The Fermilab post...
Jul. 28th, 2014 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pheloniusfriarI started writing this post at the end of May... and worked on it when I could in June... and am just getting to post it now... it has been quite the summer. Ugh.
As folks may or may not know, I am a full-time undergraduate student at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, studying Theoretical Physics (amongst other things). My home town is Ottawa, so it made sense for me to head back here when it was time to finally get a university education (read: I had family obligations); and Carleton University's physics department, for its tiny size and limited resources had consistently "punched above its weight" in the cut-throat world of particle and medical physics (if you will pardon the sports and subsequently mixed metaphors, I do know better...). When I was a teen, Carleton allowed me to sit in on a lecture series by David Bohm (one of the most important theoretical physicists of the 20th century). I vaguely understood at most 2% of what he said, but it was obviously an important event for me (I remember the excitement of mine and the others around me just listening). Also when I was a teen, a professor there (I don't even remember their name) used to let me hang around in the chemistry department's laser laboratories and help out (I'm not sure they realized I was skipping high school to be there, heh, but it was way cooler). I have been working part time as a Research Assistant in the physics department pretty much since the start of 2010 (although "part time" can be some value between 10 and 80 hours a week at times). I'm still very much a "larval physicist", but I had an entire career before arriving at university doing electronics, software, and international project management, and it was quite valuable for various projects at Carleton to be able to leverage my existing skill set (for pennies on the dollar I might add, heh). In return, I have gotten to work on some amazing physics projects (hitting, as it were, above my weight as a physicist). It is in that capacity that I got sent to Fermilab accelerator facility in Batavia, Illinois, USA in May 2014 to participate with an international collaboration at the test beam facility there. And by May, I mean pretty much the whole of said month.
I have been working with Carleton's copy of the EUDET Telescope since spring of 2013 (I've talked a little about it here, the link is to the web page I did for it). Fyi, the one at Carleton is called "Caladium"... each instance gets a proper name based on some sort of poisonous plant... an "in joke" for those who produce the units, the rest of us are confused. The first unit was designed as part of a pan-European effort in the early days of the proposed International Linear Collider to become more efficient at testing, characterizing, and learning how to best use new designs for particle detection equipment. There are five in existence and another on the way. The big problem is that the "telescope" was designed to be used in an artificial particle beam like those at DESY in Germany, or CERN in Swizerland (where the Large Hadron Collider is located), or... at Fermilab in the US — but Carleton does not have a particle accelerator to use. The only sufficiently high-energy (> 1GeV) particles we have are the particles that everyone has (even you as you read this, you have them too): cosmic ray muons. Cosmic rays pass through every square centimetre at the Earth's surface at a rate of one every minute (so several pass through your body every second) — they have an average energy of 4GeV and are energetic enough that they hardly slow down as they pass through you, ionizing your body's molecules as they go (fyi, the higher you go, the more of this natural cosmic radiation you get, e.g. flying or on a mountain). The justification for Carleton getting one is it does do a lot of particle detector development and construction for physics projects all over the world. Having a copy of the EUDET Telescope allows researchers to do all required integration work at Carleton before going to an accelerator facility with its very finite, rare, and precious time window to take experimental data while there. If we're going to facilities in Europe, they will quite possibly have their own copy and we can just hook our stuff up to it; and in the case of facilities like Fermilab, we could just bring the telescope with us.
I should be clear that this is not a "telescope" in the sense that most people think of telescopes, but rather a device that can precisely determine the path of particles through it by looking at the ionization they leave in a set of silicon detector chips as they pass through (by looking at where it passes through each chip in turn, you can see the path the particle took). Lots of software is involved to extract the data and do the analysis. Carleton is still in the process of learning how to use the telescope hardware, the data acquisition software (EUDAQ), and the data analysis software (EUTelescope), and one of the goals of the test at Fermilab was to advance our cause in that regard. I've been focusing on the hardware and EUDAQ side of things, and a post-doc physicist has been focusing on the analysis and EUTelescope side of things. I am in the process of broadening my focus to include the analysis as well. I did my 4th year Honours Project on the telescope, and I got an A+ as a result... and that's pretty sweet... but I have still just begun to scratch the surface of what this device can do and how it does it — there is a definite shortage of documentation, and because we have the only EUDET Telescope not in Europe, we're isolated from the community (it seems there's something of an oral tradition when it comes to these devices), so... the most basic things can be a challenge sometimes.
