We're holding a party tomorrow to welcome the ring. If you plan to come, you should read this. Rain and thunderstorms are forecasted for tomorrow evening. The indoor portion of the muon g-2 event will occur regardless of the weather including hands-on science activities in Wilson Hall and scientists available to answer your questions (beginning at 5:30). The ring will move rain or shine and would be delayed only in the event of lightning. Check back here for updates and if you're planning to come out, bring your rain gear.
Here's a fascinating time-lapse video from Fermilab showing the July 24-25 overnight move in Illinois:
"Scientists will begin the move next Saturday, taking the magnet from its location on the 5,300-acre Brookhaven campus to the front gate — a distance of about 1.8 miles. The following day, they are expected to move the magnet south along the William Floyd Parkway for 6 miles to Smith Point Park on the Atlantic Ocean. From there, it will be loaded onto a barge and will proceed down the East Coast, around the tip of Florida and up the Mississippi, Illinois and Des Plaines rivers."
Over the next few weeks, you may be fortunate enough to see - but hopefully not be stuck in traffic behind - some eye-poppingly huge particle physics gear traveling down a highway near you. This week, the 50-foot diameter, 15-ton Muon g-2 ("gee minus two") electromagnet was inched out of its current location at Brookhaven National Laboratory on a custom-designed rig, starting a 3200-mile long journey over highways and sea to its new home in Chicago's western suburbs. [Video copyright Emmert International, who are handling the transport logistics of the "big move."]
"It costs about 10 times less to move the magnet from Brookhaven to Illinois than it would to build a new one, so that's what we're going to do. It's an enormous effort from all sides, but it will be worth it."
"The muon, like its lighter sibling the electron, acts like a spinning magnet. The parameter known as "g" indicates how strong the magnet is and the rate of its gyration. The value of g is slightly larger than 2, hence the name of the experiment. This difference from 2 is caused by the presence of virtual particles that appear from the vacuum and then quickly disappear into it again....In measuring g-2 with high precision and comparing its value to the theoretical prediction, physicists will discover whether the experiment agrees with theory. Any deviation would point to as yet undiscovered subatomic particles that exist in nature."
As promised, Part Two of our coverage of the Saturday, September 15th Argonne Energy Showcase open house event. Our video highlights can be seen in the first installment of our Energy Showcase posts. Here's our full Flickr slideshow of over 50 photos with captions. Top: "Now, That's Cold!" Argonne researcher explains the technology behind the ATLAS (Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System) facility, the world's first superconducting linear accelerator for heavy ions. The object on the table is a model section of ATLAS' "superconducting split-ring resonator."
Center: "Hot or Not?" This very popular FLIR imaging exhibit in the Nuclear Energy building allowed visitors to see live video of themselves in the room with color-coded temperature gradients. As you can see, some people are literally hotter than others. A similar station set up in the Advanced Photon Source (401) complex let visitors take home a snapshot printout of their FLIR scans.
Bottom: "Clean and Green" One of the several advanced hybrid electric vehicles in the Sustainable Energy Tent. Some of the other new technologies on display were demonstrations of biofuel generation using fermented waste, vehicle charging stations, and an area where visitors could ride the
"Energy Bike" to see how much pedaling they have to do to light up a conventional incandescent light bulb, versus the effort needed to make LED and compact fluorescent devices glow. As we can vouch, it takes a lot less legwork to make those clean and green LED's shine!
Didn't get a chance to visit Argonne National Laboratory's 2012 Energy Showcase in the Chicago suburbs this past September 15th? Don't worry: we're very happy to share our video and photo highlights from this rare opportunity to peek inside the birthplace of modern nuclear science, and see first-hand some of the amazing research being done in America's heartland.
