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)
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