Initially, we were supposed to drive the equipment to Fermilab ourselves. And by "we", I mean me... they were going to rent a truck that I would drive down with another student in the cab with me, and a professor and another student were going to drive with us in a car. This seemed dodgy as fuck to me, and I repeatedly suggested that they be really sure that there would be no problems and that the paperwork was in extremely good order before we left. To look at it another way (and massively distorting the actual truth for storytelling purposes), they were going to load up a truck with nuclear equipment and send me across the border into the United States (that it wasn't actually nuclear equipment, but just detectors for use in high-energy physics experiments might be a subtlety lost on those protecting the border... I was going to be carrying a tube of KY with me just in case, heh). The notion made me (understandably?) nervous. In the end, somebody on our end finally realized what was being proposed and put a stop to it — the shipment would have to be made via a commercial carrier and I would be reasonably assured of not having lights shined places that light should not normally shine. We drove still, but I was able to convince them to get two cars and the trip went pretty well (we did it over two days in each direction, sleeping at a hotel in Sarnia, Ontario). The two cars really made a huge difference in the end and we were able to juggle transportation quite a bit better because of it while we were there. It also proved critical for me not being completely pissed off about how things worked out for me because I, and the other two students from Carleton (okay, one of them was from the University of Ottawa, but he was working at Carleton with one of the profs for his honours project), went to Chicago for the afternoon on our way back to Sarnia at the end of the trip.
Now, I worked my sad little butt off to get to Fermilab, putting way more work into my 4th year honours project than seems reasonable, but I really wanted to go (I fried pretty hard, but what else is new, sigh). I grew up reading about Fermilab and all it accomplished over the years. When I was a teen, Fermilab was the big thing going on in particle physics. The work done there helped to confirm the, then, proposed "Standard Model" of particle physics and shaped our understanding of the way the universe works (the link leads to an 5 minute video easy introduction to this theory). The Higgs Boson was the last piece of the Standard Model, and its discovery at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was announced in 2013. Several of the earlier key discoveries were made at Fermilab's now defunct Tevatron. For what it's worth, the Standard Model did not exist when I was young... it didn't come into its modern form until I was about 8 years old or so, so I kind of grew up with it and watched it solidify as new data was gathered. Fermilab did a lot during its heyday (from the Fermilab propaganda):
Since this is a long post already and I've just "arrived" at Fermilab, I will leave you with pictures of where I stayed (a farmhouse over a century old, Aspen East, my bedroom was the one on the second floor at the far right with the window under the eaves of the house), the bedroom I was in (it had a bathroom and tiny "efficiency" kitchen in which I still managed to make some amazing meals... and yes, the photo was taken at 5:23, All Hail Eris!), and a photo of the Fermilab Test Beam Facility (that strange curved-roof building in the distance behind the herd of bison and the berm of the main particle accelerator beamline). My next posts will be of my time at the test beam, and then my trip to Chicago. More photos will be provided in those posts! Consider these teasers...
And finally, finally, a musical interlude until then... I love this cover of The Cure's "Lovesong" by Nathaly Dawn (did you know she has a Masters Degree in French Literature now? Yowza!):
As folks may or may not know, I am a full-time undergraduate student at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, studying Theoretical Physics (amongst other things). My home town is Ottawa, so it made sense for me to head back here when it was time to finally get a university education (read: I had family obligations); and Carleton University's physics department, for its tiny size and limited resources had consistently "punched above its weight" in the cut-throat world of particle and medical physics (if you will pardon the sports and subsequently mixed metaphors, I do know better...). When I was a teen, Carleton allowed me to sit in on a lecture series by David Bohm (one of the most important theoretical physicists of the 20th century). I vaguely understood at most 2% of what he said, but it was obviously an important event for me (I remember the excitement of mine and the others around me just listening). Also when I was a teen, a professor there (I don't even remember their name) used to let me hang around in the chemistry department's laser laboratories and help out (I'm not sure they realized I was skipping high school to be there, heh, but it was way cooler). I have been working part time as a Research Assistant in the physics department pretty much since the start of 2010 (although "part time" can be some value between 10 and 80 hours a week at times). I'm still very much a "larval physicist", but I had an entire career before arriving at university doing electronics, software, and international project management, and it was quite valuable for various projects at Carleton to be able to leverage my existing skill set (for pennies on the dollar I might add, heh). In return, I have gotten to work on some amazing physics projects (hitting, as it were, above my weight as a physicist). It is in that capacity that I got sent to Fermilab accelerator facility in Batavia, Illinois, USA in May 2014 to participate with an international collaboration at the test beam facility there. And by May, I mean pretty much the whole of said month.
