ACU Department of Engineering and Physics Volume 19 Issue 4Weekly Summer Research Newsletter June 17, 2013

DANGO (Doings and Goings On)

Winner of last week’s Photo of the Week Contest“Traditional ACU group picture in front of the BNL sign.” –Dr. Rusty Towell

Updates from the Students

From Ryan Pinson:

Hey DANGO,So this week was pretty crazy. The Towell familyarrived late Sunday night to a spotless apartment.Ramsey, Andrew, Marshall, and I moved into asmaller apartment over the weekend. Monday wasthe start of the PAC meetings at BNL so we at-tended several of the morning meetings and thenafter lunch we worked on our scripts to better or-ganize them and touch up some parts as well as

add a few new things. Tuesday and Wednesday wealso had a few meetings, more of the PAC meet-ings as well as the Forward Upgrade Quarterlymeeting. Wednesday that the water at the apart-ments was out for most of the day due to a watermain breaking, which allowed us to work in theconvenience of our apartment.

Thursday we attended more meetings as wellas cleaned up the factory tent organizing LEMOcables. Thursday evening Matthias gave a talkover the G-2 experiment and then took us tosee the magnet as they prepared to load it ontoa truck to take it to a barge for transportationto Fermilab. This weekend we have big plans forRamsey’s birthday, which will include seeing thenew Superman. That’s all for this week.

–Ryan Pinson

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From Marshall Towell:

What it does Dango. So on Monday we went overwith my Dad everything that we did while he wasgone. I also began to document everything thatour code that we wrote does and how it works.After I typed it all out in a work document Ryanhelped me revise it and then helped me put it inLATEX. On Tuesday and Wednesday we mostly satthrough a lot of meetings. Thursday and Fridaywe worked a lot in the factory and spent a lot oftime separating and organizing some cords. Overall this we got a lot of stuff done this week anddid work.

–Marshall Towell

From Andrew Miller:

Hello DANGO #4,This week has been a lot of fun! On Sunday night,Dr. Towell returned with his whole family, and wehave had much larger games of League ever since.We’ve had a little more direction for our work nowthat Dr. Towell is with us, so we’ve been able tomove ahead with lots of cleaning and organizingof the factory. I also wrote some more scripts tosort through some values in the database and evenmade a graph. There is still a lot to do on thesescripts though, as we need to do some more checkson each run, and then take the good ones and usethem to plot trigger rates and ultimately calculateefficiency.

Yesterday we heard a talk about G-2 and gotto go see the giant magnet that they are movingto Fermilab to repeat the experiment. We got agood picture of the four of us in front of the mag-net while they were putting the frame on it andpreparing it to be put on the trailer. The wholeoperation was quite impressive, but some of usare still skeptical that they will be able to ship itaround the US without being flexed more than 3mm.

In other news, there was much rejoicing thispast week because we were able to get League ofLegends to work through the proxy at the apart-ment. We’ve also been playing board games, bas-

ketball, and there are rumors that people hereplay ultimate frisbee sometimes, so hopefully we’llat least meet the minimum requirement for phys-ical activity this summer.

Also, Ramsey’s birthday is today (we forgot tosing to him on the phone conference), so we’ll begoing out to eat this evening and also going to seeMan of Steel this weekend.

I hope everyone else is having a great summerso far!

–Andrew Miller

From Ramsey Towell:

What hey do you DANGO,We started off this week by getting my dad up tospeed on the massive leaps that we made in thefield of nuclear physics since he was in Abilenelast week. Also we went to a ton a of seminarsand meetings about the preliminary results of theRHIC Run 13 and what all of the various subsys-tem groups will be working on now that the run isover. We also began the task of cleaning out andorganizing the tent where we have been workingon the RPCs for the last several years.

My family showed up last weekend, so now Idon’t have to spend so much money on food. Alsomy birthday is today (Friday), and I finally hit thetwo decades mark of being alive. So that’s prettycool. We are going to see Man of Steel on Satur-day for my birthday and I really hope it’s betterthan the other Superman movies I’ve seen.

