From MariachiWiki

Kimberley Tomlinson
Born Februay 21, 1988

Major Electrical Engineering

Contents 1 Me Me Me!!! 2 Obsessions 2.1 Links 3 Future/Current projects 4 Journal 4.1 Cosmic Rays and Particle Detector

Me Me Me!!!

My name is Kimberley and I am currently a freshman attending Stony Brook University. I was born in Jamaica. No, the country not Queens. I moved permanently to the states at the age of nine. I have a younger sister, age nine. My mother put an emphasis on school and enrolled me into special programs. I graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. Here at Stony Brook I am slowly finding my niche. I am in a program called WISE (Women in Science and Engineering). The goal of the program is to increase the number of women in science, math and engineering fields. I was recently elected Vice President of the WISE student leadership council.

Obsessions

Hobbies include surfing the internet,swimming, watching television, and learning in general. I am not a big fan of music but I am slowly getting into it. So far I have discovered Snow Patrol. I am a big fan however of television. At one point my life revolved around television. I am addicted to science fiction which I believe is the reason behind my love of Physics. I think I learned most of what I know from television. My favorite shows are Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, The X-Files, Farscape, Star Trek (TNG, Voyager), The Outer Limits just to name a few. To feed my obsessions with theses shows I visit the websites listed below.

Links

GateWorld
SCIFI Channel Stargate SG-1
SCIFI Channel Stargate Atlantis
Wikipedia

Future/Current projects

Current
WSE 187

Journal

February 22, 2007
I don't know what to say. I think I learned what I will be doing in the Cosmic Ray Lab but we will see next week how much I learned. There was a survey to see how much previous knowledge we have about the topic of Cosmic Rays. I don't like those because I feel like I am taking a test that I failed. I will update later. I don't know how to use this... creating a page and uploading things. I need to learn. Today was the first day of the Basic Processing of Radio Signals. We took a survey to see how much previous knowledge we have about the topic of Cosmic Rays. I don't like those because I feel like I am taking a test that I failed. There was a presentation on what we will be doing in the up coming weeks. I think I learned what I will be doing in the Cosmic Ray Lab but we will see next week how much I learned. I still don’t know what cosmic rays are. I understood most of the physics, radio waves travel in straight lines until interrupted then it get reflected. What if it meets the Stealth Bomber? Any way I am hoping to get more familiar with the equipment. Hopefully after this I will still want to be an Electrical Engineer. I don’t see my self waiting every ten years for something that only lasts for less than a second. I just figured out why I was so confused about who I was working with. It was because I was looking at the page created for Cosmic Rays and Particle Detectors rather than my section which is Basic Processing of Radio Signals.

February 26, 2007
Today I learned that an antenna can be both a transmitter and a receiver. We connected the cable leading from the antenna to the splitter that allows both computers to receive the signal the antenna was picking up. Using the program WinRadio we were able to listen to AM radio. The antenna is not powerful enough to pick up FM radio. I could not find radio Disney even though it is an AM radio station and I don’t know why. Also found out GNU stands for GNU is Not a Unit.

March 1, 2007
Today we learned that a directional satellite is used to cut down on interference. We were also introduced to MATLAB, a numerical computing environment and programming language. We made vectors, of which I don’t really understand the significance. I also learned the difference and benefit of saving an image as jpeg or pdf.

March 6, 2007

We continued to use MATLAB today, this time to generate signals. We created an array from 0 to 1 with step 0.01 and called it ‘t’. We generated a function dependent on t, y(t)= sin(2π*ft). We started out with a frequency of f=2. As the frequency was increased the graph became distorted. To clear it up we changed the step to 1/8000. The graph became unreadable but in order to see the detail the start stop of the array was changed from 0 -1 to 0 - 0.01. By shortening the length of the array the sine wave could be seen.

Below are two graphs of the function y(t)= sin(2π*ft) with a frequency f=500.

