Anuj Purwar

A hectic month

This has been a very hectic month for me. I was at BNL (see previous post) and then I made my first trip to Fermilab. I was there to pick up a prototype module of silicon strip sensors bonded to the FSSR readout chip (see picture below) and bring it to LANL where we plan to do some tests for the PHENIX Forward Vertex upgrade project.

I also spend a weekend in Chicago, also a first. There I met up with an old old friend of mine: Dr. Nikhil Balarkrishnan (he is a real doctor and not a "fake" PhD kind of doctor like me :-). We last met 21 years ago when I was in 5th standard in Cambridge School in New Delhi. His father had to transfer to Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). We stayed in touch through letters for a few years and then lost touch until three years ago when Nikhil tracked me down thanks to Google. In the picture below Nikhil is standing on the right and we are in front of the Bahai temple in Chicago.

After all this hectic travel there was the winter break in which we again travelled. We took a long road trip camping in the Petrified Forest National Park, going to Las Vegas, then camping at Death Valley National Park followed by Grand Canyon and the great meteor crater in Arizona (see picture below). And so you can see that my vacation turned out to be quite hectic too!

And now I am finally back here in Santa Fe writing up my last post for Quantum Diaries. Physics wise this year has been a mixed bag for me. On one hand I haven't done as much data analysis as I would have liked, on the other hand I discovered an interest in hardware for the experiments. Earlier my experience as an experimental physicist had mostly been with software and data analysis. This year I started working on the actual hardware stuff: the silicon sensors, readout chips and more importantly saw a project (Forward Vertex upgrade at PHENIX) from the bottom up. Then there were the usual funding woes. The Run 6 at RHIC was first cancelled (Katrina and the Iraq war) and then might get restarted. On one hand overall physics funding got cut everywhere, but on the other hand our team in the Subatomic Physics group got an internal LANL grant to build a prototype for Forward Vertex upgrade. Still I must say these funding difficulties all the time are very draining and sometimes makes me wonder if there is any future for science in America. The signs are all around: physics funding as a percentage of the GDP has come down by 50% compared to the 70's. I can only hope that next year will be better.

P.S. I shall try to continue with this blog. For details check out my website: www.purwar.net.

The FVTX presentations

Last couple of weeks have been hectic. Almost everybody from LANL PHENIX group was at Brookhaven National Laboratory, as we had to make presentations for the Forward Vertex Upgrade project to the PHENIX management. If this project gets approved by PHENIX management it shall go the Brookhaven National Lab management and then eventually to the DOE (Department of Energy which funds a lot of nuclear physics in US). A cutaway of this proposed detector upgrade is shown below:

The Forward Vertex Upgrade project (FVTX) aims to use silicon sensors to detect "open" charm (and bottom) by looking at displaced vertices from D meson decays. These heavy quarks can be an important probe for studying the properties of the QGP (Quark Gluon Plasma). So towards this project I have been doing a lot of simulation studies as well doing FPGA programming to set up the interface of the sensors and the read out chips with the PHENIX DAQ (data acquistion system).

Matsuri and funds for Kashmir quake

Couple of weeks ago I attended Matsuri, a Japanese festival organized by the Santa Fe Jin , a Japanese intercultural society in Santa Fe. Anita, my wife is an active member. She lived in Japan for one year and can speak Japanese fluently. In addition she also had a booth as a part of her work as a financial planner with Waddell & Reed. Here is a picture of her booth:

The Matsuri had several cultural programs from Karate to Iaido (sword) to Taiko (drums). The Taiko drumming was very impressive:

Then there were several workshops for things like origami, booths from vendors, and most importantly food :-). There was also a silent auction for artifacts Japanese kimonos. Thanks to the organisers of this festival, I was able to do some fundraising for the Kashmir earthquake. I put a home cooked Indian dinner for four as an item in the silent auction. It was sold for $115 to Dr. Norm Hamer who also works in Los Alamos. All in all I was able to raise $132.

After topping it up, I finally donated $200 to www.mercycorps.org for use towards the earthquake victims in Kashmir. I would urge all of you to donate the most you can so that there is no humanitarian disaster in Kashmir this winter.

X Division at Los Alamos

Yesterday I attended an overview talk for postdocs on the X Division at Los Alamos. Popular Science describes the X Division as, "... Los Alamos National Laboratory's highly prestigious and supersecret X  Division, where some of the world's biggest eggheads handle the applied physics of our nuke stockpile....". The division leader -- whose name I probably shouldn't divulge as who knows what trouble I might get into :-) -- was quite earnest about the significance of the work being done there both from national security and "interesting physics" point of view. It was morbidly fascinating to hear about the different groups working there: the Primary Design Group which works on fisson based stuff and the Secondary Design Group which works on fusion based stuff and so on.

