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.