Friday Afternoon Progress in the Nuclear Group

Here is Matt after a good day of IBIL and PIXE on various mineral grains (zircons, etc.) The ion source is cooling and he is cleaning his sample holders.

Eric made this great plot to help us understand the properties of the fragments from the decay of 13Li, 12Li, and 9He. Each of these unstable nuclei emit neutrons when they break up after surviving about 10-20 seconds

Tim’s week ended with manual labor after the low background counting station was found to be grossly contaminated. Here he is washing one of the lead shielding blocks.

Nuclear group at MoNA collaboration meeting

These are the MoNA collaborators at Westmont College. This morning Eric Lunderberg and Paul DeYoung, showed them how to sort our 13Li->11Li+2n data files so they can develop algorithms for finding events containing exactly two neutrons. This was done via videoconferencing and desktop sharing since they are located in California.

May Term Night Sky Class

Today the Night Sky Class took a solar spectrum using the SBIG SGS spectroscope. Mercury emission lines from a florescence lamp provided the calibration. Here is our calibrated image.

We had an imaging session on May 14th and captured a favorite galaxy, the Whirlpool Galaxy M51 in Canes Venatici. M51 is estimated to be about 23 million light years away from us. The image was take with a 12 inch LX200 Meade telescope and a SBIG ST10 CCD camera with 3×3 binning and 30 s exposure.

Inside the accelerator scattering chamber

This is the inside of the vacuum chamber. The dislodged target is hard to see but is on the ring (with angle marks) sort of behind things in the lower right.

This is Graham Peaslee making sure that the set of targets that have been dislodged from the target mechanism are not going to jam the remote target manipulator.