Deadly Radiation, Internet Fame, and a Tragic End to the CERN Project

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Another great week in the books.

I'm still in Switzerland.

My map of dominant colors currently has 16 thousand upvotes on Reddit. Here it is again if you forgot or didn't see it last time.

Here is the post on Reddit and here is the page describing it. Now you can say you know someone famous, you're welcome (ha!).

This weekend Cadin, Ben, Mike (Ben's dad), and I went to Bains des Paquis for fondue.

Full of cheese, I jumped off the tall thing.

This was definitely not allowed, but I didn't get caught so it's okay.

I made some bread this week.

This is the perfect way to describe my cooking.

It was Ben's last weekend in Switzerland. My friends are dropping like flies.

Below is one of the cooler things I have seen. It's a piece of uranium in a bubble chamber. The jets that you see are from particles being emitted as the uranium decays.

Usually you can't see the decays, but with this you can visualize how dangerous radiation can be.

I'm taking the GRE tomorrow, isn't that fun?

My time in Switzerland is rapidly coming to a close. It's sad, but it's helping me to appreciate how amazing it is here, and how fortunate I am.

You should definitely come to Switzerland.

Yes, you.

My CERN Project is Impossible.

Actually. My mentor and I decided today that it isn't feasible to do what we were trying to do with the 200 MHz cavities.

This is because the inside is too complicated and there is just too much scattering going on to keep track of all the different components in an accurate and efficient manner.

We figured this out using Fourier decompositions. Any electric field that can exist in a structure like this can be described as a superposition of solutions to Laplace's equation: $$ \vec \nabla^2 E = 0$$. Therefore we should be able to reconstruct the observed field by summing these solutions multiplied by a constant that represents their contribution.

Eventually if we add together enough solutions, then the summation should start to look like what we had originally.

Below you can see that this isn't happening. We need to add way more solutions for the recomposition to converge to the original field, and keeping track of more than maybe 20 makes it just not worth it.

This wasn't a waste though. While looking at the same electric field, we noticed that there was a decently large transverse octupole component that is apparently the source of some mysterious (not any more) beam perturbation further along the SPS. This means I get my name on something formal. Boom. Contribution. Next question.

So now instead of what I've been doing for the past 7 months, I'm going to be working on a low pass filter for the RF supply of the 200 MHz cavities in my remaining 2 weeks.

More on that next time.

They grow up so fast.

Au revoir