Sarah Phillips

Owl Shift for HAPPEX

So, right now I am working the midnight to 8:00 am shift (known as the owl shift around here) on a Hall A experiment named HAPPEX.  Since the experiments here run round the clock, someone has to work all night taking and monitoring the data and making sure that everything is running smoothly.  I will be working on this shift all week, with Hachemi, who is a graduate student from Syracuse University.  He's the guy in my photographs of the Hall A counting house room.

Beamtime is a precious commodity (an experiment only gets assigned just so many days of it), so the main focus of what you do while you are working on shift is to make sure that every moment of the beamtime counts and is used wisely and efficiently so that the experiment will be a successful one.  Thus, there are a lot of things to keep track of while on shift.  We make sure that the electron beam that the accelerator is giving us meets the standards required for the experiment (and if it does not meet them, we call the machine operators and request them to adjust things), that the target (cold, dense helium gas in this case) is in happy working order, that the computer data acquisition system for the experiment is happily taking data all the time and that the data runs are stopped and started every hour, and that the data coming in makes sense.  In addition, we solve any potential problems that arise that interfere with the data taking, such as misbehaving magnets or detectors that decide to go on strike.  If we cannot solve the problems that arise pretty quickly, we have lists of people for the experiment who are experts on various parts of it, so we can call in a magnet expert if something goes wrong with the magnets, for example.  All of this is designed to make sure that the data collection is done as efficiently as possible, saving time and money.

If everything is going well, the shifts are very quiet.  The shifts I am doing right now are lovely production shifts, where things are going very smoothly, so all I do is monitor the incoming data and start and stop the runs every hour.  So, I have been catching up on some pleasure reading while I have been working!  :)  The owl shifts seem to be the best time for getting stuff done and just taking data.  During the day there is much more commotion, with people coming in and out wanting to know how things are going and if we have run so-and-so's test plan yet.  At night, we just steadily take data, which I enjoy.

This experiment, HAPPEX (here's a link to the press release about their preliminary results from some data they took last year), is a nice one to be working on, and has very familiar physics to me. :)  Like G0, the experiment measures the parity-violating asymmetry from elastic electron scattering from a liquid hydrogen target, as well as an extremely cold and dense helium gas target, with the goal of learning about the strange quark contributions to the nucleon's charge and current distributions.  Whereas G0 made these measurements over a range of momentum transfer values, and will need to make several backward-angle measurements over the next several years to do a complete separation of the strange electric and magnetic contributions to the structure of the nucleon, HAPPEX is doing an even more precise measurement at a single momentum transfer point that is slightly below the range we measured in G0.  Since the experiment is doing the measurements on a helium target as well as a liquid hydrogen target in the months that they are taking data, the collaboration will be able to do the extraction of the strange magnetic and electric contributions from this data set once they are finished with the data collection this fall.   

All in all, it means that I am working all night every night this week.  One would have thought that I would have had enough of strange quarks and their contributions to the magnetic and electric properties of the nucleon already with G0, but evidently not, since here I am in Hall A's counting house.  I am sure that Hachemi and I will have plenty to do and will have fun doing it over the next week.  Our shift last night (or rather, very early yesterday morning) was very quiet, so we just blabbed and laughed while we monitored everything.  It should be a fun week, if I can get used to sleeping throughout the entire day.  :)

Lovely Birthday

My birthday was lovely this year.  I followed my usual custom this year and stayed up to watch the sun rise on the morning of my birthday.  Since my birth certificate records that I was born at dawn, I indulge in the sentimental and romantic notion that it is important to watch the sun rise on this day.  Since I am so definitely not a morning person, this usually tends to be the only day of the year I ever see the sun rise.  :)  The only exception to that is when I am on owl shift (the midnight to 8:00 am shift) for an experiment like I will be doing next week for HAPPEX  in Hall A.  Anyway, I use this time for reflection upon the past year of my life and for planning my path and goals for the new year.  The dawn was quite lovely this year, a welcome beginning to a special day.

After sleeping in, I spent my afternoon buying myself some birthday flowers and blabbing on the phone with all my cool friends and family members that called me to wish me a happy birthday.  It is great to feel remembered by those that matter!  :)

Vince threw a birthday party for me in the evening, so I got to have a wonderful time hanging out with my friends.  We even enjoyed a marvelously chocolate birthday cake complete with twenty-seven candles made by Tim's wife Virginia.  It was so great.  It is great to have cool friends and a fun birthday!  :)

Friday!

