Los Alamos: 60 years after Trinity

Last week on July 16th was the 60th anniversary of the Trinity Test, in which the first nuclear device was exploded in Alamogordo south of Los Alamos in New Mexico. This was a direct consequence of Einstein's E = mc^2 (a product of Einstein's annus mirabilis hundred years ago, being celebrated by Quantum Diaries!). The entire Los Alamos National Laboratory in some sense owes it's existence to that equation. So what is happening in Los Alamos 60 years after the Trinity test? Being a mere postdoc I can only give a view "from under" as to what is going on locally in my own group: P-25, the subatomic physics group. There is obviously regular high energy kind of stuff going on like what I am working on: relativistic heavy ion collisions, which attempt to recreate the conditions that existed in the universe just after the Big Bang. Then there are other more applied projects related to Homeland Defense. Last Thursday, I attented an ice cream and soda party commemorating some milestones reached by the Muon Radiography and VLAND groups, both of which are working developing various radiation detectors to thwart the possibility of nuclear terrorism. The picture below Dr. Andrew Green with a stack of drift tubes which are a part of the Muon Radiography detector.
The principle behind this is pretty straightforward. Muons from cosmic rays are continually bombarding the earth. As a truck which needs to be examined sits on top, the muons pass through it and if they hit a dense nuclear material like plutonium or uranium, they get scattered more than usual, thus allowing detection of nuclear material. It is an interesting application of detectors and techniques that we use routinely in high energy particle/nuclear physics. More details on this project can be found at: http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/p/muon_rad.shtml

Comments

[Geoffrey Alan Cope]

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