May 10, 2009 at 4:45 pm (Advanced Laboratory, Life as a grad student, Movie, Physics)
Tags: Diet, Food Diary, Movie, Physics, Slice of life, Star Trek, Weigh-In
I return! Somewhat alive. I haven’t been posting lately because finals have been dragging me down. I took what is (in grad school at least) a really heavy load and I got bitten hard by that last week. I had so much to do. I had to grade papers for the advanced lab, I had to get two general relativity homework assignments done, I had to get a general relativity final done, and I had to get the statistical thermodynamics final done. That last one was especially rough, I spent almost 30 hours on it. YUCK.
Anyways rather than trying to post a bunch of back dated articles, I will simply summarize the results here.
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April 22, 2009 at 8:42 pm (Advanced Laboratory, Exercise, Life as a grad student, Physics)
Tags: Advanced Lab, Exercise, Physics
So as it says at the top of my blog I am a graduate student in physics. To earn my keep until I can become a research assistant I am a teaching assistant. In my case I am the TA for the graduate lab. This is a lab that almost all first year grad students must take. It gives them experience with experimental methods and paper writing. Additionally, I figure it makes the theorists have a little more respect for us grubby experimentalists.
We use a lot of radioactive sources in the lab, the are useful for any number of experiments both those involving nuclear physics and those on things like atomic physics, condensed matter physics and basic quantum mechanical things like the statistics of spin. Anyways, we have an experiment called ACAR, short for Angular Correlation of Annihilation Radiation, I won’t get into what the experiment is about beyond this: It uses a Na-22 source which is a positron emitter. Yes I said positron. The proton rich nucleus emits anti-electrons to get rid of some of its excess positive charge. Anyways this source is quite hot. We have it shielded so that the radiation dose rates are quite low (almost lower than the increased cosmic ray dose rate that you receive in an airplane trip). But nonetheless it is quite hot.
This source is hot enough that 30 feet away we can pick up the characteristic gamma rays of the source, despite the shielding. This made us decided that the source needed yet more shielding. As it is the dose rate to students and people working on it is fairly low but the fact that we can pick it up means that it might interfere with other experiments.
“What does all this have to do with moving heavy things?” you may be asking. There is one material that physicists favor for building gamma radiation shields, lead bricks (or sometimes solid chunks of lead if need be). Unfortunately the lead bricks are stored in the Nuclear Science Lab in Neiuland Science Hall, we needed them in Jordan Hall of Science. Even worse, the bricks are stored in the room that holds the Read the rest of this entry »
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