I am happy that it is Friday!  Yay!  Tomorrow is my birthday and I am going to enjoy a lovely weekend with friends.  Then I will have to be useful again, since I am working on the owl shift (midnight to 8:00am) for the Happex experiment in Hall A all next week.  But I won't worry about that until Monday.  :)

Thank goodness for Fridays!

Birthdays

Today is Gary's birthday.  Happy birthday Gary!  I wonder what trouble he is getting into today...

My birthday is this Saturday, August 27th.  I am excited about it, since I am clearly young enough to still thoroughly enjoy my birthday.  Vince is throwing a birthday party to celebrate this event, so I am really looking forward to that as well.  What sort of trouble should I get into to celebrate my twenty-seventh birthday?

Photograph by Paul Nasekos

Marriage Proposal

Last night was a weird night.  I decided to get some diesel for my car before I went to go grocery shopping, but as I pulled into the gas station, a group of guys there filling up their cars started pointing at my car and talking amongst themselves excitedly.  I found this behavior rather curious.  As I got out of my car, one of the guys commented, "Nice car!  Haven't seen one of those in a while."  I laughed and said that she is a great car. 

After I left the gas station, I went to the grocery store.  Unbelievably, there was another group of guys there in the parking lot that started pointing at my car and discussing something among themselves!  I could not believe that the same thing could be happening again!  As I walked to the store, they stopped me and one of them said, "You have a diesel Volkswagen?  A Jetta too!  Those are such cool cars!  She's from the 80's, isn't she?" 

"Yup," I replied.  "She's a 1986 Jetta."

"Cool.  They have nice little engines in them," he said.

"Yeah, I have been learning to do my own work on the car, so I am really gaining an appreciation of how well built they are," I said.

"You do your own work on the car?" he said with a tone of awed surprise.

"I am learning as I go," I said.

He then looked at me with a very serious expression.  I was sure that he was going to ask me if he could buy the car, and I was completely prepared to tell him that the car was not for sale, when he said, "Will you marry me?"

That was not what I had expected him to say at all, so I looked at him somewhat blankly for a moment, and then I could not help laughing at the complete absurdity of the whole thing.  As I laughed, I told him no, that I was not in the habit of marrying men whom I have never met before.  Besides, he just wanted my car.  :D   

He never even got around to asking me what I did for a living...  :D

Back at Jlab

Well, I am back in Virginia and back at Jefferson Lab.  I admit to being quite sad that my vacation is over now.  I had such a wonderful time! 

In addition to the dirt racing and car fires with my brothers, I spent quite a bit of time with my family, both my immediate and extended family.   My youngest brother Stephen and I spent a good deal of time tinkering with our cars (he has a diesel VW Rabbit), so I  learned some new things.  My brother Matthew and I wandered around the state exploring all the wonderful books that our favorite old bookstores had acquired recently.  New England is a book lover's dream.  There are used bookstores all over the place.  One of Matt's favorites is a huge barn in Henniker, NH that is absolutely filled to the rafters with cases of books of every imaginable type.  Needless to say, I spent quite a bit of money at these places.  I am so addicted to collecting and reading books...  But I have so many lovely old books to show for it!  It is said that the books that a person collects say something about the personality of that person.  I wonder what my library says about me?  (That I'm around one hundred years old and have gold-leafing around my edges, perhaps...  Or maybe just that I have taken entirely too many math classes in my short lifetime.)

I had the wonderful opportunity to hang out with my cousins and with my grandmother, and I spent a day happily shopping for completely frivolous things with my mother.  We bought clothes and I added some new pieces to one of my sets of English bone china.   I got to enjoy lots of reading (all those great books I acquired with Matt), quiet time, and piano playing.  I even spent an afternoon at my parents' lake cabin with my family while my brothers did some maintenance on it.  Here are some nice pictures taken by Matthew of the ducks that were stalking him looking for a handout of bread.  I took  the picture of Matt talking to the duck, but Matt took all the ones of just the ducks.  He seems to have a real talent for photographing birds, like that awesome close-up picture of the black chicken the ran through Gary's yard.

Matthew also took this one of Stephen and I blabbing in front of the cabin.  The whole place is surrounded by wild blueberry bushes, which are very common in New England, so I took a picture of some of the delicious berries that cover them.

