Science - that thing I do.

I presume the people reading these blogs, might be interested in the science. Call me crazy. So I thought I might give a little info on plasma wake field acceleration. We are fringe physics. Maybe (hopefully) our technology will be used in 20 years, should everything go according to plan, but then again maybe not. Why I love my experiment and why I am here is because I have been given a chance to work on something novel. We are not taking well-known technology to the next level, we are starting from the ground floor and making it work. Straight up - my experiment is so cool.

Background: Presently, the accelerator at SLAC is made up of fancy copper tubing. We generate an electro-magnetic wave using klystrons, pump it into the fancy copper tubing and the electrons or positrons (the anti-matter of electrons) ride the wave at the proper point and get accelerated. Think: surfer == electron/positron, ocean wave == electro-magnetic wave, wave-maker == klystron. An excellent website to waste time at is SLAC's virtual visitor center. I could go into this more later. The problem with the setup: copper eventually melts. At a certain point, if you pump in too much power to try and accelerate electrons too quickly, you will melt your accelerating structure (the fancy copper tube). That would be very, very bad.

That's where we come in. We use plasma. Plasma (by definition) is already broken down. Plasma is merely ionized gas, gas where an electron (or two) have been stripped from the atom. So you can pump much more power into plasma without having to worry about silly things like melting. This means more acceleration in less distance. Just whetting your scientific appetite ... more to come.

Comments

[Raymond]

Finally, a fellow Harvard College grad getting into some real science! Awesome stuff. I, on the other hand, was an econ major, but only recently started reading Hawking (Theory of Everything, Universe in a Nutshell), Brian Greene (Fabric of the Cosmos, Elegant Universe), Bill Bryson (History of Nearly Everything), and Ken Ford (The Quantum World). Technically, I don't read them, but listen to them on my Ipod! Its awesome! I listen to these books everywhere now, while riding my bike, running, driving... Problem is, after reading all of this stuff, I'm INSANELY INTERESTED in quantum mechanics, M-Theory (superstring theory), and the concepts of non-locality and the Exclusion Principal. I never learned any of this in college or high school. Is it really true that a scientist conducting an experiment can "spin" a photon in one lab, communicate its axis to another person, say, a trillion miles away, and its sister particle will instantaneously spin at the same velocity on the same axis??? How can I ask other quantum mechanics questions for dummies?

[Caolionn O'Connell]

Sorry for the delayed response. Quantum mechanics is very strange and borderline trippy when you get into the gedanken experiments. I believe you are asking about the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. I have to give my boyfriend major brownie points for remembering its scientific name - I think of it as the jelly bean experiment, but that name wasn't going to help me in finding a good website. I had learned it in the context of have two "entangled" jelly beans in two different pockets each with a 50/50 chance of being red or green. If I take my jelly bean to New York and then look it and see it is red, then I instantaneously know the other jelly bean is green. It's a little low brow compared to spins, but it just sounds cooler and more profound to me if you put it in the context of something tangible. If you are interested in reading more about it see the links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox (very good)
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Einstein-Podolsky-RosenParadox.html (just a teaser)

Feel free to ask questions, but I can't promise that I will know the answer. In those cases, I offer up the theorists.

[saravanakumar]

this is interested for every one.i also exited about urs.i want learn more about ur topics . plz help me.