Beamlines of the World

"Clearly we have worse weather than Spain and clearly the cuisine in Italy is better than in Germany, but the best league in the world is in England and they have the worst weather and the worst cuisine," said K-H Rummenigge in a NY Times article I came across not long ago - K-H Rummenigge, if you’ve not consumed fußball (aka soccer) since you've been able to walk, is a former star of the German national team who now holds some 'top' position in the mighty Bayern Munchen club. I'm not planning to discuss his words - there's no way I'd make everybody happy if - but what he said somehow resonates with the situation we have in our nuclear physics world (actually the whole article about the bundeslig trying to attract talented international players). Let me explain ...


As we (grad students) progress in the path towards our PhD - I'd better say, as we hold on to grad school, since the first couple of years can be pretty grueling with all those subject exams, grading undergrad lab reports, advisors getting you all excited about research projects, and the adaptation to a diet based on food from Owen hall cafeteria (and the homework... the good old HW at 4am in the library) - anyway, we hold on tight and after some time getting that PhD starts to look less like an utopian dream. You go to a party, and it turns out that in parties among grad students there’s not much flippy cups & drinking games, and you engage in actual conversations about life and such, which inevitably go through some "when will you graduate? what do you want to do next?"



Unlike students in other fields, for us, rare isotopic scientists, it's not so easy to just claim "I want to escape the -10 degrees of East Lansing (in whatever scale you chose to measure them) and go somewhere it's sunny all year long!". No. Just like the Brazilians Ronaldinhos and Robinhos that have a painful time changing caipirinha in Ipanema beach for fish and chips in rainy London, it seems that the reputation of the nuclear physics labs that will hire us after grad school is inversely proportional to the average temperature of their location. My quick answer is that there are only a handful of places in the world doing research comparable to what we do at the NSCL - there is this one lab in Japan, a good one in the middle of a forest in Germany, and a couple more here and there, so my decision would be in a large part guided by who is in need of a postdoc by the time I graduate. Maybe if I want to stick to measuring nuclear masses (the topic of my thesis) I might even get lucky and go to Finland!



But there's still hope! During the DNP meeting last fall (see my previous post) they were giving away a nice little book with a compilation of information about nuclear physics labs around the world. I know my evaluation of the “job market” is a little bit too extreme, but I was surprised by the many different labs scattered around the world I found there - and therefore the ‘inspiration’ for this post. So just for the fun of it, and to test the nuclear physics literacy of the readers of this blog, here is the "Beamlines of the World" quiz! The prize: a cup of the renowned NSCL espresso to whom identifies all labs first, or whoever gets more correct answers by whatever arbitrary date the quiz ends!



1: element 105 is named in its honour, since this is one of the labs where physicists are working on expanding the periodic table of the elements.




2: it's the only beamline in the sample that serves as a race track for electrons - as far as I know, the others accelerate ions all the way from protons to uranium. The picture shows mostly the accelerator.




3: the name of this lab could make you think it's a product from the Apple corporation, but I think it's actually under the jurisdiction of the South African government.

4: futebol & carnaval (soccer & carnival)




5: this lab is the younger brother (or sister? is there a correct term?) of Germany's Gesellschaft fur Schwerionenforschung (GSI), but it's miles away. There are rumors it'll host an olympic event this summer, if only they can find an adequate one.





6: until recently we could proudly claim we had the most powerful cyclotron of the world here at the NSCL... and then came the pink beast in the middle of this picture.




7: during a talk I heard the speaker describe how this beamline was mostly put together by a diligent army of grad students. I Wonder if their work also included digging down the cave into the mountain where it's located.





8: once a factory to produce enriched material during the Manhattan Project era, this lab now does nuclear physics just for the fun of it!




9: our neighbours to the north (and also a little bit west).




10: this lab is quite famous for it miles-long circular accelerator that transverses the border between Switzerland and France, however it also has a area dedicated to more 'traditional' nuclear physics work.





11: at 4.5 inches in diameter this could certainly be (or could have been) considered a "tabletop beamline"