At The Lab

Hey, everybody, look at the NSCL homepage! See the person at the top? That's my advisor! Here's a paraphrase of the blurb: "News Flash: Everybody Else Thinks She's Awesome, Too." (Ha! I win at advisors.)

'Tis Valentine's Day
At the NSCL
Get out of our way,
We're racing pell-mell
Talking in hallways
On stairs, elevators,
And looking 'round always
For collaborators.
 
It's Valentine's Day!
Not a chocolate in sight
For, I'm sad to say,
We've been here all night
Writing proposals
That lack in romance
To study intently
The nuclear dance.
 

We'd none of us be in science if it weren't for some form of outreach that got us interested in what we're doing. For those of us who have already joined this parade, however, some kind of inreach would be nice from time to time. (This is one of the things I like about coming to a big university like MSU--there is a perpetual string of seminars to go to.) Let's contrast outreach with inreach. Here's who people outside of physics read: Brian Greene. Here's who people inside of physics read: David J. Griffiths.

This is a demonstration that has become an integral part of how I explain what we do here, and we used to great effect with last Saturday's visiting sixth graders. I call it the "Fragmentation Box", and most of the credit for it goes to Jon Delauter.

It always comes down to money when you want to do research. You need money to buy detectors, and build structures. Then you need money to go to conferences afterwards to show your results. And money to live on is usually a good thing too.

This week's featured quirky term which I encountered in the context of physics is "beamstrahlung."
 
Why it's interesting:
Physics pun!
 
What it is:
Bremsstrahlung-like radiation produced when (in this case) a bunch of electrons passes through a bunch of positrons (instead of ordinary matter, as in the non-pun namesake) when beams of same collide. And yes, the word "bunch" is used in the technical sense.
 
Where I encountered it:

The content of this post is less grand than the title, but do not be disappointed. There is some import contained within.

On Friday, I was privileged to attend the lecture by Dr. Ruth Ann Sime, author of Lise Meitner: a Life in Physics. Aside from being a thoroughly pleasant person, Dr. Sime enlightened us with her research into the life of a woman who was instrumental in the discovery of fission and yet received no credit. Due to her gender and Jewish ancestry, her research in Germany was glossed over and her collaborator, Otto Hahn, received the Nobel.

At our group meeting today, it was pointed out that my pixels (not the helpers in super paper mario) looked a bit off and it was suggested I take a look at them. Each HiRA telescope has 32 Efront strips and 32 Ebacks for 1024 'pixels'. I calculated the position of all of them, but they didn't appear to cover a big enough area. So I checked, and the width of the active area was slightly less than it should be ~.6mm. You may think half a millimeter is really small and negligible, but remember, we're trying to do precision measurements on nuclei that are very small.

The Lise Meitner lecture really was awesome. It's wonderful to encounter a scientific biography given to a scientific audience by someone who actually knows science (the author/speaker's a chemist)! The speaker was really good, and I learned quite a few things I didn't get from the Wikipedia article. The slides had some neat pictures, too, including a periodic table from around the 1920s/1930s.