GSI Facility in Darmstadt

No, it isn't some fancy acronym from a Command & Conquer video game.  It's the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (Center for Heavy Ion Research) in Darmstadt, Germany and I went to visit it Friday afternoon.  They have a linear accelerator (UNILAC), the accelerating synchrotron (SIS), the Experiment Storage Ring (ESR) and Fragment Separator (FRS).  It also has several other experiments set up along with a tumor therapy room.  Lest all this sound uninteresting, this is the place that put elements 107-112 on the periodic table!  Meitnerium (1982), Hassium (1984), Darmstadtium (1994), Roentgenium (1994), Bohrium (1996), and Copernicium (1996) were all created/discovered here.  Ha!  And I stood next to the machines that did it.  It was astonishing.

That tumor therapy contraption was pretty interesting as well.  Heavy ion beams are shot at a person's head for example.  The beam is made up of carbon ions, instead of the old X-ray, and these ions release all of their energy at one particular point.  Here is a picture of the Bragg Curve courtesy of Wikipedia.  

 This particular curve is for alpha particles, but X-rays don't even have that peak. They only gradually die out in energy. Carbon ions, on the other hand, have an even sharper peak than the one in this picture.  That means the technicians and scientists know exactly where, distance-wise, the ion will release all of its energy after leaving the vacuum area of the accelerator.  If they hold your head still, they have millimeter precision with targeting and destroying a tumor.  Kind of crazy when you think about it.  I would feel a little nervous about having my head at the butt end of a particle beam that just got up to 90% light speed in 2 seconds.

This picture of the facility (sorry it's a little hard to read) was taken from the GSI page linked to here.  In it you can see the blue part is the existing facility which I got to walk through (mostly).  The red is the future and it will be awesome.  With the things they can already do, I can only imagine what they'll find out with more experiments and more powerful accelerators.  I said 'mostly' earlier because they had experiments going on at the time we were there, meaning the accelerators were active and that means everything was bottled up because of radiation.  A few experiments were not being used so we did get to see some of the detectors up close and personal.  The other experiments were trapped behind locked gates with radiation 'airlock' rooms and meters worth of concrete walls.  I'm hoping to get to go back and see it again.  I still don't get particle physics, because I'm just a simple astronomer, but I do appreciate the complicated stuff they do here to better understand the universe.  

By the by, the tumor therapy room is just below and a little to the left of the ESR ring.

Pseudo Anti-Deuterons

Today in my Methods and Applications of Atomic Physics class, we discussed antiparticles and CPT symmetry conservation (Charge conjugation, Parity and Time reversal).  The CPT thing is not what I'd like to discuss.

I know that having a particle interact with its antiparticle results in mutual annihilation accompanied by a release of energy.  I asked my professor what the possibilities are for gaining energy for free by using our available energy to create an antiproton that would then collide with a proton that we didn't have to work to get.  In case that made no sense this is what I meant: (No energy expended proton source) + (some energy expended antiproton source) = More energy than we put in coming back.  He said that it takes a crap-ton (rough estimate) of energy to make antiparticles currently.  Also, the number of antiparticles the world has thus far created, although numbering in the millions (if not billions), would hardly heat a cup of water if allowed to annihilate.  Drat.

My second question was a little more abstract.  I began with making sure I understood the matter-antimatter combination.  An antiproton will only annihilate with a proton, a positron will only annihilate with an electron, and so forth, right?  He didn't sound so sure but I asked my next question anyway.  What would happen if you could put an antiproton with a regular neutron?  A normal proton and neutron form the nucleus of deuterium also know as heavy hydrogen.  45 years ago we had already made antideuterium (antiproton with antineutron), but I want to know what would happen if you could mix different matter and antimatter particles.  He said he did not know but he guessed it would be bad (his words!).  

I really don't know what the point of such a particle would be, but I suppose that since the antiproton is made up of antiquarks the annihilation would come from the quarks messing with each other.  Just wanted to share those thoughts.  Does anybody know anything about this?  Has it been done?