I have been working with Carleton's copy of the EUDET Telescope since spring of 2013 (I've talked a little about it here, the link is to the web page I did for it). Fyi, the one at Carleton is called "Caladium"... each instance gets a proper name based on some sort of poisonous plant... an "in joke" for those who produce the units, the rest of us are confused. The first unit was designed as part of a pan-European effort in the early days of the proposed International Linear Collider to become more efficient at testing, characterizing, and learning how to best use new designs for particle detection equipment. There are five in existence and another on the way. The big problem is that the "telescope" was designed to be used in an artificial particle beam like those at DESY in Germany, or CERN in Swizerland (where the Large Hadron Collider is located), or... at Fermilab in the US — but Carleton does not have a particle accelerator to use. The only sufficiently high-energy (> 1GeV) particles we have are the particles that everyone has (even you as you read this, you have them too): cosmic ray muons. Cosmic rays pass through every square centimetre at the Earth's surface at a rate of one every minute (so several pass through your body every second) — they have an average energy of 4GeV and are energetic enough that they hardly slow down as they pass through you, ionizing your body's molecules as they go (fyi, the higher you go, the more of this natural cosmic radiation you get, e.g. flying or on a mountain). The justification for Carleton getting one is it does do a lot of particle detector development and construction for physics projects all over the world. Having a copy of the EUDET Telescope allows researchers to do all required integration work at Carleton before going to an accelerator facility with its very finite, rare, and precious time window to take experimental data while there. If we're going to facilities in Europe, they will quite possibly have their own copy and we can just hook our stuff up to it; and in the case of facilities like Fermilab, we could just bring the telescope with us.
I should be clear that this is not a "telescope" in the sense that most people think of telescopes, but rather a device that can precisely determine the path of particles through it by looking at the ionization they leave in a set of silicon detector chips as they pass through (by looking at where it passes through each chip in turn, you can see the path the particle took). Lots of software is involved to extract the data and do the analysis. Carleton is still in the process of learning how to use the telescope hardware, the data acquisition software (EUDAQ), and the data analysis software (EUTelescope), and one of the goals of the test at Fermilab was to advance our cause in that regard. I've been focusing on the hardware and EUDAQ side of things, and a post-doc physicist has been focusing on the analysis and EUTelescope side of things. I am in the process of broadening my focus to include the analysis as well. I did my 4th year Honours Project on the telescope, and I got an A+ as a result... and that's pretty sweet... but I have still just begun to scratch the surface of what this device can do and how it does it — there is a definite shortage of documentation, and because we have the only EUDET Telescope not in Europe, we're isolated from the community (it seems there's something of an oral tradition when it comes to these devices), so... the most basic things can be a challenge sometimes.
Initially, we were supposed to drive the equipment to Fermilab ourselves. And by "we", I mean me... they were going to rent a truck that I would drive down with another student in the cab with me, and a professor and another student were going to drive with us in a car. This seemed dodgy as fuck to me, and I repeatedly suggested that they be really sure that there would be no problems and that the paperwork was in extremely good order before we left. To look at it another way (and massively distorting the actual truth for storytelling purposes), they were going to load up a truck with nuclear equipment and send me across the border into the United States (that it wasn't actually nuclear equipment, but just detectors for use in high-energy physics experiments might be a subtlety lost on those protecting the border... I was going to be carrying a tube of KY with me just in case, heh). The notion made me (understandably?) nervous. In the end, somebody on our end finally realized what was being proposed and put a stop to it — the shipment would have to be made via a commercial carrier and I would be reasonably assured of not having lights shined places that light should not normally shine. We drove still, but I was able to convince them to get two cars and the trip went pretty well (we did it over two days in each direction, sleeping at a hotel in Sarnia, Ontario). The two cars really made a huge difference in the end and we were able to juggle transportation quite a bit better because of it while we were there. It also proved critical for me not being completely pissed off about how things worked out for me because I, and the other two students from Carleton (okay, one of them was from the University of Ottawa, but he was working at Carleton with one of the profs for his honours project), went to Chicago for the afternoon on our way back to Sarnia at the end of the trip.