It was great, just lovely being in New Hampshire again.  I alternated between quiet, peaceful times reading, and doing crazy stuff with my brothers. 

Then I drove down to northern New Jersey to see my exceedingly cool friend Jason M.  (there is another Jason later on in this epistle...see, foreshadowing!).   He is was there visiting his family, so I took the opportunity to visit him (he is usually in physics graduate school in Michigan these days).  And we had a wonderful time! 

We drove down to the beaches on the southern-most part of New Jersey, and on the way, we participated in one of the greatest games on earth: Madlibs.  I love the English language and the ability we have to completely make up words that make perfect sense.  My big contribution of the day was the verb snuffleupagate, which means to realize that something is real that you thought was imaginary (for any who are unfortunate enough to not know what a snuffleupagus is, here are some links to enlighten you about this august personage).

 

 

We wandered past the Hereford Inlet lighthouse, and then spend a lovely day at Wildwood on the beach (we saw some dolphins playing in the waves off the coastline!) and a lovely evening wandering the boardwalk enjoying such marvelous treats as frozen custard.  Yum...     The night there is very beautiful since everything is all aglow with colored lights and music.  The Ferris wheel was particularly cool-looking with all of its colored lights.

 

That night was beautiful on the beach as well.  The moon was full, and the ocean became very still, so you could see the moonlight reflected in the ocean waters.  These photographs don't really do it justice, but it was a lovely night.

We had planned on climbing the Cape May lighthouse, but we did not have time.  Here are some pictures of when we visited both the Cape May and the Hereford Inlet lighthouses last year.  There are lots of really lovely lighthouses in New Jersey, but I have only photographed about half of them in my visits with Jason.  The tall white and red one is the Cape May lighthouse, and the yellowish one is the Hereford Inlet lighthouse.

While I was hanging out with Jason M., I had the opportunity to hang out with another of my friends, also named Jason (K.), who is an amazingly cool guy that I met several years ago while visiting Jason M.  Jason M. and Jason K. have been friends for many years, and I love to hang out with them and be part of their circle of friends.  We spent several happy nights laughing and playing Dynasty Warriors 5 by Koei and Halo 2 into the wee hours of the morning.  We even went and saw the Dukes of Hazzard movie together, and I admit that my adventures with my brothers earlier has given me an entirely new respect for the stunt people in these movies who pull off those cool slides and such in those cars.

I also got to meet some new people in their circle of friends.  I met Jason K.'s former roommate Erik, who was quite cool and patient enough to put up with me as his teammate in an awesome match of rather random badminton against the two Jasons.  Our brilliant strategy of jumping around a lot clearly paid off since I was declared the winner of the match with my grand total of six shuttlecocks that I put on the roof and 2 in the hanging flowerpots, with Jason K. coming in second with only four on the roof.  Jason M.'s sister Jill retrieved them all from the roof like a good sport, so she clearly wins the award for most long suffering.  I also had the opportunity to meet Erik's roommate Nick, who was quite a riot, and that Sean kid, who played Dynasty Warriors with me quite merrily.   Here is a photograph (taken by Jason M.), of Jason K., Sean, and I raptly watching the television screen right after we successfully beat the final level for one of the characters in the game.  We were playing the game as a cooperative team one, so we were feeling pretty good about our success as a team.  :)

While I was there, I went with Jason to a Tori Amos concert, had the best sandwich in the world, ate at Chateau Blanc (I had never eaten at that classy establishment known as White Castle, so we stopped on the way back from the concert), and all had all those little adventures that make great friendships so much fun.  I had a wonderful time.

Maybe I can find time to visit all these people over Christmas...

 

 

 

 

Dude, Your Car's on Fire

This afternoon, my two brothers Matthew and Stephen took me out to teach me some of the details of the fine art of rally racing, which is when you race your car in dirt instead of on an asphalt road.  Stephen has an old 1985 Saab 900 that is his beater car for this sort of thing since it runs pretty well (okay, so it burns a fair amount of oil so it smokes a bit), but has some rather significant cosmetic issues (like no interior).  At any rate, it is a fun car to run around the woods in and to learn how to drive in the dirt.  I wanted to learn some new things, so off we went in the car!

Well, it was incredibly fun and I learned several important lessons this afternoon, as well as a pile of interesting tidbits.  The whole thing is an intricate dance of car and dirt.  Here are the highlights:

Important Lesson Number 1:  Sliding turns are cool.

