Debbie Harris

Multiple Personalities

July 31, 2005

Once a year, as a Fermilab employee, I have to fill out a form that talks about my so- called "scientific accomplishments" over the past year.  In principle someone looks at this form and decides if I get a raise or not, or if I should get assigned to different things.  It's also supposed to be a precursor for another form I am to fill out where I go over my goals for the next year.  The first form is due at the end of July, so naturally I am filling it out at almost the last possible second. 

Nothing else convinces me of how many balls I've been juggling at once like filling out this form...even just listing my different job titles over the past year would take several lines here:  Proton Beamline Instrumentation Coordinator, "Level 3 Co-Manager" of Neutrino Beamline Monitoring, Co-convenor of the Proton Driver Neutrino Oscillation Physics Study, Safety and Quality Assurance Docuentation coordinator, Co-convenor of Near Detector Physics Working Group, and of course the thing that's my biggest job: "Project Manager" for MINERvA. 

I'm realizing that this next year will be very different from the previous year, since being Project Manager eats up so much of my time that I have all but dropped all of those other responsibilities.  Of course it helps that the NuMI beamline is up and MINOS is taking data. The proton and neutrino beamlines are both well-behaved (knock wood), the "Proton Driver Physics Study" is complete, and so many of these jobs are simply obsolete.  Also, others I've been working with on these jobs (see how many times "co-" is listed above) have assumed more complete responsibility in some cases.  But actually, it's almost a relief to fill out the form and realize that I have made that switch from doing a million different things to really focusing on one main task and having "hobbies" on the side.  (Of course as I type this I remember that I just signed up for a week of "night shifts" on MINOS in mid-September.)

But the interesting thing about this form from a "big picture" point of view is that "scientific accomplishments" fall into three categories (at least according to this form):  Physics, technical, and management.  The break between management and not management is pretty clear, but I think the break between "physics" and "technical" is much less clear.  I think many folks around here tend to think of "physics" as something that happens when you produce a new particle (like the top quark), or uncover some totally unexpected interaction that particles have (like neutrino oscillations) and everything else is just "service work".  But in reality there is so are so many pieces that go into any of those big discoveries, and to call it "service work" makes it sound less critical and decisive than it really is.  Now management on the other hand, I'm just beginning to appreciate...as much as that scares me to write. Must be a sign of age...

How to Survive a Heat Wave

July 21-25, 2005

Two months ago, when I bought tickets to fly to Florida to visit my grandparents, I thought "no wonder these flights are so cheap, no one wants to go to Florida in July!".  My grandparents have been living in Florida for about 20 years now and I am used to paying about a factor of 3 more for tickets when I fly out to see them at Christmas time.  I had the last laugh though, because it ended up being only 92 in Florida but I heard it got up to 104 in Illinois while I was gone!  (and the water was only 80, as you can see in the photo at the left). 

It was a short visit but the switch between work life and family life was total:  it always feels so strange to be running around trying to finish everything I was going to finish at work, and then driving away from it all and switching to worrying about whether I put enough sunscreen on my kids.

The only "in between" moment occurred when as I was literally walking out the door to get in the taxi, and deciding then and there that I would take my mandolin and my laptop with me, not only one of the two.  Of course bringing a mandolin to my grandparents house is like bringing pictures to an exhibition--my grandfather has been playing the mandolin for longer than my mother has been alive, and I would have my choice of mandolins to play while I was there.  But I'm addicted to my own mandolin so it came made the trip with me.  You can see at the left that I even convinced my grandfather to play a few tunes with me, instead of him just listening to me play and giving me pointers. 

The other transformation that happens when I visit my grandparents is that I finally get the chance to read the paper a bit, work on crossword puzzles, and read:  I devoured The Swallows of Kabul while I was there and started Birds Without Feathers on the plane ride back to Chicago. 

Of course Isaac and Sonia were in heaven--if you think grandparents spoil their grandchildren, that's actually only a warm-up for being a great-grandparent.  Isaac learned how to do word scrambles and play Rummy Q (he inherited my grandmother's love of doing puzzles and playing games), and Sonia got to watch TV every day and to eat her weight in ice cream.  (luckily as you can see she did not eat so much that she couldn't still sit on my grandmother's lap...).   

But as they say, no good deed goes unpunished, and when I returned from this mini-vacation I went full swing in the other direction to Project Manager mode for the MINERvA experiment:  trying to understand how much of the experiment should be considered R&D, and getting paperwork for 5 different universities through signatures so that they can start spending real money on the R&D they are doing to figure out how to build this detector.  We have a collaboration meeting this coming weekend, but I confess that after that I'm going on yet another vacation...

Life at Fermilab in 15 minutes

July 14, 2005

Today there was a symposium (read:  afternoon full of talks) in honor of the outgoing director of Fermilab, and I was asked to give a talk about "Life at Fermilab".  When I was first asked to give this talk I was mortified--what kind of talk was that?  Then once I saw the agenda for the symposium, I was even more peeved--why is it that of the 8 talks, the one talk given by a woman was not on physics? 