Now, I worked my sad little butt off to get to Fermilab, putting way more work into my 4th year honours project than seems reasonable, but I really wanted to go (I fried pretty hard, but what else is new, sigh). I grew up reading about Fermilab and all it accomplished over the years. When I was a teen, Fermilab was the big thing going on in particle physics. The work done there helped to confirm the, then, proposed "Standard Model" of particle physics and shaped our understanding of the way the universe works (the link leads to an 5 minute video easy introduction to this theory). The Higgs Boson was the last piece of the Standard Model, and its discovery at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was announced in 2013. Several of the earlier key discoveries were made at Fermilab's now defunct Tevatron. For what it's worth, the Standard Model did not exist when I was young... it didn't come into its modern form until I was about 8 years old or so, so I kind of grew up with it and watched it solidify as new data was gathered. Fermilab did a lot during its heyday (from the Fermilab propaganda):
The Tevatron became the world’s highest-energy proton-antiproton collider in 1985. The CDF and DZero collider experiments generated about 1,000 Ph.D. degrees and one scientific journal article a week describing their world-leading discoveries, observations and measurements. These experiments: discovered the top quark, determined its mass to high precision, and recorded two distinct top-quark production mechanisms; explored a new mass range for the Higgs boson and constrained its mass through top-quark and W-boson mass measurements; observed the strongest evidence yet for violation of matter-antimatter asymmetry in particles containing bottom quarks; discovered five B baryons and the Bc meson; and made the world’s most precise W-boson mass measurement.Truly heady days of discovery, and now I was finally going to be able to not only visit, but actually do particle physics with a world-class accelerator! Mind officially blown! The Tevatron stopped operation in 2011 due to budget cuts and competition from the Large Hadron Collider (I said it was a cutthroat business to be in...), but the main injector ring was still operational and there is plenty of bleeding edge physics being done at Fermilab still. In particular, neutrino physics is being done there now including the MINOS, MINERvA, and NOvA experiments that use the neutrinos generated by the truly terrifying NuMI device (they are created by slamming 120GeV protons from the main injector into a water-cooled graphite target, blocking the subatomic debris that is generated, and having nothing but neutrinos continue onward through the experiments at Fermilab and then 735km through the Earth to another detector in the bottom of a mine in Minnesota). More neutrino physics experiments are also on the way: in particular, the "Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment" will generate an intense beam of neutrinos at Fermilab that will travel 1300km through the Earth to a mine in South Dakota in order to study neutrino oscillation and help determine whether neutrinos are their own anti-particle (like photons). Down, but not out by any stretch, and the test beam facility that I was going to continues to provide the physics community and industry in general with a critical tool for testing devices and materials using high-energy particles as probes.
The Tevatron’s fixed target program included 43 experiments from 1983 to 2000. About 400 Ph.D. degrees and more than 300 scientific papers were generated through these pioneering experiments that tested and refined the Standard Model of particle physics. These experiments: discovered the tau neutrino; observed direct CP violation in kaon decays; made pioneering measurements of charm-quark physics; recorded some of the earliest evidence of particle jets; measured the quark content and structure of the proton and neutron; and bserved the first atoms of antihydrogen using Fermilab’s antiproton source.
Since this is a long post already and I've just "arrived" at Fermilab, I will leave you with pictures of where I stayed (a farmhouse over a century old, Aspen East, my bedroom was the one on the second floor at the far right with the window under the eaves of the house), the bedroom I was in (it had a bathroom and tiny "efficiency" kitchen in which I still managed to make some amazing meals... and yes, the photo was taken at 5:23, All Hail Eris!), and a photo of the Fermilab Test Beam Facility (that strange curved-roof building in the distance behind the herd of bison and the berm of the main particle accelerator beamline). My next posts will be of my time at the test beam, and then my trip to Chicago. More photos will be provided in those posts! Consider these teasers...
And finally, finally, a musical interlude until then... I love this cover of The Cure's "Lovesong" by Nathaly Dawn (did you know she has a Masters Degree in French Literature now? Yowza!):