This overview was done from a recruitment point of view so that lab postdocs would consider working X Division as possible career. There was only a handful of postdocs which attended this (of which atleast some, like me just came for the morbid curiousity). This is not surprising because the Popular Science magazine just featured X Division in the 10 worst jobs in science, below jobs like Orang-Utan Pee Collector! Here is the excerpt from that article (for full article go to Popular Science Magazine Website):

 

5.Nuclear-Weapons Scientist

They've mastered fusion. Next up: Filing

This job hasn't been any fun since the disastrous espionage trial against Wen Ho Lee in 1999. Now it's gotten worse. Lee was a naturalized citizen who had worked for 20 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory's highly prestigious and supersecret X Division, where some of the world's biggest eggheads handle the applied physics of our nuke stockpile. The FBI suspected him of selling secrets to the Chinese.

After some seriously abusive jailhouse tactics, for which an appalled federal judge apologized, Lee pled guilty to one, almost trifling, count of mishandling classified data and was immediately released (the judge sentenced him to the 278 days of solitary he had already served). Nevertheless, the X Division's sterling reputation had been badly tarnished.

Not long after, more classified data-storage tapes went missing and then showed up behind a copy machine, and the FBI returned for more interrogations . . . er, interviews.

Then, in 2004, came an eye-burning laser accident with an intern, and yet another case of missing data tapes. In a lab-wide lecture, the since-retired director called his scientists "buttheads" and "cowboys" (never good for morale) and ordered a costly months-long lab shutdown so that the scientists could learn to file paper like pro bureaucrats, not absent-minded professors.

But wait, those last missing tapes? An FBI investigation concluded that they probably never existed in the first place; it was all a clerical error. But the damage had been done. For the first time since Oppenheimer, the federal government put Los Alamos's management up for industry bid, offering an annual $79-million contract nearly 10 times as much as the University of California is now paid to run the lab and fed-up scientists are retiring in droves.

As for the younger brainiacs, surely they can find a job in academia, right? Not exactly, lamented one X Division scientist, who declined to be quoted for fear of retribution. Since most of their work is classified, there's often no record of having ever published anything.

Of course I am sure that it isn't quite as bad as that. X Division folks reading this might want to comment.

Lost Diwali; gained Halloween

Day before yesterday was Diwali, the Hindu festival of light. This used to be my favourite festival but I cannot really celebrate it here in US. Although occasionally the Indian community tries to have a Diwali get together it just isn't the same because there is no substitute to being with your family, lighting the oil diyas/candles all over the house and of course the fire crackers. As they say: "In Rome do as Romans do", and so looking around for a new favourite festival I came across Halloween. The children dress up in costumes and go from house to house asking "Trick or Treat" and in return they get candy. The adults too dress up and usually go for parties. It's a lot of fun! This year Anita dressed up as lady bug and I dressed up as a Ringwraith (Lord of the Rings). Here is a picture of the two of us:

Catherine (a friend of Anita who was visiting from Denver) dressed up a Geisha:

And then we went for a fundraising party for the Center for Contemperory Arts in Santa Fe.

A week of PANIC

The entire last week went by in PANIC or the Particles and Nuclei International Conference. Since it was being organized by people in Los Alamos, most of my time went by in organizational stuff like sitting in the A/V room assisting speakers with their talks so that all their slides come out fine when they are projected. There were often problems in transferring MS Powerpoint slides from Macs to PCs. You would think that after all these years Microsoft would be able to solve this problem! One nice thing about this conference is the way it brings physicists from different areas of experimental nuclear and particle physics together, thus allowing nuclear physicists to see what is being done in particle physics and vice versa. Experimental high energy physics is getting very fragmented. I can barely keep up with results from STAR (one of the experiments within RHIC) let alone appreciate what is being done in other labs like Fermilab or Jlab. I wish there was some sort of a simple short 1 page summary every month describing the latest results from different high energy particle and nuclear experiments. I don't know how this can be implemented easily. Maybe other high energy physicists can weigh on this issue.

FPGA programming

I spent last week in San Jose, taking a course on VHDL programming at Xilinx Corporation. VHDL stands for VHSIC Hardware Description Language and is used for FPGA programming. FPGAs are Field Programmable Gate Arrays and are a special class of chips which can be programmed at a gate by gate level thus giving speed and flexibility without having to design a custom chip for applications. In high energy physics these are used to organize and label data as it comes at high speeds from various detectors. For instance Muon Tracking Arms in PHENIX use FPGAs. In addition they can also be used to make fast trigger decisions, for instance if we are trying to detect J/y particles we need to make quick decisions as to whether or not high speed muons were seen in a given event (say Au+Au collision).

