Exotic Beam Summer School 2012

The last of my summer travels took me to the Exotic Beam Summer School at Argonne National Labs near Chicago, IL. Unfortunately, I never made it into Chicago. Fortunately, I now have a pretty good feel for the kind of research I'll be doing for my dissertation and the instruments that I will be using.

Welcome to Chicago! Even though I never made it into downtown.

The cool plane at the airport. The airport is named Midway after the battle of Midway. Pretty cool, huh?

 Overall, EBBS was a smashing success. How can you not have fun when you are with ~35 people for 13 hours a day who think and act just like you?

The whole group from the summer school.

The summer school kept us busy. We were going from 7:30am-9:00pm. We had lectures each morning, hands-on activities in the afternoon, and some type of forum/activity each evening.

They had really comfy seats in their lecture hall. I spent a lot of time in that chair.

 Not to mention that they fed us EXTREMELY well! It's every grad student's dream.
We were housed in four bedroom suites with others from the summer school. I was housed with a girl from Michigan State and another girl from Hope College which is also in Michigan.

You know you're staying on a national lab campus when there are whiteboards everywhere!

I was lucky enough to get the room with 2 twin beds and not a double.

At least I didn't have to share the room.

My view out my window was typical Illinois. Meaning it was flat and included a water tower and a parking lot.

There were students from all around the world. We had people from Germany, China, Japan, England, Canada, Mexico, and the US. Most in attendance were nuclear physicists. There were only two nuclear chemists and I was one of them. Want to know what you learn right off the bat? Never go anywhere with out your badge. It's that important.

This is a temp badge. I can't wait until I get my permanent one!

We got to play with some really cool instruments! My favorites were HELIOS and Gammasphere. HELIOS is made from an old MRI magnet and is used to do inverse kinematic experiments at ATLAS (Argonne Tandem Linear Accelerator System). It generated quite the magnetic field. The magnet tried to take the earrings out of my ears and my fillings hurt the entire time I was in range. But it was so cool!!!

HELIOS

And it's a good thing I liked Gammasphere. It's the main instrument that I will be using for my research. Even cooler, it made an appearance in the movie The Hulk. Not surprising, but Hollywood got the science wrong. Again. Gammasphere detects gamma rays. Not create them.

Gammasphere

Bruce Banner getting irradiated by Gammasphere.

The Hulk tossing Gammasphere around.

I even got to make a gold target for gammasphere! Mine is the front one!

In the middle of our week, we were taken to a movie in the town by Argonne. We got in free with our Argonne badges which is good to know for when I move there! It was the most interesting theater I've ever been to. They took the whole concept of dinner and a movie to a new height. The theater was filled with high tables and you sat in very nice office chairs. You could order everything from a steak to an alcoholic beverage to chocolate cake. Then you watched a movie while you ate. There were even waiters! It was really cool. I wouldn't recommend seeing Total Recall though. It was okay.

Me at the really cool theater.

My newly made friends from Surrey. The menu was huge so it was hard to make a decision.

The decorations in our theater were very old timey/ Clark Gable-esque.

 I had to laugh at some of the signs I found around Argonne.

Apparently the building got struck by lightning a few year back and it killed all the electronics in the building. I guess they fixed that problem pretty quickly.

Apparently, tornadoes are a valid worry at ANL. They have to go into the shelters for real about twice a year. We didn't have to while we were there but I guess the previous summer school had to.

EBBS 2012 was awesome. I learned so much and made a lot of new friends! It makes me excited to move to Chicago which looks like it's going to happen this next summer. Which is extremely fast! I thought I had two years instead of one but it's going to be exciting!
And by-the-way, I never realized exactly how big the great lakes were until I flew over one!

It took us 15 minutes to fly over Lake Michigan.