Grade 10 student Carmen Wong is visiting TRIUMF for 5 weeks. She is at TRIUMF as part of the Emerging Aboriginal Scholars Summer Camp put on by the Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences.
This week at TRIUMF, I am back with Chris, Wyatt, and Rocky who I met last week. There are also two others with us. When I got there on Monday, they were trying to make the drift chamber work properly. Something was wrong with the amplifier, so they tried a few different things with unplugging and soldering. Mostly, they looked at a computer screen and there wasn’t much for Wyatt and I to do so we went to check on Wyatt’s experiment for Dr. Yen. They ended up turning on the beam and looking at the computer screen some more. Their work is interesting, but complicated.
Tuesday was a little more interesting. They were fixing amplifiers and the entire drift chamber was wrapped in aluminum foil. The first thing we did was plug something into one end of the drift chamber. It took a long time because there were many things that needed to fit exactly right and they were very tiny. Later, they did a lot of putting in and removing screws to put the cover on the end back on properly. Most of my time, I spent watching them try to put pieces back together properly. There were a few tour groups that came in and took pictures of us. I took a few pictures and they looked at the computer screen some more. Right before I left, we took the aluminum foil off of the drift chamber and put plastic on it.
At TRIUMF on Wednesday, nobody was at M-11 when I got there and the beam was on, so I sat in the control room until someone showed up in a couple of minutes. The only thing I did was help fix the trigger connection by watching the screen and telling someone if the number changed from 0. After that they started collecting data and writing down some numbers. I took a few pictures. Just before I left they turned the beam off and we put up a cable that hooked up to a machine in the control room. They turned it back on before I left. This week was really interesting and I am excited for the next week at TRIUMF.
-- Written by Carmen Wong, PIMS Student