Bye good,Ramsey

From Chris Campbell:

Hey DANGO,Well our first week as a part of the COMPASSteam at UIUC was a success! After getting ac-quainted with the research team and the project,we got to work continuing the construction of the

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Prototype B drift chamber. This involved tensiontests of the sense wires (20-micron diameter) andfield wires (100-micron diameter), as well as manyhours in the UIUC Nuclear Physics Lab cleanroom assembling PTB’s various layers. Next weekwe will continue this work and hopefully start tosolder the sense and field wires onto the setupwe’ve been working on. Also, we’re hoping to startworking with UIUC’s cosmic test stand, organiz-ing its wires, etc. Should be fun.

Apart from COMPASS, we had the privilegeof attending a couple of REU talks this week.One was about high temperature superconductiv-ity and the other was about nuclear physics andproton substructure, both were interesting.

Outside of work, we’ve been having a goodtime hanging out with the Daugheritys, checkingout the various shops and restaurants around cam-pus, and getting to see Man of Steel in IMAX lastSaturday with the REU gang.

–Chris Campbell

From Spenser Lynn:

Hi DANGO,We officially completed our first work week! I’msad to report that we didn’t figure out all ofphysics, but there’s still plenty of time left tofinish. I spent the week getting oriented in thelabs, doing wire tension tests for the COMPASSdrift chamber, assembling the drift chamber in theclean room, and working on the reading assign-ments from Matthias. Next week we will wire thedrift chamber and hopefully clean up the cosmicray test stand. In non-work news, I found the ar-boretum which is this great park owned by UIUCa few blocks from our apartment. There are plentyof trails there to run at so I intend on getting toknow the place pretty well. I did make the mis-take of running through the UIUC Pollinatariumwhich houses a large number of man-made beehives. Of course I didn’t realize this until I wasin the middle of the colony. We saw Man of Steel,which sadly disappointed me, and located some ofthe best BBQ that I’ve ever had. I’ve enclosed a

picture of James working on the DC in the cleanroom. Stay safe and have fun everyone!

–Spenser Lynn

From Kristin Holz:

Hello!I’ve spent most of my time this week working onmaking a simulation of an electrostatic speakerin COMSOL Multiphysics software. The speakerworks by creating a sound pressure field with a vi-brating graphene membrane. The membrane, heldat a constant voltage, is sandwiched between twoperforated capacitor plates driven by an alternat-ing current. This causes the membrane to moveback and forth towards each plate and producesound waves. I haven’t used the software beforeand neither has anyone else I work with so it’sbeen a slow process; but I have the geometry madeand now I just need to get the program to recog-nize the currents, tension in the membrane, andother details so that it can produce plots of theelectric field and pressure among other things.

I also ran an acoustic impedance test on myclarinet for concert A5 on the tempered scale.Looking at the data, it is interesting to see thatthe first two harmonics for this note are reallysharp because of a tone hole that is open 1/3 ofthe way down the instrument above any of theother holes that are closed. I’m really interestedto see how opening this hole (with the registerkey) and other register holes affect the harmonicsfor different notes.

Apart from research, I went swing dancing onThursday which was really fun and saw Man ofSteel with Spenser, Chris, James, and several peo-ple doing REU physics and computer science in-ternships here.

–Kristin Holz

From James Mallon:

How’s it going, Dango?Wow. The fact that this was just my first week iskinda blowing my mind. Just a little. The weekstarted off fairly well. Spencer, Chris, Dr. D and

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I got shown around and chose our offices. We hadabout 5 hours or so of meetings, but once thosewere over, we could get some real work done. Imanaged to play around with Autodesk and getsome of the drawings we got from Seclay (mayhave butchered that) translated into ’murican. Af-ter that was done on Tuesday, I worked almost ex-clusively in “The Barn”, where we assembled thedrift chamber. This went well, besides a few poorlymachined bolts. After running a gas leak check,which indicated only two very small leaks, we tookthe drift chamber apart on Wednesday, glued aKapton and carbon layer on the G10 frame, andstarted putting it back together. On Thursday andFriday, we finished applying a new carbon layer toa new layer of Kapton, and repeated the processof taking the drift chamber apart and putting itback together.