Day III - Finals

It's finals time...finally.  After a grueling 4 months, we've come at last to the moment of truth.  And what a moment it is here in Germany.  Typically, there are no tests at all during the semester.  The only thing providing any measure of accomplishment in class are homeworks and frankly I've not had the best ones while here.  Usually there are 3 maybe even 4 tests during the quarter at home and they scale in such a way that bombing one doesn't mean a complete failure.  Sometimes one is even dropped.  Here there is no chance of that.  You bomb this, you bomb for good.  It's so much pressure!  There have been 12 in class practice problem sheets and 12 homework assignments for one class and no indication by the teacher what might be the 'big problem' on the test.  You know, the one that should take 20 minutes and call upon a great deal of what you've learned?  No idea what I should really focus on and there isn't enough time to really review everything in the fullest.  There are so many equations, so many formulas, so many relations, tricks, and concepts that need to be known just to do the homework.  I take an hour just looking in textbooks and online for the tools I need to do a problem.  I'm not even sure what the equation sheet that will be provided for the test will look like.  How will I be able to take a test?  

I knew that school here would be more difficult.  It seems that since moving away from California 4 years ago I've been progressively increasing the difficulty of my schooling.  First changing majors, going to a community college, getting accepted to the University of Washington for astronomy, doubling my major to include physics and now studying abroad during a critical time of my physics education: EM and quantum.  I know taking quantum mechanics will be difficult, but now I'm revamping my position to saying it will be near impossible.  I do not look forward to taking it this coming semester.  What will the test for that class be like?

Day II - End of the Universe

What is an interesting thing to think about if you're a long term thinker?  How about the end of the universe?  Apparently, a new calculation of the amount of entropy in the universe has revealed much higher numbers than originally thought.  Of course the researchers can't put a number yet on when exactly every particle in the universe is around the same energy excitement level, but they assured us that it would be after the sun has done its red giant blossoming thing.

I wonder if this 'heat death scenario' is the same as another end of days theory I've heard about?  It involves the expansion of the universe eventually leading to a point, the 'Big Rip,' where no matter will coalesce and form new stars anymore.  Everything in the universe - stars, planets, moons - will be smeared out to elementary particles just floating in space.  They'll never get back together for a reunion party in a star's core or a planet's crust because everything will be too spread out.  Boring!  Of course before that happens the expansion, which increases, will cause every galaxy to disappear from view.  That's right.  They'll be so far away the light won't reach us.  The only stars will be those in our own galaxy and of course those will be going out as the galaxy evolves and no new ones will form...and it leads to particle butter scraped over too much bread!  

Einstein Field Equations

Here in Germany I knew I would be probably yearning for some English, especially in my schooling.  As such, I signed up for a Nuclear Astrophysics class as some of you dear readers already know.  Also, this is a graduate level class.  I knew, or at least had heard, of the Einstein field equations and how they were supposed to equal 42 or some such thing...alright that last part is a lie.  I had heard of them before though.  So it turns out that this class seems to me to be more Cosmology than Nuclear Astrophys, especially since one of the first things mentioned in lecture was how we would develop the tools to solve the field equations in the first few weeks.  Here we are almost 2 months in and we recently got there.

I was amazed.  Why?  Because I was able to follow the steps.  These are 10-coupled equations.  You start with defining the metric which I think describes how the space-time you have should work.  On second thought I'm pretty sure that's wrong, but please roll with it for the purposes of this blog.  Anyway, you have to have this metric so that you can find the Christoffel symbols.  With the Christoffel symbols and the metric, you calculate the Riemann-Christoffel tensor and from that tensor, you use the metric to contract it to the second-rank Ricci tensor.  From the Ricci tensor, contracting with the metric again gets you the Ricci scalar.  And with all these pieces you solve the equations.  I was wowed.  I'm still not sure exactly what these equations tell us, but I'm pretty sure they describe the universe.  Holy cow.  

On a related note, I discovered today that I am definitely a theorist, not an experimentalist.  Sure, I like to think I have a little engineering in my blood, but that's just from watching too much MacGyver as a kid.  I definitely prefer math and the cosmos to experiments with circuits or particle accelerators and what not.  I'm happy sitting at a computer analyzing light from start thousands of light-years away or manually calculating Fourier transforms.  Is that wrong?  

No.  Cheers!

As Promised...

So I promised a story last time and as I took a brief restroom break from my homework, I chanced to read in the magazine Astronomy a brief article regarding "dark flow." Dark flow is a term coined by a researcher whose team discovered something I think is one of the coolest things ever. Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center, and his team discovered that at least 700 massive galaxy clusters (a large number of galaxies relatively close together) are all moving as groups towards a single point in the sky!

Let me use a different example in case you didn't follow that. Imagine if 700 million people on Earth were all inexplicably pulled 20ft towards the Space Needle here in Seattle. It's something like that, only they keep moving. Can you imagine how crazy this is? At least 700 individual galactic clusters are all moving towards one point! It's hypothesized that there is a concentration of mass beyond the observable universe that is exercising a force on these clusters. It's rather beyond me the size of this mass you would have to have to be able to do all this. My mind is blown.

