had no pots, pans, plates, or utensils, so the only thing we could make safely was oven pizza.



We also decided to take a walk on the beach to admire the mountainous skyline before we remembered that the beach is clothing optional. We didn't bring the camera to the beach, but then again, I'm not sure we could post any pictures from that place anyway.



On a side note, Zach recently introduced me to Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog. How is it possible that I had never seen this before? Seriously, if you have not seen this before, you need to. Right now.


www.drhorrible.com/

Thats all for now, but we will be back with an update about interesting features of TRIUMF soon.

Landed in Canada

Hi all, Zach here.



Chris has been bugging me about writing a blog post, so here I am doing it. So we just recently arrived in Vancouver after something like 10 combined hours of plane travel. We had to wake up at about 5 am to get to our 8:10 am flight from JFK to San Francisco and then we caught the connection from there to Vancouver. I was able to catch a bit of shuteye on the plane but when you wake up at 5 am and the hours later the local time says 2 pm, well it can get a little confusing.

We are staying in the University of British Columbia campus, which I’m told is the largest campus in North America. I believe it too, this place is massive. Very pretty too, lots of pine trees, and the weather is fantastic when compared to the muggy heat of New York. Also, our rooms are right next to the waterfront, where there is a clothing optional beach. We attempted to make it down there but the police were breaking up a party that got a bit too wild. We may have dodged a bullet there.




The next they we met with Professor Uemura and he took us down to the TRIUMF particle physics laboratory. The place is just amazing. They have the worlds largest superconducting cyclotron that makes paperclips stand on end from 21 feet away. I’ll let the pictures talk for me, because it is hard for me to describe the hodgepodge of devices, wirings, concrete and flashing LEDs that seem to make up TRIUMF’s interior. The construction of this place must have been quite an undertaking (even Prince Charles stopped for a photo shoot with the construction workers). Now though it seems like the facility doesn’t need that much maintenance; only a few mechanics can be spotted making rounds and everything is overseen by two guys in control room that looks like it came out of some James Bond movie.











The TRIUMF lab doesn’t operate like laboratories do in major universities. There are very few in house projects, although what is here is very interesting. One group using a large machine called TIGRESS (TRIUMF is fond of creative acronyms) in order to analyze the particle physics during super novas, a project that will be in TRIUMF for about a year and a half. Mostly, TRIUMF facilitates other labs and universities. Physicists from all over the world schedule a “beam time” when they can use one of the accelerator’s beam lines. So, groups come here primarily for data collecting, having prepared their samples and theory beforehand. I’ll be honest, data collecting is not the most action packed part of physics research. Mostly it involves graduate students monitoring temperatures and magnetic fields while changing samples every few hours. The hard part is that someone needs to be on shift 24 hours, 7 days a week during your beam time.

Prof. Uemura, and by extension Chris and I, are here because it is his beam time. We’ll expand more on this as we get a better grasp of the material. Basically, there is a measurable relationship between the magnetic field of a sample and the way muons scatter off said sample. The spin of these muons is very important to the measurement, and to make sure they all share the same spin before striking the sample the muons are made by decaying pi mesons. This sample is one of a few complex materials that Uemura’s group figures could display superconductor like behavior at certain temperatures (LI(ZnMn)As for example). So, not only are there several materials to be tested but temperatures and doping amounts of manganese and zinc must also be varied. This leads to a lot of data, and explains why beam times can be to two months or more.

My background in physics so far has been in solid-state stuff: graphene to be specific. Earlier in the summer when I was working for Professor Phillip Kim I was working something like 60-hour weeks or more doing a lot of nanofabrication. Here, however, there is a lot less to do and it requires a lot less concentration, but I am surrounded by amazing equipment. We’ll see how things shake up, Chris and I are still be trained. Oh, one other thing, we saw Inception: if you can follow that movie then you can follow muon scattering super conductance physics. No Problem.


(From Chris: Hey, if you want to see all the pictures we take, check out chrisandzach.imgur.com)

The story so far

Hey, Chris here. I just created this blog a few days ago in order to record what happens in the next few months. But for those of you who may have no idea what's going on, I figured I should start from the beginning.

In this story, the beginning was in the fall of 2009 where Zack and I started as freshmen at Columbia University. We were both studying physics and became friends. Later on in the year, we both began to apply for internships, and met Professor Tomo Uemura. Professor Uemura told us that he was looking to take a few interns on a worldwide trip to study physics and learn about how physicists work in the real world. A few days later, Professor Uemura asked both of us if we would be interested in going on a University sponsored trip to Canada and Japan. Naturally, we were both incredibly excited to go. Now, the departure date has been for July 14th, and we are preparing for the trip. I have set up this blog in order to record our travels and adventures. Hopefully, we will also be able to give some advice to people going to Japan, as we will be there for a month.

So thats pretty much the situation. We will try to update with information up to and through the trip with our adventures. See you soon.

The Adventure Begins

Once upon a time, there were two young College students named Chris and Zack. They were both studying physics at Columbia University. One day, they got an amazing opportunity to go and travel the world, studying physics and learning as much as they could along the way. This is their story.