Keep it kicking,James

From Erik Forrister:

Sup Dango!First of all, I’d like to give a shout out to my

man, Francisco. It was his birthday on Friday!Well this week was about the same as the oth-

ers. Still working on the motor. I got the serialcommunication working or at least it spits outwhat I put in. That’s about as far as I’ve gottenon the communication side. I also made the mainpart of the program and enabled a reset button.The motor will now go a certain direction untilit hits a switch; then it will stop and do it allover when the reset is pressed. I was fighting theprogram to make the motor stopping even moreaccurate, but it just wouldn’t work. Then I actu-ally calculated that even though the motor mighttake 4 extra steps, it actually would only go 120microns in those 4 steps. Dr. Head said sometimes“perfection” gets in the way of “good enough”. I’m

now working on the algorithm to input numbers(the chip only inputs 1 character at a time andin a sort of continuous stream). So yeah, progresshas been pretty good. I’m taking man-sized stepsnow, towards the end goal.

Until next time,Erik

From Francisco Teran:

Hello Dango,This week has been a really long and hardweek.This week after dealing with several pro-graming problems, we were able to make a pro-gram that can run the lenses. I worked all weekon this program. It took me a while to under-stand how c# works. Using some examples codeswe were able to create this program. It was noteasy because this sample program is a generic pro-gram. We had to find a way to make it work forour USB. We spend many hours studying the wayc# works. We had to play around with the codeand run the program to see what it was doing.We fail many times but every fail helped us un-derstand c# better. Every time we ran the pro-gram we made little changes to it. Based on theanswers we were getting from the program andUSB we made the changes. After we got the rightanswer and everything was working right we hadto design a loop to make the USB output channelto generate 4095 samples. Designing the loop wasnot very easy. We worked on it for a day and ahalf. Unfortunately this process is too slow andwe have to make it faster. Next week I will beworking on a program that will allow us to runmuch faster. We are making progress and that isa good thing.

–Francisco Teran

From Noah Kitts:

Hey everyone!This past week has been an interesting one. Itstarted out with us figuring out what was wrong

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with some of the hodoscopes at station 3. Tues-day through Thursday was the User’s Meeting atFermilab, so I got to listen to a ton of differenttalks. In other news, I broke my ankle Thursdaywhile skating, so I couldn’t go to work on Friday.Also, the biggest tragedy that comes from this,other than not being able to walk for a while, isdefinitely delaying when I will be seeing Man OfSteel in the IMAX theater. Hope everyone is hav-ing a great week!

Stay classy,Noah Kitts

From Elizabeth Carlisle:

Hi everyone,This has been an exciting week. Last Saturday, myaunt came to visit from Indianapolis. She pickedme up from my dorm room in the village, and wetook the train to Chicago. We went to Navy Pier,and then we got to take a boat tour, which wasvery fun because we both love boats. And thenthis week we went to the users meeting, wherewe listened to a whole bunch of talks and learneda whole bunch of physics. On Wednesday, Laceyand I went to an Italian festival. We met someinteresting people and got to eat some deliciousItalian food, which is always great. On Thursday,we joined the tango club. So now we can learnhow to tango. The first lesson was really fun. Notas fun as swing dancing, of course, but still enter-taining. So that was my week. And tonight I’mmaking brownies, which makes it even more ex-citing!

–Elizabeth

From Lacey Medlock:

Hi, This week I attended a bunch of talks at theusers meeting. I learned about different experi-ments there. I also went to an Italian festival onWednesday with Elizabeth and then to a tangodancing class on Thursday with Elizabeth. We hada good time.

Have a good week,Lacey

Updates from the Professors

From Dr. Josh Willis:

Liebe Dango,This week was filled mostly with running otherpeople’s code, trying to fix mine, and comment-ing on new code other people wrote. In prepara-tion for the f2f (“face-to-face”) meeting in Syracusein a week and a half, some of us here are tryingto at least get the analysis pipeline to run with apycbc executable. We’ve also been discussing thelong term plans for FFT based pipelines, espe-cially over the next nine months before the codeand analysis review for the advanced detector erabegins (which is expected to take about anothernine months).