Kashlinsky named this phenomenon dark flow to reference dark energy and dark matter, two other great mysteries. Obviously of course, there is much research to do still and this might be a ginourmous coincidence. So, don't quote me. I just wanted to share an article.

Source: Astronomy January 2009 p.31

Anticipation

So to make a long story short yet concise yet full-of-all-that-you-would-need-to-know, I am preparing my skill set to partake in analyzing data for a post doc at the UW. What? Well to undergrads like myself they call that research. Cool, huh? I have to say I'm very nervous yet excited. I know that research is an important part of being an undergrad and grad in the sciences so I've been wondering how I was going to get started. Imagine my shock when all I had to do was talk to our (the Astronomy Dept.) friendly program advisor who then took me over to the faculty member with the work to be done! Whew!

What skill set am I preparing you ask? Well, I'm a Windows guy. I like PC's. To use the current cliche, I'm a PC. What I don't know very well are any things that use command lines and stuff that's behind the scenes without a friendly desktop and mouse to help me around. The data I'll be needing are accessible by Linux or programs similar to Linux (which is similar to Unix [you got me on what that is]). This faculty member, whose name is Lynne, got me a link to a crash course in Linux and I'm studying it like a fiend, trying to get good at it so I can start this project.

And the project is, you ask? Well Lynne was taking optical (visible light) data of a patch of asteroids in the Asteroid Belt and at nearly the same time, the Spitzer Space Telescope was taking an infrared (measures the heat of an object) picture of the same batch of asteroids. Now if you have either optical or infrared data on an object like an asteroid, it's difficult (not sure if its impossible) to determine its size. But, by combining both, you can determine the albedo, a measure of the reflectivity of the object and from that you can determine size. What you do with the info after that is ... up to someone else at this point I think.

There is my news for the week. That and I've been sick with a cold. I also just finished my math physics homework which was more tedious than anything I've done in about 4 months, which was when I had to move.

3.3 Microseconds

It's a full moon. I've started listening to Christmas music. I'm freeing up space on my computer. And this is my 60th blog (but technically my 59th posted blog). It seems only fitting I discuss an interesting matter that has been muddling around in the back and front and sides of my head (nooks and crannies are free of this thought).

Take a moment and consider light. Go on................ It has a velocity: 3.0 x 10^8 m/s (or verbally, three hundred million meters per second). That's pretty stinking fast you say. Duh, I know, I'm an astrophysicist (in training). Anyway. Now consider what light does for us. It illuminates things. Everything you can see with your eyes is because light is reflecting off of it. Shocking! If it were not for light bouncing off things, we would not see them, unless the object itself was a source of illumination. Now, put these two ideas together. Velocity and that things we see are because of light. We are constantly seeing the past.

Yes, we are always seeing the past. Never the now. A little meta-exi-physi-stensial for you? Well, I'm only putting it how I heard it and then thought about it. Light takes time to travel from an object to our eye. Thus, unless the object is in your eye, you are experiencing it as it was in the past (and we won't discuss neuron sensory path time). There is no now when it comes to visual stimuli. It's easy to say light from a star took 100 million years to get here because it's 100 million light-years away, but it's not something people think about when they look at a train coming at them from say....1 kilometer away. Do you know how long it took that light from the train to get to you? It's Math Time (insert intro credits to favorite TV show here).

Distance = velocity x time so t = D/v or t= (1000m)/(3 x 10^8 m/s)

t= .0000033 seconds

AHHHH! That train could have exploded and you wouldn't know it for 3.3 micro seconds!!!

So, cue a discussion if you like. Perhaps others are so adamant about the absurdity of my statement that an answer to life, the universe, and everything will come out of discusssion.

P.S. As an aside, or I guess more accurately a post script, I would like to point out the distance from the Sun to the Earth is 1.49 x 10^11 meters, which is 149 billion meters. Couple that with light speed and the Sun could explode and we wouldn't have a gorram clue for 8 minutes. Makes me chuckle just thinking about it.

π day

Well everyone, today is Pi day, the day that matches the beginning of the mathematical constant Pi, 3.14159... etc., ad infinitum, and what not. My calculus teacher this quarter (a capital fellow if you ask me) said that mathematicians don't really celebrate Pi day, it's the people around math people that think they should be celebrating today. People bake him pies to eat, so he doesn't argue the fact to hard. "Yeah Pi Day!" Who's making me a pie??

