Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
| Where I spent most of my Stanford time was at SLAC, a high energy physics facility second only to Fermilab in the US. |
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| When I was at Caltech, I was introduced to a post-doc named Anders who was working on Babar, the "hip experiment" at SLAC. Without him, SLAC would have been a miserable time since he was incredibly kind with his time -- showing me around, introducing me to people, talking about life in high energy physics, and most importantly, signing the form so I could get my radiation badge and pass freely through these gates to touch important stuff and take pictures. |
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| This is the SLAC outdoor cafeteria area. Since the weather is perfect every day, there's no reason to eat anywhere else. |
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| I took four pictures of the view from the top of the hill past the end of the linear accelerator. This was the one that got ruined the least. Keep in mind that all of this is located in one of the most expensive places to live in the world. |
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| Of course real physics must get done at some point, and here is one of those interaction points. |
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| Another picture of pretty much the same thing to suck up precious bandwidth. One reason to go into high energy physics: Amazingly beautiful labs. Fermilab is one of the prettiest places around my home, CERN is in the Alps straddling France and Switzerland, and SLAC is in one of the nicest parts of the country. |
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| They had a pretty nice visitors' center to keep the public from being scared of high energy physics. I'm guessing its biggest crowd is from geeks like me who think this stuff is cool to begin with. This drift chamber has a bunch of high voltage wires strung in different directions so that when a particle passes through and ionizes the gas, the resulting electrical sparks can be detected and the particle's location pinpointed. |
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| This display was pretty cool. They set up six scintillators, which light up when a cosmic ray passes through them. By correlating the flashes from the top and bottom or the left and right, they can tell which direction the cosmic ray came from and they increment the appropriate counter. With this, you could see that many more come from straight above than from the side since the ones from the side have more time to decay in the atmosphere. |
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