According to an on-site event organizer, this year's open house was the first one held in five years, after tighter security restrictions post-9/11 put National Laboratory open houses on hold. This year's Energy Showcase was also the first to require visitors to pre-register online. While past events had as many as 20,000 visitors each, Energy Showcase 2012 hosted a more modest registered attendance of approximately 2,000* - not necessarily a downside if you were seeking a good, close look at the dozens of fascinating exhibits on hand. [*According to another person I spoke to later, the registration attendance was capped at 10,000, so I may have misheard the original attendance estimate. If any readers out there have more solid attendance stats, please let us know in the comments! - LR]
First, let's stop in at the Physics building to have a look at the Gammasphere, the world's most powerful spectrometer for nuclear structure research. If the Gammasphere looks familiar, you may remember that the device had a 'guest starring role' in the 2003 feature film "Hulk," as the contraption that triggered Bruce Banner's verdant transformation - back then, it was physically located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Read more at http://www.phy.anl.gov/gammasphere/index.html
Next, let's take a short drive south to the nearby Advanced Photon Source complex, a facility which provides the brightest x-ray beams in the Western Hemisphere to more than 5,000 scientists from around the United States and the world. Here's a panned view from the APS observation gallery, as a researcher gives a basic explanation of its workings in the final 30 seconds or so of the video. In person, the building and equipment are remarkably large; what you see here on the video is only a tiny fraction of the APS accelerator "ring." More at http://aps.anl.gov/About/APS_Overview/
Here is a live demonstration of a technique called "acoustic levitation" that uses high-frequency (~22kHz) sound waves to suspend small objects like liquid droplets, plastic spheres, and popcorn in mid-air. Bystanders could manipulate and rearrange the plastic beads within the sound column using a metal spoon, creating intriguing patterns. As you can see from the video, the column behaves as though the beads are 'magnetically' attracted along an invisible vertical line running between the upper and lower sound generators. The demonstrators explain that the beads are spaced at wavelength node intervals of about one-third inch, allowing visualization of the standing wave. More at http://www.anl.gov/articles/no-magic-show-real-world-levitation-inspire-better-pharmaceuticals
Down the hall, we stopped by to see an X-ray diffraction demonstration, which provides a simulation of how the APS' powerful X-ray beam can reveal the before-unseen inner structures of nanoparticles, proteins, crystalline structures, organic molecules, and many other materials. More at http://aps.anl.gov/
The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory will open its gates to the community on Saturday, September 15, 2012, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. for a day of discovery and fun for the whole family. The event is free and open to the public. Advance registration is required as attendance will be limited.
Argonne's Energy Showcase will be a similar event to the traditional Argonne Open House but will be on a somewhat smaller scale, making it easier to experience all that the laboratory has to offer in a single day. The Energy Showcase will feature interactive demos, exhibits and tours, giving attendees a unique opportunity to mingle with prominent energy researchers and innovators within a hands-on atmosphere. This is a great opportunity to learn more about Argonne's research and talk with leading experts at the laboratory.
The event will be held rain or shine. Free shuttle service will be provided and food and drink will be available for purchase. Advance reservations are required and visitors are welcome to take photos and videos of the event.
The Laboratory facility is located on 1,500 wooded acres, about 25 miles southwest of Chicago. Outdoor fans also may wish to take in the DuPage County Forest Preserve District's Waterfall Glen nature area in Darien, which includes a scenic 9-mile hiking/biking loop trail that encircles the Argonne grounds. The Energy Showcase promises to be an unusual, exciting opportunity to get a glimpse inside Argonne, and to meet some of the researchers who are pushing the boundaries of today's knowledge to meet our energy needs for the present and future.
Looking for more radiation related sites? There's the informative and descriptively-named Radioactive Waste blog from Australia:
Being an environmental scientist of the disorganised type, and also overwhelmed by the quantity of sites of relevance to my interest in safety of radioactive waste, my hope is that this blog will bring some order to my life (this part at least)! All views & irreverent commentary expressed here are entirely my personal opinion, of course. In Australia, after cleaning up the mess at Maralinga (former UK nuclear weapons test site), we are now in process of building a national radwaste repository.
Atom Central is an intriguing portal with sections on the atom bomb, the Trinity site and video releases on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American bomb tests and more.
Argonne's rich heritage in the development of nuclear reactors began with CP-1, the world's first nuclear reactor brought to life by Enrico Fermi and his team on December 2, 1942, under the West stands at Stagg Field on the campus of the University of Chicago.
Dr. Walter H. Zinn, one of Fermi's close colleagues working on CP-1, became Argonne National Laboratory's first director in July 1946. In 1948, the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) transferred the major portion of the nation's nuclear reactor development program to Argonne. Under Dr. Zinn's vision and leadership, Argonne established a vigorous and far-reaching program to develop nuclear reactors of virtually all types.
You can see some of Argonne's history in video: Argonne's pioneering nuclear research is prominently featured in the documentary Atoms for Peace (1994, VHS), hosted by Bill Kurtis (whom we met as the host of the program NOVA: Back to Chernobyl). This one-hour feature details the history of the American peacetime nuclear program with its focus on energy production (and the U.S. fast-breeder reactor program, now on indefinite hiatus), as well as its linkage back to the early weapons development initiatives at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Arco, Idaho (the first town to be powered by nuclear energy) and the now-defunct Hanford site power plant in Washington state. While Atoms for Peace is a bit hard to track down, you'll probably be able to find a copy at larger public libraries with video collections.
