By Thanzaw Myint
Yangon, Myanmar
Physics and Math
By Kassahun Haileyesus
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Physics and Math
Our exploration into particle physics took us to the famous Argonne and Fermi national laboratories near Chicago, then down a rattling elevator to a lab 2,400 feet underground in the Soudan mine in northern Minnesota. We were on a quest to see firsthand what we had learned in Professor Tonnis ter Veldhuis’ special topics course, Elementary Particle Physics.
Through our travels and our discussions with professional physicists, we saw how particle research is done in practice
and learned about the latest
experimental results.
—Thanzaw Myint
—Kassahun Haileyesus |
Before the trip, we each conducted a small research project related to what we had learned in class and what we were about to see, and presented our results in class.
At the Argonne National Laboratory, we visited the ATLAS (Argonne Tandem Linear Accelerator System) linear heavy ion accelerator and the Advanced Photon Source. Dr. Robert Janssens, the scientific director of the ATLAS experiment, gave us an insider’s tour through the belly of the ATLAS accelerator. We also saw Gammasphere, the world’s most sensitive high-resolution gamma-ray detector used in studying nuclear reactions.
During our visit to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), we spoke with graduate students about the particle physics done at the lab, and what it is like to be in graduate school. We visited the Tevatron Collider—the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the DZero detector and the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) Near Detector.
MINOS researchers try to determine unknown properties of neutrinos, very light and weakly interacting particles. Every second, billions of neutrinos emitted by the sun penetrate the earth and all of us, but they are harmless because they do not often interact with ordinary matter. At the MINOS facility at Fermilab, they produce a beam of muon neutrinos and measure the beam’s properties using the MINOS Near Detector. This beam is directed toward the MINOS Far Detector in Soudan, traveling 457 miles underground through thick boulder without diminishing in intensity.
Our next trip took us deep into the Soudan mine, a former iron mine, now a state park and home of the MINOS Far Detector facility and the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search II experiment (CDMS II). The CDMS II looks for evidence of the existence of dark matter particles called WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). Laboratory manager Bill Miller gave us a tour of the MINOS Far Detector, and we spoke with the two postdoctoral research associates from Stanford University in charge of CDMS II operations.
We were amazed by how much our understanding grew when we actually saw what we had learned in class. Through our travels and our discussions with professional physicists, we saw how particle research is done in practice and learned about the latest experimental results. This extraordinary experience motivated us to obtain summer research stipends to work on projects in collaboration with Professor ter Veldhuis, exploring for ourselves some of the intriguing scientific problems facing today’s particle physicists.
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