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
Friday, July 23, 2010
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.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
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.
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)
