Chicago

At the end of March I went to the US to help Peter with his experiments at the Advanced Photon Source, part of Argonne National Laboratory just outside of Chicago. My objective was to assist, to gain experience using the synchrotron, and start planning the equipment requirements for (hopefully) my experiments some time in the future. The synchrotron is kinda like an atom smasher in that it accelerates electrons to almost the speed of light using electromagents around a big ring ~300m in diameter, but without crashing into anything. Instead they just use other electromagnets to deflect them off course a bit, and when they grumble and moan about the change of direction they give off x-rays. These are tapped into a beamline where we do the experiments - there are 34 stations at the APS each with several beamlines. The one we used had a beam with about a billion times more flux than a standard lab x-ray machine. The beauty of it is that the beam is focused and quite monochromatic, so you can actually penetrate a couple of mm of steel (or ceramic coating) and sample a whole volume, rather than just the top 10-20 microns (millionths of a meter).

When you apply at least 6 months in advance to get 5 or 7 days of beam and travel halfway around the world to get there, you don't want to waste any of it, so you work 24 hrs a day until the beamtime ends. It's an intense time. But as these weren't my experiments, it wasn't so bad for me, and we had enough people to have a couple of shifts. Our boss Magnus decided not to adjust to US time, so kept his bodyclock to Swedish times and did 12am - 12pm, so that he'd there'd be no jet lag when he flew home and went straight to work. I was generally on 12pm - 12 am, though that stretched out over the last few days. For those in the know, they are building Australia's first synchrotron just next to Monash, and it should be running in 2007.

There is a pic, and a description of how it works if you're really interested, just click on:
APS
Australian Synchrotron

We managed to spend a night in NY city thanks to a SAS plane that didn't work, which was cool as we got wander around Times Square and Broadway, have a real diner 'burger and drink Manhattans in Manhattan. Sorry, no pics as I didn't get my replacement camera until later. (My cool little Pentax went to camera heaven on the way to France, which still makes me very unhappy). Alot could be written about the total ineptitude of SAS in dealing with this problem - and will be, in a letter to SAS asking for compensation. Every ticket took 15-20 mins to rebook, all 280 of them. We queued for 3 hours, which even tested the patience of the Swedes, and they love queuing! And there was a damned woman (American) who complained loudly about the ineptitude of the staff and boasted to the rest of us in the queue about how she wasn't going to leave until she got what she wanted, took 30 mins to nitpick over details. Of course the Swedes are too polite to complain directly to her, but if she spoke Swedish she might be surprised to find out just how far support for her position actually didn't go.

In Chicago we got to go to the Green Mill, a jazz club that was formerly run by Al Capone, complete with leather booths, large mirrors and elegant woodwork. And funky jazz. After the beamtime we trekked around town looking for clothes, which were cheap but hard to find the right fit: most pants and jeans have the 'relaxed fit', which is basically the 'fatass fit', and look terrible - they stick out at the hips like the jodphurs equestrian riders in France would wear a hundred years ago. T-shirts could also be very wide. A few hard to get jazz CD's were also bought. We did a blues club, the 95th floor of the Hancock tower, part of the Art Institute, and saw most of a baseball match where the reigning 'world' champions the Chicago Whitesox eventually lost in a very low scoring 3-4 run match.

All in all it was a cool time, both work-wise and play-wise. Chicago is a big city with lots to do - a change from Lulea of course. The synchrotron work was interesting, but we'll see if I still find it so after I have the stress of working 20 hr days to get my own experiments done...

Pics from Chicago can be found on Flickr:

Chicago Pics

Again for those confused: single click on the large main picture, then click on the RHS smaller pic each time to advance through the set. Or start a slideshow, but miss the exciting and informative commentary.