Those cool sliding turns that the drivers perform with such precision and flair in races and movies are much harder to do that they look.  Actually, it isn't hard at all to slide around like a twit.  But it is really hard to end up pointing the direction you want to end up going.  You also really have to sight where you want to end up going and keep your eyes on that point, because if you are not looking at your goal but at something else (like the car in front of you), you will end up going some direction you did not want to.  You will go where you are looking to some extent.

Important Corollary to Lesson Number 1:  Don't lose sight of the destination.

I did not verify this myself, but Matt and Stephen tell me that if you spin the car around too many times and lose track of your destination spot, you get pretty disoriented.  I figure that this is important to remember for the next time that I am driving in Boston.

Important Lesson Number 2:  Emergency brakes are way cool.

Heh.

Important Lesson Number 3:  Don't let up on the gas unless what you hit actually stops the car.

This is a direct quote from my brother Matt.  One of the obstacles I was learning to traverse was a really steep, sandy hill.  The first time I tackled the hill I had the car in a reasonable gear (the car has a manual transmission, of course), but I did not have enough speed, so the car only made it about half-way up before gravity won out and we started sliding back down the sandy surface backwards.  Dropping into a lower gear and stomping on the gas pedal only dug out trenches in the sand as we slipped backwards. Stephen told me that I needed more speed going into the climb, so I tried it again.  The second time I took on the hill I had a good bit of speed going into the hill, and we would have made it to the top, but about three-quarters of the way up there was a horrendous thunk from a large rock the tire threw up against the bottom of the car.  I thought that I had hit something, so I let off the gas pedal, and the momentary hesitation had us sliding down the hill backwards again.  Matt told me, "don't let up on the gas unless what you hit actually stops the car".  Seems like reasonable advice...  Also, I kept being vaguely worried that we would get stuck on something, but Stephen made it clear that that is what all those tractors we have are for.  So, I tried again. The third time I made it to the top, although admittedly, it was not too gracefully.

This rule may have some exceptions.  Matt got a car completely hung up on a tree while following this rule.  Then again, that is what the tractors are for.

Important Lesson Number 4:  Never sweat a minor setback.

The car is a bit older and is beaten on somewhat regularly, and the exhaust system and muffler were perhaps hanging a little lower than usual.  Or maybe not.  At any rate, when we were sliding backwards down the hill, somehow I got the exhaust lines caught on a rock or something and tore the muffler off (so much for the loud thunk).  During the next lap, we noticed that the car seemed louder than usual, and so we stopped and walked our course, picking up all the pieces and pipes of the exhaust system that were strewn along the track as they cooled down enough to handle.  I was feeling bad about it, but my brothers were completely unfazed.  They tossed all the pieces (including the muffler) into a pile laughing about how they would just put it all back on later.  Then we piled back into the car (with all the windows open) and headed out around again!  So much for the exhaust system.  Who needs a muffler anyway??

Important Lesson Number 5:  Always make sure that the battery is tied down.

After my third and successful attempt to make it over the hill, Matt decided to show me how a pro goes up over the hill.  He zipped around the corner at a high velocity and zoomed up the hill effortlessly while Stephen and I watched from safe spots on the top of the hill.  It was pretty cool!  He stopped the car, set the emergency brake, and jumped out of the driver's seat to let Stephen jump in and drive a lap.  As Matt jumped out, he noted the thick clouds of smoke around and commented to Stephen, "Steve, she's really smoking."  Stephen jumped into the driver's seat while replying, "Oh, she always smokes like that.  It's nothing."  As he strapped his seat belt on, the car's engine suddenly died.  Stephen was surprised and tried to restart it, to no avail.  Muttering, he popped the hood.  I glanced in and saw orange flames, so I looked at Stephen and commented, "Dude, your car really is on fire."  (How many times does one get to say a line like that?)  Stephen scoffed, "Nawh, she always smokes a lot."  Then he looked in, saw the flames, and said "Damn!  It's on fire!"

We weren't too worried about it.  After all, there was plenty of dirt around to smother the flames with if things got out of hand!  As it was, Stephen quickly beat out the flames.  Then we all laughed at the idiocy of the whole situation.  The cause of the fire?  In all the bouncing around of everything, the battery bounced loose and slid toward the extremely hot exhaust manifold.  It trapped the battery cable that goes from the battery to the rest of the electrical system of the car between the manifold and the battery.  The insulation on the cable caught on fire, burning up stuff and leaving melted red insulation all over the place.