Most of that is secret LIGO/Virgo stuff that Ican’t talk about. However since I mentioned thepipeline name (ihope) last week, I will at least passalong that one thing discussed was what the nameof the new pipeline should be. The Cardiff grouphad come up with three options: ahope (“a” for ad-vanced), pyhope (since it’s in Python) or nohope(suggestion of a competing analysis group). I amoptimistic, though, that we have sold everyone onthe idea of Episode IV: a_new_hope. You mayimagine for yourself what fraction of the teleconwas then spent by a dozen or so physicists makingStar Wars jokes. Don’t tell the Empire.

Bis nächster Woche,Tschüss,Josh

From Shon Watson:

Dear DANGO,This week I have continued to work hard on thepacket receiver program for the Niffte TPC. I haveprimarily been using Valgrind’s callgrind tool togenerate profile data for the packet receiver’s per-formance. After each successful profile run, I an-alyzed the profile results with KCachgrind. Theseprograms helped me to identify several regions ofthe packet receiver that could be improved.

After many changes over the week, an offline

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part of the packet receiver’s performance has im-proved by almost a factor of two. This trans-lated into a moderate reduction in CPU usage forthe online packet receiver program. Unfortunately,the actual effective throughput dropped slightly.I need to figure out how to improve the onlinethroughput.

Shon

From Dr. Michael Daugherity:

Dear DANGO,After two glorious days of work at UIUC, we had alovely “professor’s retreat” in Washington DC ar-guing why the Department of Energy should keepfunding us. In the meantime, it was really niceto go up to FermiLab again and see the SeaQue-sters. We also took the kids all around and aboveChicago. The view from the top of Dr. Willis’tower really is incredible. After all this travel,what I’m really looking forward to is even moretravel in Portland next week to get the latest up-dates from Physics Education Research.

We started working the Nuclear Physics Labclean room on our prototype drift chamber forCOMPASS. We also have a lot of work to do onthe cosmic test stand in Loomis Lab so we get aposition resolution measurement once the proto-type is done. In order to get below 200 micronswill we have to install some Silicon tracking de-tectors and figure out how to include them in theDAQ. It is amazing to me that we already haveto start planning DNP abstracts for this Fall.

Since I’m indecisive, I’m submitting two ob-vious pictures without captions. Everyone is en-couraged to make up their own captions for thelast picture.

–Dr. D

From Dr. Donald Isenhower:

To residents of DANGOland,This time I’m doing my DANGO while I’m at thelab as opposed to going home and then forgettingabout it due to taking my wife out for her birth-day celebration that included going to see the new

Star Trek movie (finally) at the Hollywood Palms.The past two weeks has been spent mostly wor-rying about our DOE review in DC that all wehad yesterday (13th). As all of you know by do-ing homework and facing exams, it is much easierto worry about it that DOING something aboutfinishing it. So the talk got sent in on the 6th(on the due date rather than being early), but thetalk, shared by Towell and Daugherity went well.We don’t think we cost ourselves our research andas a consequence don’t have to worry about stillhaving work for all of you to do next year. OK,I wasn’t really worried about that aspect anyway,but came out looking strong I believe and it wasthe accomplishment of previous years’ studentswho helped. So pat yourselves on the back if thisis your second or later year working with us. Theonly snag was a tornado warning at the airport onthe way back which delayed a lot of flights.

We are still working haltingly through the ho-doscopes and getting the voltages set properly.This is something that would be trivial if we hadbeam and if I could look at each signal, but isa nightmare trying to do it correctly without it.There are plenty of other tasks that have to befinished by August, so the students here will bekept busy. I am glad that Dr. Daugherity decidedto travel to DC via Chicago because he did a greatjob of getting some pictures of students “working.”Of course Noah had to make sure he had the mostpainful week.

From Fermilab,Dr. I.

From Dr. Rusty Towell:

Hello Dango,My family and I safely arrived in NY on Sunday.The older I get the less I take safe travels for gran-ite. Or maybe it has more to do with the advancedmileage of our van?

