Dr. Kenneth Bloom is a postdoctoral researcher in experimental high-energy particle physics at the University of Michigan.
More photos from Ken Bloom
I travel from Ann Arbor, Mich., to Fermilab on Wednesday mornings of alternate weeks. I work at the lab through Friday and then go into Chicago to spend the weekend with Elizabeth, my girlfriend, returning to Ann Arbor on Sunday evening. I've been on this regular travel schedule for about two years now, and I will spare you the details of my journey except to say that by now, I am very, very good at it.
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StumbleUponAny visitor that I have brought to Fermilab has been surprised by it; the image they had in their head didn't match what they saw. (If you are in the Chicago area, stop by; as of today, the lab is now fully open to visitors for the first time since Sept. 11.) I guess it is a little bit surprising that the lab should have a herd of bison, which is part of Fermilab's prairie-restoration project. But why shouldn't a laboratory have a headquarters building modeled on the cathedral in Beauvais, France, or large outdoor sculptures? All were conceived by Robert Wilson, the founding director of the lab; the place is still infused by his vision.
Most of all, I think people are just surprised by the size of the place—10 square miles—but that is what is needed to hold our accelerator complex. The Tevatron, the world's highest-energy particle accelerator, is more than a mile in diameter, and the other machines that feed particles to it take up additional room on the site.
I stopped by the CDF control room to say hello to our shift crew. Twenty-four hours a day, we have four physicists on duty for the experiment (taking eight-hour shifts), so that we can be taking data whenever there are colliding beams. The crew is in charge of operating the experiment, keeping all of the detector systems up and running, fixing things if they break, or, if they can't fix them, finding someone who can. (Things usually break around 3 a.m., and people are then rousted out of bed.) Shifters are also the first people to look at the data; if there is anything that looks abnormal, they make sure the data are not used for physics measurements and also try to identify the source of the problem. Unfortunately, today has been a quiet day for the shift crew; we lost the particle beams overnight, due to a failure at an electrical-power substation near the site.
While much of the architecture at Fermilab is innovative and visually striking, that does not hold for the rabbit warren of trailers that is the CDF office complex. About 200 members of the CDF collaboration are resident at Fermilab, making it the intellectual hub of the experiment. Much of my visit is spent meandering through the trailer maze, talking with people I haven't seen in the past two weeks. As far as I'm concerned, my most important task during any visit to Fermilab is to make sure that I'm still working on the same experiment as everyone else; I try to get a feel for what they are working on and how it fits together with what I'm working on. Also, the bulk of the graduate students in the Michigan group live here, so I make sure to check in with them. Among other things, I rounded up Nate and others to discuss the plan that Dave and I had put together yesterday.
Some of my time is also spent in more formal meetings, including a meeting of a working group that I lead along with Michael, a professor at Northwestern. This group works on some of the event-reconstruction software. The raw data we record are in the form of amounts of charge recorded on an amplifier, or the time that the charge arrived on the amplifier. From this information we "reconstruct" the energies and momenta of particles produced in the collisions, using complicated computer programs. This working group has spent the past two years writing the software to reconstruct muons (they're like electrons, but heavier) in CDF. Our meeting today went pretty well; we had about 20 people from 12 different institutions there, by my count. A few people presented some work they had done on reconstructing muons in detector components that we haven't studied much yet, and they had made good progress, finding and fixing a few mistakes. This is important work; the more detectors we have working, the more muons we can reconstruct and the more physics we can do—top quarks, for instance, often decay into muons.
Later, Michael and I had dinner at the Chinese place just outside Fermilab and spent a couple of hours talking about what we need to do with the muon software in the short and long term. Over the past few months, a lot of our time had gone into getting physics measurements that used muons ready for the Amsterdam conference, and we had been ignoring various smaller problems which now needed our attention; I had a long list of talking points for our conversation. Leading a large group of scientists requires some project-management skills, just like in the business world. We have to set priorities, try to predict what will be needed at different times, and make sure that we have skilled people on hand who can get the job done. After two years of this, we're starting to get a little good at it.
But after a long travel day, and after scampering around the rabbit warren, there's only one project I want to manage—getting to my hotel room and getting some rest!
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Notes From The Fray Editor:
Discussions of people doing remarkably complex things tend to move in two directions: toward the people and toward the remarkably complex things. In this case, Air Vent began a discussion of physicists that sounds like almost every group-of-physicists-yukking-it-up I have ever been around while andy finished off (more or less) a discussion of the relationship between the complicated math and the reality of the reality it speaks to (previous posts in that thread are less daunting).
Remarks From The Fray:
I recommend against counting 'Daves' at Fermi, as the statement 'Dave is a common name in particle physics' is an unsupported statement. Fermilab is I think unrepresentative of particle physic generally. I think CERN must be sampled too and two universities also. I think Cal Tech and the U. of Michigan must be sampled as well. At CERN there may be some Dave's who go by Pierre for example to fit in and at Fermilab there may be some Pierre's who go by Dave to fit in at Fermilab. I suggest checking birth certificates. So just in conversation you may have picked up both some false negatives and some false positives on this score. Hope this is helpful to further research.
--Air Vent
(To reply, click here.)
the retrospective realism comment is perceptive.
we talk about the various flavors of quarks as if they're real (also the leptons and gauge bosons); to the extent that we can measure quantities that appear to correspond to each of the particles, we should consider to be real. but there are ambiguities.
first, even field theorists generally do not focus on the elementary particles as the fundamental concepts of reality. rather, the main concept in particle physics is the so called SU(3) X SU(2) X U(1) local gauge symmetry. it's the symmetry principle that takes precedence; the particles are looked on as the quantum excitations of the vacuum induced by the field operators present in the theory. i suspect that many theorists would say that what's real is the symmetry principle, and the observations of the various particles and the manner in which they interact with each other confirm the prediction of the symmetry-based gauge theory.
second, field theory may not be "fundamental". quantum field theories are often referred to by theorists as "effective field theories" these days. the reason is that most people doing theory nowadays believe that QED/flavordynamics and QCD are only approximations of an underlying level of complexity at higher energies (corresponding to shorter distances.)
one of the many reasons for the prevalence of this belief is the existence of infinities in various calculations. theorists tend to think that such infinities indicate the theories are incomplete; this explains the interests that theorists have in strings, M-theory etc. this brings us to a third ambiguity in the concept of the top quark:
one of the field theory calculations that give infinite result concerns the mass of the quarks. obviously, the infinity present in the calculation is not observed, so we try to "sweep" it under the rug by replacing it with some arbitrary parameter which is determined by measurements made at a specific energy scale [this trick is generally known as 'renormalization' and one of the most popular schemes for doing so is called 'modified minimal subtraction']. however, from QCD theoretical calculations, it turns out that the mass of a quark varies depending upon the energy scale at which we perform the renormalization. thus the "mass" of the top quark is a somewhat ambiguous concept.
Finally, as you already know, we can't observe free quarks even at the energies that will be reached by the future LHC collider at CERN. this is due to the nature of QCD which dictates that the strong force increases in strength at lower energies (larger distances); the concept of six quarks organized into three 'families' is postulated from the fact that such an arrangement would consistently describe other particles as quark composites...otherwise there'd be hundreds of known "elementary particles". so to a certain extent, a quark is a convenient construct.
-- andy
(To reply, click here.)
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