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 shadowing Greg Hackman. On Monday, he showed me an experiment he is conducting and introduced me to Peter Bender who is working on it with him. Greg explained the experiment to me—it's the compact Bragg detector, part of the High Mass Task Force program. They are working with lithium fluoride and oxygen ions. They aim the oxygen ions at the lithium fluoride target and the ions that go through, go into chambers filled with argon and methane gas. They will also be testing a different ration of argon to methane, which is not explosive like the one that is normally used, to see if it works the same.
Greg showed me where they keep the lithium fluoride and showed me some other expensive things they have. Greg is a part of four different projects, and on our way, at least three people talked to him about those projects. He showed me a crystal of geranium and asked me to test some LED lights for him. He set up the battery and the wires and all I had to do was clip the wires to the LED lights and check the voltage while dunking it in liquid nitrogen. If it was between six and nine, it was good. Every light I checked was good. Greg told me that usually, only half of them are good. At 3 o’clock, there was a meeting about the experiment. It was very interesting. I got to learn exactly what was going to happen for the rest of the week and see how it is planned.
On Tuesday, I helped center the targets for the experiment. Peter set up everything inside the chamber and Greg cleaned some parts with alcohol. Peter did something with the vacuum and did some work on the computer. They turned the beam on and started to collect data. Chantal Nobs explained to me what the chart meant and there were some weird thing that showed up. First, it was fine with plots that showed up as a slope, but later they started to show up in a horizontal line. A group who will be taking shifts at the experiment showed up with Greg as I was leaving.
On Wednesday, I finished testing the rest of the LEDs, as Greg, Chantal, and Peter finished setting up the experiment. They started taking data and Greg explained to me what exactly they were doing and why. One run showed really weird results, so they ran it again and the data showed something completely different so they checked if something went wrong with the beam, but apparently nothing had. They ran tests with different pressures. This week was really interesting. I learned a lot about how the experiment worked and what the meetings are like. It has been really fun being at TRIUMF. Definitely a lot better than staying at home bored all summer like some of my friends.
-- Written by Carmen Wong, PIMS Student