But I accepted to give the talk anyway, because I figured I could at least stand up on whatever soapbox I felt like standing on for 15 minutes in front of the symposium-going segment of the lab community (whoever that is).  Regardless of who else might attend the talk, the new director was on the agenda right after me so I figured he would certainly be there.  The only question is:  what soapbox would I pick?

So in putting together this talk I realized that I could only organize it the way I organize physics talks, and that the easiest way to talk about life to an audience of physicists was to put it in terms they were used to hearing:  in terms of a physics experiment.  Luckily, as far as picking a soapbox was concerned, I had it easy: the outgoing director adopted an infant 6 months after starting as director, so in fact I know him almost equally as "Lily's father" and as "the Director of Fermilab".   My best joke (thanks to my friend Jim) was this:  "Everyone in this field worries that when they have kids it will affect the development of their carreer.  Some wait until they have their PhD.  Some wait until they get tenure.  It takes a cautious person to wait until he is director of a national lab". 

But anyway, I got my chance to remind the lab how many of us are part of 2-carreer couples, and how many of us have kids, and as a result, how many of us depend on instutions' support of these facts:  by being aware of the two-body problem and by providing good day care.  I summarized my talk by saying "Fermilab should be an example to the rest of the world on these issues.  We're not there yet but thanks to our director, these issues are on the front page".  What I was really thinking was "we'll know that Fermilab is really on top of these issues when men are standing up at symposia like this talking about 'life' and the women are up here talking about the physics". But hey, this is a start. 

P.S. If you're curious about the slides I did show, Download Life.pdf (all 3MB of it...)

P.P.S. If you have even more time on your hands you can see the streaming video of the talk (and all the others) at the Fermilab Streaming Video Web Site for this event. 

 

Group Therapy

July 7-11, 2005

Last weekend (and then some) I got to go to a conference without having to get on a plane or even take a long car ride--the Neutrino Beams and Instrumentation (NBI'05) workshop was held this year at Fermilab.  So instead of my flying off somewhere new, physicists from Switzerland, Japan, and even Long Island all came to Illinois.  If attending the Particle Accelerator Conference was like going to the prom then the NBI workshop is a cross between group therapy and a family reunion. 

You wouldn't know it from reading my previous entries, but there are actually two neutrino beamlines running at Fermilab as I type this (both NuMI and MiniiBooNE at Fermilab), two beamlines under construction (T2K in Japan and CNGS in Europe), and finally K2K that just finished running in Japan at the end of last year.  This workshop happens roughly every year, and people who are working on these different beamlines get together at this workshop and talk about not only what went right and what they are doing now but also what went wrong and the lessons learned over the past year.

These workshops are like family reunions because the role each beamline takes evolves over the years.  Up until now those of us working on the NUMI beamline have been like the little kids at the reunion who are watching the big kids to see what they are doing and learn...but now this year we've started running, so it's our turn to be the big kids for awhile.  K2K and MiniBooNE are like the experienced elders because they have received huge numbers of protons on their targets, and have both survived deaths of their horns (and gone through the arduous process of replacing them).

And just like when out of town relatives come in to visit you see all the sights you never get around to seeing on your own, the conference banquet was held at a restaurant on Navy Pier in Chicago overlooking the skyline at sunset (see photo at left).  It was kind of funny because there were functions every night and usually I brought my daughter if not the whole family, and then for the fancy dinner I came by myself.  When I showed up alone people looked surprised and said "hey, where's your sidekick?".    

The catalogue of information shared is long and exists not only in the notes I took during the workshop, but also in the slides that people showed during their talks, which are available on the workshop web page  But what you cannot tell from these pages is that now Sacha, the principle organizer, is also very well prepared to plan his children's weddings (see left for a slide Sacha showed at the welcoming talk), or maybe his next family reunion.   

Maternity Leave Rumor Mill

July 6, 2005

This morning when I dropped Sonia off at day care I coincided with Amy, a day care teacher who has been on maternity leave, and Sarah, her six-week old daughter.  Amy already has two children in the day care (one in Sonia's class) and when I first found out that Amy was pregnant my first (selfish) thought was "Oh no, I hope she's not gone when Sonia gets to be her student" since I know Amy is a great teacher and Sonia will be in her class starting this fall. 

But in fact Amy is back at work long before I was after giving birth, because Fermilab's maternity policy is 6 weeks paid leave and you have to take your own vacation days after that.  If you work 1.5 years as a physicist and never take a vacation day you could then get paid for the entire 12 weeks you are allowed to take by the Family Leave Medical Act.  But if you're a day care teacher it's a lot harder--you get fewer vacation days than physicists in the first place!  If you're a parent it's even harder to rack up the extra 30 vacation days, since you have to use up a vacation day every time you stay home with your sick child. 

The truth about maternity leaves in physics (as in the rest of the paid workforce) is that what you get still depends primarily on whom you work for.  When Isaac was born I was a post-doc for the University of Rochester, had a great boss, and I was able to take off 3 months full time and 3 months half-time.  When Sonia was born I was working for Fermilab and hadn't racked up enough vacation days to have three months paid leave, regardless of how supportive my boss at the time was.  I know post-docs at other institutions who only got 6 weeks unpaid leave, in spite of the Family Leave Medical Act! 