Stephen and Matt were still unfazed by this.  After giving it all a couple of minutes to cool off, Stephen pushed the battery back over to its place, and then wrapped the now bare and soot-covered wires with black electrical tape while they were still warm and flexible (once they cooled off completely, they would be pretty brittle).  Then we all jumped back into the car.  It started right up happily (and with considerably less smoke), and off we went!

Important Corollary to Lesson Number 5:  You can fix just about anything with electrical tape.

It seems that electrical tape is as cool as duct tape.  There are many cool things about being an experimental physicist; knowing how to fix an electrical system is one of them.

Important Lesson Number 6:  Always do this sort of thing with cool people.

This is the most important lesson of the day.  Always do things like this with cool people.  With cool people, things like this end up being hilarious adventures and stuff like engine fires are at most a minor setback.  I cannot imagine anyone else that I would want to be tearing off the exhaust systems from the undersides of cars and putting out engine fires with.  I am sure that we will laugh about this for years.  I know that I was sure laughing at the time.

It is good to be home!  :)

Driving Through the Clouds

My journey back home to New Hampshire was pleasant and uneventful.  If you want to see any photographs of the scenery, you will have to check out my Gordon Conference Photos, since I don't generally take pictures while I am driving.  :)  I completely agree with David Waller that the car stereo is a truly wonderful invention.  I listened to a pile of CDs, and had so much fun singing along in the relative privacy of my own car that I would say that the fourteen-hour drive was quite enjoyable.

Even so, it was getting long and tedious by the time I made it into Massachusetts.  Generally I make lots of wise-cracks about that chubby turkey on the "Welcome to Massachusetts" sign I always see as I cross the state line, but I must admit that I was just so happy to be seeing it there this time that I was almost good.  :)  But I made fun of it anyway.  :D  I have also never been so happy to go through the tollbooth at Worcester, Mass. (pronounced sort of like wooster by most of us or woostah depending on whether you are from Boston or not), since that tells me that I am only a few hours from home. 

A funny thing happened while I was driving through the mountains in Pennsylvania and New York on the way up, though.  The clouds were really low in the sky, so low that they were running into the sides of the mountains.  It was very cool, because as the highway went up and down the mountain sides, I got to drive up through the clouds, look over them, and then drive back down through them again.  I kept wishing that cartoon physics worked in this world so that I could be leaving Volkswagen Jetta-shaped holes in the clouds behind me, but no luck there!  It was very cool to be driving through the clouds, though.  It gave me an odd sensation of flying somehow.

Now that I am here at home, I am planning mischief and mayhem with my two brothers, who are more than capable of coming up with great plans.  More on that later....

Going Home!

Well, the end of the week is finally almost here...  I am heading home for my vacation tomorrow!  Yay!  I will try to keep posting occasionally while I am gone, but if I do not manage it (which is probable), I will start writing again when I return.  I am sure that I will have lots of great stories to tell!

A Successful Defense!

My friend and classmate Justin defended his dissertation this morning in the physics department at William and Mary.  Justin and I entered the physics graduate program here in the same year, but he chose to pursue particle theory instead of the experimentalist path that I chose.  Even so, we took many of the same classes and spent many long nights frantically attempting to finish presentations and field theory problems together.  We even played on the field hockey team together!  This morning, the fun group of us who have hung out together for the last five years all filed on into the conference room to watch our friend defend his dissertation (and to give Justin some moral support).

To me (and I am not alone in this), the scariest part of the defense is the part where the candidate's committee gets to question them.  They can ask anything (and do).  Here is a picture I took of Justin mulling over a difficult question, then turning to the blackboard to figure out the answer.  At William and Mary, the physics department defenses are public, and the audience can also ask the candidate questions.  We were all nice though, and did not heckle Justin (much).  :D  :D  Justin came through it all with flying colors.

Then of course, comes the waiting in the hallway while the committee deliberates and decides the fate of the candidate...

And Justin passed!  He is now Dr. Justin Conroy.  Congratulations Justin!  Sadly, I won't really get to celebrate with him much.  While I am home with my family, he is heading off to a job at a college in New York.  However, he has already threatened to come a heckle all of us during our defenses, so I am sure that I will see him again soon...  :)