This week was the bi-annual PHENIX collab-oration meeting. So Monday morning we heardtalks on the status of the collaboration (strong,productive, but many challenges ahead ...), the

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just completed Run13 (extremely successful),preparations for Run 14(major silicon repairs re-quired), and long range plans for sPHENIX andePHENIX. Tuesday was our quarterly forwardupgrade meeting. That was useful in bringingall of us up to speed on the current status ofthe detectors, analysis, and plans for the future.On Wednesday Matthias, Mickey, and I walkedthrough the factory and made a list of work thatneeds to be done in the factory that is 3 pageslong. PHENIX doesn’t expect to be able to con-tinue to use this space in the future so we needto move and store all of the RPC stuff into a newlocation.

Wednesday evening I traveled to DC for ourDOE review. On Thursday Dr. Isenhower, Dr.Daugherity, and I gave our presentation. We allfelt that it went well and the review committeewas impressed. Despite a tornado touching downnear the airport and a four hour delay in my flight,I got back to BNL late Thursday.

Friday I attended the PHENIX InstitutionalBoard meeting where PHENIX considered admit-ting 2 new institutions into the collaboration. Wealso met with Francesca to report on our anal-ysis work. She was impressed with the progresswe’ve made. It was good to end our week with aphone conference where we got to hear from ev-eryone. Noah, we hope you are better soon. (andthat someone got a picture! :)

Grace and Peace,

Rusty

Photo ofthe Week Candidates

#1: –Dr. Michael Daugherity

#2: –Dr. Michael Daugherity

#3: “James working on the DC in the cleanroom.” –Spenser Lynn

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#4: –Dr. Michael Daugherity

#5: “ACU students prepare to load the G-2magnet onto the shipping truck.” –Andrew Miller

#6: “The cleanroom gang.” –James Mallon

#7: “Fun at the park.” –Chris Campbell

#8: “The ceiling can’t hold us!”–Ramsey Towell

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Other News

25 Years of CookiesLois Marie has served our department for 25 years.Please take a minute to estimate how many cook-ies she has lovingly baked for us then drop her anemail and tell her how much you appreciate her.

New StudentsThe department of Engineering and Physics ex-pects to welcome over 60 new students this fall.This will be by far the largest group of new stu-dents ever for our department and three times thenumber of engineering students as expected. Plannow to help us welcome them to our department.

Wildcat Video MinuteWe are highlighting the Physics and Engineeringdepartments in our July episode of the WildcatVideo Minute. The only footage we are lacking issome shots from the students in New York andChicago at the laboratories. We will need aboutten different shots of students working in groups,close-ups of machinery, classroom setting, etc., tohelp show the students in action. You can reviewthe script below in case there is something specificat your location that makes sense to film and sendto us.

We are hoping you and/or your students canprovide us a few shots in the next week or two towork with. iPhones, other smartphones or digitalcameras will be perfect. Just make sure to keepthe phones turned sideways and shoot horizon-tally, not vertically. This will match the footagewe have shot.

• Keep your shots steady

• Hold on your subject for a good five to tenseconds

• If there is action you think you should fol-low, please be careful to move smoothly,then wait at the end of the move to steady-up for a few seconds

• If in doubt, hold your shot

• Oh, and shoot more than you think youcould possibly need.

Fall conference2013 Fall Meeting of the APS Division of NuclearPhysics October 23-26, 2013 Newport News, VA.http://www.aps.org/meetings/meeting.cfm?name=DNP13

New alias for our department:acu.edu/engineering-physics

Snowmass Young Physicist SurveyHelp shape the future of High Energy and ParticlePhysics research: http://snowmassyoung.hep.net/

AAPT T-Shirt design contest($100 cash prize):http://www.aapt.org//Programs/contests/2013tshirtcontest.cfm

New FacultyDr. Matt Steele arrived in Abilene on May 25. Hewill join the Engineering and Physics faculty inthe fall. Be sure to give him a warm welcome!

The Particle Data Group Announces:The 2012 edition of the Review of Particle Physicsis now available on the Web: http://pdg.lbl.gov/

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• Summary Tables

• Particle Listings

• pdgLive

• Review articles

The PDG recommends our website for the public:

ParticleAdventure.org

We thank the 700 members of the particle physicscommunity who contribute to the Review of Par-ticle Physics.

We always welcome your suggestions for improve-ments.

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