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
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
Hey, could you tell my Mom I said "Hi" and that I'm shopping for a house? I hear one is for sale on Bath Tub Row, but I'm having a hard time getting a loan. Bad credit.
Posted by: Geoffrey Alan Cope | November 03, 2005 at 03:27 PM