After generating the wave we sent the signal to the sound card. The function was multiplied by 0.5 and 2 in effect changing the amplitude which affects the pitch of the sound. The frequency was also manipulated. Cutting it in half lengthens the play time to be twice as long. March 8, 2007
Today we used "randn" to generate a Gaussian Niose.
March 14, 2007

March 16, 2007
Jay has been holding out on us. There is a graphic user interface (GUI) that can graph a signal simply by loading the recorded signal into the program and clicking a few buttons. The interface has a feature that will

March 20, 2007

Cosmic Rays and Particle Detector

March 22, 2007
Today was the first day in the Cosmic Ray and Particle detection lab. In this lab we will be creating experiments to study cosmic rays. There are these 'black boxes', scintilators, that are used to detect cosmic rays. They actually detect all ionized articles that pass through them so I don't really see how they will help in studying the cosmic rays if it does not distinguish between the different ionized particles. There are other devices that are used to detect particles, one is the cloud chamber. The chamber uses alcohol that condenses and falls. The other was a device that had high voltage plates that would give off a spark where an ionized particle passed through.

March 27, 2007
Today we set up the equipment on our own. The only trouble was getting a good grip on the connector to pull the out. I learned how to use a new power source that supplies a voltage to the scintillators. The scintillators were connected to the computer which was used to count the number of particles that pass through each scintillator. It was also used to count the number of coincidences that occur between two scintillators. The test trials were 20 second long and 120 seconds long.

Another experiment was conducted, this time comparing the coincidences with the voltages that were supplied to the scintillators. We started at 5.0V and went up to 6V in increments of .2V. The results were recorded and graphed (displayed on the right). Series 1 represents one scintillator, series 2 represents the second scintillator and series 3 represents the coincidences between the two scintillators. As the voltage increased so did the rate of coincidences.

March 29, 2007

Today we collected data from 3 scintillators. They were stacked on top of each other and connected to a new device that gathered data and sent it to a computer program to display the information. The scintillators on the top and bottom are 1 and 2 respectively. The device counted the particles through each scintillator and kept track of the coincidences between the first and the thirds scintillator. The program compared the coincidences between 1 and 2 with the count of scintillator 3. The trials were done for 120 second intervals. The voltage was increased in increments of .2V starting at 5.0V and stopping at 6.0V. The Faction(%) value (I think that is wrong) is a result of dividing the coincidence of all three by the coincidence of 1 and 2. A graph of Factions(%) vs. Voltage was plotted to show the efficiency of this method of counting.






April 10, 2007
Light vs. Dark

This chart is the data collected from the experiment that was done to see if light has an effect on cosmic rays. Trials were done with the lights on and off. Cosmic Chris was laid flat and put to stand up. Laying flat the counter had a higher count that standing up but there were no significant difference in the count when the lights were on from when they were off. Since there was not much of a difference in the count from when it was in the dark or light there was no grounds on which to further conduct the experiment. The next choice was to test materials. Some options for material were testing the different roofings of the Physics building which included tin and concrete. Another idea was also to get a count of cosmic rays on the different levels of the building. To go about this Cosmic Chris, a portable scintillator with a counter, is going to be transported around the physics building. The idea is to station Cosmic Chris on the roof, as a control, under the different concrete levels of the building going from D level to the ground floor. There will be three trials each three minutes long. Since the count is higher when Cosmic Chris is laying flat this will be the case during this experiment. My hypothesis is that the more materials the cosmic rays will have to pass through the less the count. I think this is because the particles have to go through more material.

April 12, 2007
Cosmic Chris is the only portable scintillator so we could not break off into groups to take data faster. We also could not gain acess to the roof so the highest elevation and consequently the littlest amount of aterial for the cosmic rays to travel through ws the roof protecting D-level of the physics building.

April 17, 2007
Since Cosmic Chris was out of commission we broke into two group. The group consisting of Virginia and Priya did an experiment to determine which direction cosmic rays corme from. Below is a table of their results.

To view or read more abour the experiment click on their names above.

Jessica and I did an experiment to determine the effect of placing two scintillator counting coincidences at different vertical distances relative to each other.

Wise Final Report