If you're at all interested in the amazing number that is the ratio of a the circumference of a circle to its radius, you can go to this link and search the first two hundred million numbers of Pi for any sequence of number you want. For example, my birthday, 3483, starts at the 17,774th digit of Pi. Moreover, if you were to use the full US date format of 03041983, then my birthday doesn't occur in the first 200,000,000 digits. Wow! (or not Wow! depending on how nerdy you are.)

http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery.html

There's other things that could be said about Pi. I could show you an alternate way I learned how to calculate it that use infinite series and stuff like that. It's way cool because every succesive term in the series of numbers you add up tacks 25 digits onto the end of Pi. Holy cow! What does he even mean?! Sorry everyone, but I just had to say something about it. So think about it today at 1:59:26 am and pm. (cause that'll be 3.14 159 26)

Corollary: I add this paragraph on 3/15 and would like to tell about the aftermath of Pi day. Krista Fosse, a veritable anthropomorphized precious gem, actually made me (of all people) a pie yesterday. Apple pie none the less, which is my favorite. And then Jessica Turver, a forest rose of surpassing grace and kindness, made two pies as well, not knowing it was even Pi day. Needless to say, there was much pie consumed last night in the Aerie and there was much rejoicing. Praise Him!

The Multiverse

Regardless of what the masses believe regarding the soon to be mentioned subject (preview: the multiverse theory), I believe I have come to the ultimate justification for any expenditure in proving and utilizing, if proven true, the following theory: the multiverse. Yes, the multiverse. WTF is a multiverse you ask? A brief history (as far as I understand where they [i.e. present day scientists] get their ideas), complete with diagrams.

The multiverse theory seems to me to come from two different ideas and or observations and I think either one is just dandy. Today, there is a debate about whether light is a particle or a wave, or some fancy combination of both. By particle, I mean individual "photons" of light and when I say wave, I mean the electromagnetic wave that propagates all around us allowing us to see. So, which is it? Well if you use what is called the "Double-Slit Experiment," you can demonstrate that light acts like a wave. By shining a laser at a double slit, you set up an interference pattern on a screen beyond the slit like so:
This is produced by overlapping waves. Now, the interesting thing is if you reduce the intensity of the light until only one photon of light is coming at a time through this double slit, then you get something quite interesting and remarkable. This:
Astonishing! I believe the popular opinion among the more extreme thinking branches is that the only way these single, tiny balls of light still make this pattern, even though there is nothing else in the way to hit it or knock it off course, is that in another parallel universe, somebody is running the same experiment, and those photons are interacting with out photons. There's more to say, but this is a blog and nobody cares.

The second idea is much simpler and I don't think there are any proofs yet for this. It is merely that every choice that anybody in any time has ever had to make has spawned a parallel universe; one where you did the alternative to whatever choice you eventually made. One where you went with brown socks and then destroyed the world and one where you stuck with white socks and had a good day at school. Get the drift? Good. It makes for fascinating discussions about science, psychology, morality, and Western civilization. For your viewing pleasure, I have drawn the first four dimensions and then what the multiverse would be like. Think of the sphere as one time unit. (The fourth dimension having popularly been accepted as time.)Theoretically, since there are an infinite number of these universes, there is one where everybody has blue hair naturally, or where the sky is a deep and majestic shade of purple-green, or where most everybody is a comfortable baked clam. Yes, I know. "What a stupid theory," you must be saying. Well, I would postulate that those universes would be infinitely "far away" from us and we don't need to worry about it. If you were to think of all these universes as little beads strung along a wire, then the one where everybody is a baked clam is probably ten to the ten trillion universes away from us. It doesn't matter. I'm concerned with the universes maybe fifty or more away on either side of use. Now we come to the reason for my sharing and the justification.

Somewhere, and most likely not to far away down that imaginary line of universes, is a planet Earth where the sci-fi TV show Firefly did not get canceled. It got signed for five or six or even more seasons and went on to great things. I am going to go to this universe someday and bring back the DVD sets of these seasons, so that this world doesn't have to suffer the stupidity of certain network executives and their shortsightedness by canceling the show before it even had a chance.

(Yes, you read all that sci-babble for that. Sorry)

p.s. Even more astonishing, though I didn't include any numbers in my picture, is that these parallel universes don't necessarily have to be at the same time in...well time. You could go to a universe that is our exact universe except at an earlier or later time frame. How cool would that be?