Friday Night (cabin) Fever

So, ladies and gentlemen, it's my first free Friday night in Japan. Am I out trying as many different kinds of sake as possible? No. Am I hopping from trendy dance club to trendy dance club until I've worn holes in my shoes? No. Am I at least participating in some sort of cultural event, like attending a Kabuki performance or some sort of Noh theatre? Oh no. Because I am in the Coarsegold of Japan. It is beautiful, rugged mountain country that is good for the hiking, but bad for the being any good at all after dark. It was an 710 yen ($7.10), 45 minute bus ride from the nearest town, which discourages any uncessesary travel. To continue the Coarsegold analogy, the nearest town, Aioi, would be Oakhurst. (For you of non-San Joaquin valley origin, go here, or to Yahoo maps beta, which kicks butt but needs Flash. Fresno, the nearest big town, which you may have heard of, is a 500,000 person (or so) suburb of nothing. Why the fascination with Coarsegold? It's my hometown.)

But that's ok, I guess. I've been pretty busy at least during the days. Yesterday I got a tour of the experiment hall at SPring-8. This is most likely where I'll be spending long, long hours for the rest of the summer. I'm working for Ishikawa-sensei and he's in charge of two very cool beamlines.

Hmm. It occurs to me that none of you probably have any clue about what I'm talking about, except for my grandfather and maybe my dad, if he didn't fall asleep while I was trying to tell him about it. Okay kiddies, open your copies of Synchrotrons for Dummies to page 8, please, and follow along.

One explanation of synchrotrons I once heard was that it was where you spin electrons around until they get dizzy and throw up x-rays. This is basically true. A synchrotron (copy this into your notes, children) is basically a big circle with electrons going around in it very, very, quickly. Because the electrons are always going in a circle, they're always changing direction, which means they are being accelerated (F=ma). Due to some electrodynamics, when an electron is accelerated, it emits radiation. Then after some more theory of relativity (thank you, Einstein), it turns out that the radiation has wavelengths in the x-ray regime. The x-rays go out in straight lines from the circle (storage ring) and each path is called a beamline.

Key concepts:
make electrons go almost speed of light -> spin them around -> they spit out x-rays

vocabulary:
synchrotron - big expensive x-ray source
storage ring - the circle electrons go around in
beamline - where the x-rays come out.

The quiz will be on Monday.

Why do people do this? The x-rays are really really good. You can also get other kinds of radiation out if you want. For instance, there's a synchrotron in Canada where they get the kinds of x-rays that they use at the doctors office that they use for medical and vetrinary imaging. They're actually building a beamline with a door for cattle.

Anyway, I got to see the storage ring (it's very dangerous when the synchrotron is running, but it's in shutdown mode right now so I got to take a peek) and got a tour of all the beamlines. We have two beamlines. #19 is the most brilliant (brightest light) in the world and #29 a 1 kilometer beamline which makes coherent light. Okay, enough technobabble. Here's the pic!
I look retarded and you can't see anything I just told you about. The green machinery behind me at least goes in the x-ray beam...

My friend Chris came to visit SPring-8 with his own group yesterday and today. He brought some...food...with him. Too bad this picture is so blurry. Believe it or not, we actually ate the clear and green ball-y thingies. You stick them with the little plastic toothpick and roll them around in some powder, and enjoy. They basically taste like the powder. It's sweet, but that's all the description I can give you. For the rest of the night, we were total dorks and talked about our research groups and working at synchrotrons and so on. Although we did complain about our respective housing situations, though, so at least we're a little normal.


Wow! I'm impressed with myself. Really, nothing happened and still I've managed to talk for quite a long time.

Oh oh oh - Ishikawa-sensei arrived from France today. He seems pretty cool, and much more casual than I was expecting. Hopefully I'll only offend him a little bit with my American boorish manners. We're going to discuss my schedule on Monday, when he's not so overwhelmed and jet lagged. (As if he weren't busy enough, he's also in charge of the x-ray free electron laser (think a laser that shoots x-rays) which just started working two weeks ago and there was a press release yesterday and he's been gone...) So I guess I'll finally figure out what I'm doing on Monday.