Detectors of the World

The nuclear physics trivia contests are back by popular demand! Same old rules: whoever is the first to get the name of all the detectors right can go knocking on Goeff's office and demand a brand new NSCL t-shirt as the price. If after a few days nobody identifies all these wonderful machines, then the winner will be whoever got more answers for the first time. But it should be easy this time, even though you'll notice the field is not exactly restricted to nuclear physics; they are all radiation detectors, but some live in the border between the nuclear and the high energy/astro/particle worlds.

1) The first detector in the group is close to my heart. My first task as a nuclear physicist, a long long time ago, consisted in wrapping its BaF neutron detecting tubes in bubble wrap to ship them for a calibration run at the University of Notre Dame. It has played an important role in the life of other students at the lab, such as Paul Hosmer (in the picture), who used it for his thesis experiment.

2) The most inexpensive detector in the sample. Even though in that category nothing beats a cloud chamber that you can build with empty jars of Tostitos salsa and dry ice. Once I had to buy like 10 jars of salsa as supplies for a summer program for high school students and teachers we have at the lab - the most awesome nuclear physics outreach program ever! The “sci-fi oldies & tostitos” party that followed was not enough to finish all the salsa, even though I think we watched the whole Ghostbusters saga. Each year, during the same summer program, a group of teachers build the detector presenter here, and then the students use it to count particles coming from outer space.

3) Just slightly more sophisticated than the previous one: it has a large bucket of water instead of a pica of plastic as its soul, solar panels for energy, and some gadgets for wireless communication. All that because there are like 3000 of these scattered throughout the 'yellow pampas' in South America, with the sole company of cows and zorzales, so they have to be self sufficient detectors. But in the end it does the same thing, detecting cosmic rays.

4) Fishing for neutrinos. We are doomed to use the adjective elusive to describe neutrinos - unless you're an accomplished poet. We also can’t get away with an easy way to detect them: we need lots of material. And what could beat water when you need lots of something?

5) Once you've reached the limit of how much water you can hold in a container before it breaks apart, then you have to get really creative and rethink how you define your container. Some guys in Italy are thinking about the Mediterranean sea, but I think it would be unfair to feature a research group that could have their office next to a beach in Sicily. So here is a detector that really goes to the extreme...

6) "None of us working at the lab are green mutants" Zach, our outreach coordinator, usually tells visiting tour groups when he explains the low radiation doses we're exposed to at the NSCL. I think Dr. Robert Bruce Banner would beg to disagree.

7) Here is a nice little detector you won't need to be Hulk to carry around. And that's a useful feature if you want to use it to survey the level of radiation in some location. That is, by the way, what we do before we bring visitors to the lab, we walk around with our Mickey-D detector and check that it's perfectly safe and no one will become a green mutant. So please don't be scared away from the great tours Zach offers!

8) Millions of years of careful design by mother nature have made this the most perfect radiation detector of them all. All the rest are just crude imitations.

9) Viajero, has llegado a la region mas transparente del aire. At about 100 astronomical units (9300000000 miles) this is the artifact that has made it farther from home. It's carrying a few particle detectors on board, such as the LEPC (Low Energy Charged Particles), which provide crucial information to identify, for example, the change in the nature of the solar winds that marks the boundaries of our solar system.

10) Another one up there. In the sixties these machines went up to monitor nuclear tests for nonproliferation reasons, but it turned out that either the little green men were much more active building bombs, or that there was something completely new out there. Such was the birth of gamma ray astronomy (a very active area of research, check this cool gamma ray sky map ). This is one of the latest additions to the field.

11) Once I went back home and took shiny lip gloss as a present for my teenage cousins. It was like giving candies to children. The next year I brought a 3000 pieces puzzle of this picture: the skeleton of a future dinosaur in high energy physics. Soon after that they removed me from their messenger friends list!