more of the same. waaaay too much of the same.

Hi, I'm back, it's been awhile, I know. I've been putting in a lot of loooong hours at work, and just got back from a week at Case Western Reserve University, where the first stage of LUX is being built (dubbed LUX 0.1). We got a lot of work done, learned a lot, but glad to be home now. Missed the misses quite a lot, so I'm staying put for awhile. I'm technically on vacation now for spring break, but instead of being lazy, I have to make up work for my classes and study a lot so that I don't fail. Failing would be bad. However, the semester is flying by in a good way, pretty soon it'll be summer and I'll be able to spend all my time on research. Also, working at the camp as 'Mr. Physics' in which I will run 1 hour physics experiments/demos for kids in Michael's camp. I'm nervous because I'm notoriously bad with kids, but the money is very attractive, especially since I get paid so little for summer work.

Anyway, before then we have some vacations to look forward to. One will be a trip to Arizona to visit my Dad, and another will be a trip to Seattle to visit Erin's Dad. We're also hoping to be able to afford a trip in June to my cousin's wedding in Long Beach, but we may not come up with the money for it. Oh well, such is life when first starting out.

Speaking of which, Erin is taking more classes, this time for photography! Also, Erin's sister Meghan got into Harvard for mind, brain and education, and her mother is going to finish her dissertation (finally) on music stuff (Franz Liszt). So everybody is back to school!

Now if you were reading this blog for the science, then here, some pictures of my trip to Case.

Sorry this is sideways. This is the top two flanges for the detector can. The bottom flange has a smaller can that bolts to it, and that's where the liquid xenon, pmts, etc. go. The top flang has a larger can that bolts onto it over the smaller one and that's the vacuum and cryostat for cooling. The cans are shown...


... in this picture


This is Dave and I working in the clean room... We broke something, now we're trying to fix it...


Here is more of the detector constructed. The aluminum blocks are to take up space so that we don't use a lot of liquid xenon. The idea is that this is a smaller version of the larger, full LUX, so we use the same detector system, just use a tinier amount of PMTs and xenon. The big hole in the back is where the instrumented xenon will be, with the four PMTs observing it. Ask questions if you don't know what I'm talking about.


This should give you a better idea of what everything should look like, only this will have an even larger can over it, and then the whole contraption will go in a large bucket of water, because water is good at shielding against neutrons that can create noise in the detector.


That's it for now! Bye!