Glass palace on a hill: week one

For some reason, I took a picture of the hill and not the palace. It's a really good hill, though: very steep, and with a high quality covering--the result of endless maintenance. Very much like the Waltham Westin which it thrusts skyward over the surrrounding landscape of office parks and reservoir ponds.

Along with a dozen other students from my own grad program and a hundred more folks from schools all over the US, I've been a voluntary prisoner in this glass cage for the past week. I'm home today, but I'm going back for the concluding week before tomorrow ends. Science routinely isolates me from non-scientists--dissappointing, but not surprising and not without some compensation: studying in a posh lobby, along with free access to a workout room, pool, hot tub, and sauna; a government-financed stay for two weeks in a four-star hotel. Not a bad deal for ten days of intense academic labor. I think we're the only guests at this swank hotel who think nothing of taking the short way to lunch places, even if it means going through the landscaping. We're also the only ones camping out in the lobby with math and cocktails.


















The daily schedule goes something like this: Hotel-provided breakfast must be finished before classes start at 9am. (After many many requests the first day, to-go coffee cups were provided. Over the course of the first few days, decaf was demoted from Giant Urn to Tiny Hand-Pumped Thermos. Diesel was promoted to Three Giant Urns grouped tightly with spouts together for rapid pouring.) Coffee in hand, we bound enthusiastically into our hotel conference room seats and attend lecture until 11am, learning fancy math tricks so we can easily (really easily) calculate the quadrupole moment of an offset sextapole. Or prove that when the flow is symplectic, only phase space filamentation can cause apparent violations of Liouville's theorem. Then comes two hours of building simulated particle accelerators and optimizing their design. Accelerator physics is more an art with lots of math than a science with a prominent sense of mysticism.

Lunch is never more than an hour, and then it's class again until 5pm.
My class (attendees have their choice of maybe ten courses of one- or two-week length) consists of thirteen students who have proven that they will do whatever our professor asks of them, even implicitly, and that they will do it unquestioningly (if not uncomplainingly). The big guy is shown here on his very knees, finishing an explanation of how the iterative application of the variation of constants yields arbitrary precision in the nonlinear corrections to the transport mapping function. I wanted to capture the easy grace of his derivations of the Twiss parameters, but it didn't offer a chance to show off the choice use of a $5,000 LCD projector: as a lamp for the whiteboard he felt was under-illuminated.
Class (I forgot I was detailing a schedule) lasts until 5pm, which leaves an hour before hotel-catered dinner to begin the homework (or hit the gym/hot tub/sauna), which consistently takes us to midnight or one am. Collapse, repeat. It's exhilirausting. I have never before had the experience of the professor personally instructing his students to stop working, that it was now almost 1 am, and that we needed sleep. Talk about feeling hard core.

Five days of this, and I'm happy to spend the weekend soaking up the weather, the city, and the company of friends. By close of Sunday, I'll be back at it. What a good life I've found!

This didn't even happen today

but I dig it nonetheless. Full disclosure: Below is the unretouched version.

That searing light in the sky is the moon at about half full. I mean, half empty.

Today I found a pretty rock.

See? The laboratory's lighting is unflattering, but believe me, it's very pretty.

____________

The early part of this week (we don't believe in "weekends" or "breaks"), on my way to the mountain,
I made sure to look both ways before crossing the busy street:





and avoided agitating the turkeys, who were showing their aggressive displays and being very blurry:


I made it to the lab safely, and the photon beam was still focussed on the tiny sample of material who electron band structure we're mapping.



We moved into one of the on-site apartments, which chiefly means that I can now leave my soap and shampoo in the shower and that we have a kitchen space which is our own. But I found this little guy camouflaging himself against the door, and then this stuff:

I didn't realize that lichens could bloom. Perhaps this one is having a medical problem with a mold or something. Any guesses? The other things I've snapped are less difficult to categorize, but just as nice to look at.


Good night, Mrs. Calabash, where ever you are.

Photoemission in the Forest

What the hell is it? It's not spit, not from a person anyways. See how regular all the bubbles are in size? I wonder if it's a deposit of frog eggs, but it's far from any pond where the tadpoles could develop. Maybe toad spawn? Is it a clump of insect eggs? All expert guesses welcome.

__________________________________

Welcome to BNL. Bored yet?

Another synchrotron, another blog. It's the perfect way to entertain myself while I wait for the signals to assert themselves above the noise. Cutting-edge science so often involves pushing the current technology to the limit of what it can deliver. Which leaves me with long stretches during which I can't go far but also can't do much.

This time I find myself on a tropical island just south of Connecticut. Here the natives are not like they were in Sweden. They seem to be on average less entirely pleasant to look upon, even uncouth in some instances. Their choices of apparel heighten this effect rather than downplay it. I saw a lady at the King Kullen whose hair and makeup must have taken more than an hour, but the rest of her only meritted sweatpants and a sweatshirt.

Long Islanders seem to enjoy eating well, but so farI haven't find out where they do this, since none of the towns and strip malls in the area surrounding the laboratory grounds would have me eating like that. Which is about enough complaining, since many people here have been quite friendly and human, velour tracksuits notwithstanding.

Brookhaven National Laboratory has a reputation among its users as boring and crapulent. In fact, I originally planned this entry to be a photo essay of just how miserable and half-assed this place is, but as I documented it I realized just how lovely it looks. I have been trying since I first came here two years ago to emphasize the beauty of this place, both to myself and to my coworkers. It's been too easy to slip back into the dissatisfied boredom that they voice in response. Judge for yourself how it looks on film:

The National Synchrotron Light Source is just one of several research centers here at Brookhaven National Labs. To first approximation, BNL is a 5000 acre forest. (Pardon the use of local vernacular.) The smattering of roads and buildings are the most important correction to that approximation, but I found a shortcut between the dorms and the lab, so this pine-needle red carpet is my walk to work. Well, the picturesque part.

The lab grounds are more forest than research centers, and are home to more critters than scientists, such as these:

...that I surprised on the walk to the lab in the morning,

... as I cut through a parking lot,

... in the grass outside the northeast entrance,
... and even among the gravel surrounding the transformer outside the dorm.

(See? I ain't lyin'.)





I'll thrown in more shots of the wild turkeys, fat little groundhogs, racoons, and song birds if I get some worth sharing.


Buut when I'm not pretending to be a naturalist, this is the Millenium Falcon of a lab facility where I'm doing my work. Actually, it's not my own work, since the chemist who is synthesizing the material I will use is still putting the finishing touches on the samples. So for the last week or so I've actually been lending a hand to one of the other students in my research group. This gives me a chance to polish my understanding of our techniques and gives me the incidental benefit of extra experience in the lab here.

For instance, I learned not to optimize the sample position using the intensity of the valence band peak; I took excellent data for a whole day without noticing that I was using the sample holder and not the sample we're experimenting on. My head wasn't even foggy from overwork. I look forward to making more exciting mistakes in the future.

-Dr. S