We took the course at Xilinx campus in San Jose, CA. I must say Xilinx has one of the best cafetarias that I have ever come across. The food was really good and relatively inexpensive (although I am told it is subsidized). I wish we had a cafetaria like that in Los Alamos instead of the one we have run by Aramark (for those who do not know, Aramark is one of those big food industry corporations, which seems to have a stranglehold on all government contracts in US as they have the same standard fare at Brookhaven National Lab and probably many others).

Is it New Delhi or New Mexico?

Last month (you can see how I am getting a backlog of stuff that I need to put in my blog!) I attended the burning of the Zozobra. This is peculiarly New Mexican (Santa Fe) festival in which a large effigy of Zozobra, the old man gloom is burnt amidst festivities consisting of fire dancers etc. The effigy is full of fireworks and so it is spectacle when it goes up in flames. Here is a picture of Zozobra being burnt in New Mexico:

What is amazing is that there is almost identical festival: Dusshera in India, at the same time of the year in which an effigy of the evil king Ravana is burnt amidst festivities. This effigy too is full of fireworks and so it is spectacle when it goes up in flames. Here is a picture of Ravana getting ready to be burnt in New Delhi:

Camping in a volcanic crater

Last week I was in the island of Maui in Hawaii to attend the Division of Nuclear Physics Joint Meeting of the APS and JPS (Japanese Physics Society). The meeting was held in the Ritz-Carlton. Was I living the high life! Here is a picture from my room at the Ritz.

The organizers had done a great job, getting a rate of just $165 instead of the regular $350 or so. In addition it had been organized so that we either had a morning or an evening free allowing us to do some sightseeing. Of course the flip side was that sometimes the sessions would go into the night. Still once again great organization. Maui is a volcanic island with blue oceans and pretty beaches; white, black & red the beaches come in all colors. And then there are the mountains rising all around. I ended up doing several hikes: from Iao national park with it's dense rainforest with delicious strawberry guavas 

to camping inside the volcanic crater: Haleakala or House of the Sun. Here is a picture of our little camp.

You can see the volcanic cinder cones in the background. The crater itself is huge, apparently it can fit the entire island of Manhattan! We hiked around for several hours encountering some very interesting landscapes from rainforest to "moonscapes". Here is a picture of Anita next to one of these "moonscapes".

We also went around the silversword loop full of these endangered plants which look like an alien with a hula skirt, specially in this volcanic other worldly landscape.

After a strenous hike with all my equipment (see my picture with my backpack standing on an old lava flow in the crater)

we treated ourselves to a fancy lunch at Mama's Fish House. For dessert we had this amazing dessert: black pearl, a chocolate mousse filled with a passion fruit sorbet in oyster shaped cookies..

It was undoubtedly one of the best desserts I have ever eaten. It was so pretty that we were almost a bit reluctant to eat it!

Free Coca Cola and Pentaquarks

For each of the previous 5 times that I went to the Los Alamos cafeteria, I bought a 20 oz. bottle of Coke, all of which had a winning cap which allowed me get a free 1 L bottle of Coke. The probability of winning in any one bottle is 1/6 and since I won 5 times in a row... I just pulled off something that has a chance of 1/7776! I won't even try to calculate how far this is from norm in terms of sigma, the favorite term that physicists like to use to determine the likelihood of a signal.

So what does this have to do with pentaquarks, that exotic state of 5 quarks. A few days ago I attended a seminar by Ed Hartouni from Lawrence Livermore National Lab, in which he described some analysis he did searching for a pentaquark signal with a fixed target p+p experiment at Fermilab. They didn't find anything. But there are several experiments which show pentaquark results: effects of several sigmas even and then there are several experiments which published results indicating no pentaquarks. What does this mean in terms of statistical significance? This brings me back to the incident of 5 consecutive free Coca Cola wins for me. If I naively assume that each of these wins is independent, then I get the absurd result of 1/7776. However if I assume that these events correlated, then I get a much more reasonable probability of 1/6. Obviously we need to be more careful when we quote results in terms of sigma as there might be unforseen correlations. It also reminds of a news headline I read "50% of scientific papers are wrong". This applied to medicine but sometimes I wonder it applys to physics. For instance with regard to pentaquarks, I know that my experiment PHENIX had "Seen" a pentaquark signal last year. But fortunately before the results became official, a mistake was found: a miscalibration in the timing of the Electromagnetic Calorimeters lead to a false signal. And yet this finding was never published... In some ways there is more to learn from these mistakes than another "discovery". I wish that some of these negative finding papers were also published so that some other experimental collaboration does not make the same mistake.