But actually, 6 weeks unpaid leave sounds like a party compared to what I recently heard from a friend of mine--she is now leaving the field and suing her ex-boss after she was denied maternity leave and had her salary severely cut after she had a baby.  The University stood by the professor and fired my friend when she complained, and in the meantime the spokespeople of her experiment have given this professor a prestigious appointment in the collaboration. 

I can't believe that in this day and age this can happen, and then I started wondering: for all of us chosen to "speak for the field" and are happy parents doing physics, how many others have left in the meantime because they were treated poorly over precisely this issue? 

Just like there are job offer rumor mills out there where people share gossip about who got what job where, we ought to have a "maternity leave rumor mill" where people can look up how accomodating any one boss or institution might be about maternity leave.  Then we can all enter into these jobs with our eyes wide open, and who knows, maybe the worst offenders of the FMLA might even be punished...   

Physicists in the Wild

June 24-27, 2005

As if crossing the Atlantic and reuniting with my kids wasn't enough excitement for one week, we all topped it off by going camping in Wisconsin over the weekend with five other families that we know through Fermilab.  When I was telling my aunt about leaving town just three days after flying back from Italy, she said "I just don't know how you do all of this".  But when I got to the campsite I found out that one of the dads (pictured at left) got back from CERN (in Switzerland) less than 24 hours before he left for Wisconsin, and one family had yet to arrive because a mom was still at the US Particle Accelerator School at Cornell.   

So given how hectic all of our lives are (of the twelve adults at the campsite, 10 were physicists and all were parents of two), it's not surprising that we spent a lot of the weekend just sitting around the campfire talking and goofing off with the kids in the field next to our group campsite.  We certainly took a few hikes and hit the lake, but the schedule seemed gloriously relaxed. The kids of course had a blast because they got to play with their buddies from the Fermilab Children's center (and now from Fermilab Summer Camp).  I brought my mandolin and worn-out copy of Rise Up Singing and played lots of old songs and learned a new one as well--Waltzing Mathilda, which I liked so much I was considering moving to Austrailia at one point in the weekend. 

There are many many differences between working at a laboratory and working at a university, but one of the side effects of living near the laboratory that hosts your experiment is that your social life can end up revolving around other physicists on your experiment.  Most of the people in this camping group know eachother because at least one person in each family is or was once on the CDF experiment, and their kids are or were at the Fermilab Children's Center.  We're all bracing ourselves for the fact that two of the families who went camping this weekend are moving away from the lab over this summer:  one family is moving to Massachussetts, and the other to Indiana.  I guess that's the flip side of being at the lab and having this great pool of friends with lives like yours:  you have to learn to deal with the fact that lots of them end up moving away to universities.  Meanwhile we cope by trying to figure out a new camping place that we can all miraculously drive to next summer...

Beamline's Growth Chart

July 1, 2005

Although I was away from the lab for almost 3 weeks and I've been worrying about other things, I couldn't help but keep in touch with MINOS by watching from afar the number of protons hitting the NUMI target to make neutrinos (look for "NuMI" on Fermilab's "Channel 13" and you can keep updating...).  In March I talked about the huge jump that was made when people figured out how to get ten trillion protons on target without losing too many of them along the way, and the last month has seen a steady increase in how many protons we can take on the target.  Just last week we started routinely taking more than 20 trillion protons on target every few seconds! 

You can see this jump in the plot at the left that Brett Viren keeps up to date:  it shows that all of a sudden we went over 20 units, which means 20 trillion protons hit our target every 2 seconds or so!  You can also see on this plot that we've taken in total more than 1.5 x 10^19 protons on target.  For a sense of scale, one gram of protons would be 6 x 10^23 protons, so we've taken about 25 micrograms of protons...all accelerated up to high in energy that each one is 120 times more energetic than its "rest mass" alone.   

The problem with neutrino experiments is that since neutrinos interact so rarely, you can basically NEVER make too many of them at a time.  So this means that the experiment wants as many protons as possible.  But every time you lose protons before they get to the target they have to go somewhere, and these protons are so high in energy that they make lots of new particles (i.e. and radiation!) wherever they go.  So we have strict limits on how many protons we can lose in order to be very very very far below any radiation limit. 

It's like walking around with a glass of milk--the more full the glass is, the more you're likely to spill some, and you really don't want any of that milk hitting the floor because cleaning it up takes a long time.  So you're better off not filling up the glass quite so high, until you learn how to walk very very steadily.  In the past month, you can see that the people sending us those protons (some of whom, pictured at the left, are not even "on MINOS") have put more and more milk in the glass because they can walk much more steadily now than they could a month ago! 

As you can see from the last photo here, the two-year-olds at the Fermilab Children's Center aren't making nearly as much progress on not spilling milk.  This sign was up for several months, and I hear the highest number of days they went was 3 without spilling.