User:Dlklein
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Me
It's hard to start these things. Do I say hi? I mean I'm not actually talking to anyone. I'm sitting at my desk, by myself. People are put into psychiatric institutions for this kind of stuff (talking to inanimate objects). Do I just go right in to my biography? I mean do you (not you, computer. you whoever is reading this) really want to know all that? Well we'll make a deal. I'll just tell you everything I'm comfortable broadcasting on the old WWW and if you feel I've shared too much drop me a line and I'll be happy to alter, edit or change the following:
Heyyyyyyyyy it's been a long time. Wait, have we met? I think I would remember you. Oh well, let me re-introduce myself then. Deb Klein at your service (as long as it's not too inconvenient). Who am I, you ask? Its hard to say. I can tell you what I am, but what exactly does 'who are you' mean? Does it mean 'what do you do with your days' or 'what is your nationality, gender, religion' or 'what are your hobbies'? Or does it just generally encompass all of that? Hmm, its a puzzlement. Well I could always go the safe route and answer all your probing questions:
Name: Deb Klein
Funny story about my name (well it's funny if you're not me who as to live the joke): My full given name is Devora Leah Klein. I never really liked the name, being too long and flowery. Plus I didn't actually chose it. So at about 14 I shed my old title and was dubbed by my friend 'Deb'. I like it, it's short and to the point. It works for me. And I would appreciate if you would call me by that and only that. Its really a lucky thing that I am now called Deb, and I'll tell you why. My brother just got married (just is my way of saying 3/21/06) to some girl whose name is also Devora Leah. It was all fine and dandy when she had her own unique last name, but now she is Devora Leah Klein. Its actually quite bizarre to see their names written together cuz to me it just looks like its me and my brother. Sorry for that tangent, I promise we're getting back to stats now.
Age: 19
Birthday: December 22 (First day of winter HUZZAH!)
Favorite anti-biotic cream: Neosporin (hey any of you guys over at Pfizer, I want to get paid for being a sponsor)
Growth rate of hair: about .5 inches a month
Longest time without a cheeseburger: 19 years and counting
Length of gum wrapper chain: approximately 8-9 feet (so far!)
Duration of this random list: done now
well thats all folks. Good night and thats the way the cookie crumbles.
Summer 2006 Research
Week 1-5 (June 5 - July 7)
I am working on this project with Zina Sanchez This week, after a long and arduous orientation consisting of a bunch of beaurocratic nonsense, I finally got to start something. Wednesday morning Zina and I got together with Nate Emerson, a grad student at SBU who will be teaching us how to work the computer programs as well as helping us understand the ins and outs of the scintillators. We all went to the lab and met up with Helio Takai and Michael Marx who gave us a little chat about what our basic goal is for the summer. We then went to Marx's office where he gave us a more thorough introduction to cosmic rays and what the ultimate goal of the MARIACHI program is.
After this little talk, we finally got our first assignment. We were to plateau the [counters]. What we wanted to test was how efficiently any given counter was working. Basically there are two controlling variables. First, this is controlled by the input voltage, which determines how strong a signal will be created from the photons entering the phototube. Second, this is controlled by the 'threshold voltage' which is the voltage level set on the output side of the experiment which determines how strong a signal triggers an actual count. By adjusting these two variables the optimum efficiency for a particular counter can be found. Now it is worthy to note that the settings for each counter may be different, which is ok.
There is a systematic way in which we test these counters for efficiency. The way we tell if a counter is efficient is we put the test counter between two other counters. This is arranged as follows:
The efficiency of a counter is a ratio of how many counts there are on all three scintillators simultaneously to how many counts there are on the outer two scintillators simultaneously. The theory is that the simultaneous counts of the outer two are probably actual cosmic rays, and if the middle scintillator did not get measure all those cosmic rays then it is not working most efficiently. We don't expect the scintillators to all work perfectly, but most of them should work at about 90-95% efficiency.
As I mentioned before, we can adjust two different variables on these scintillators. Here is how we started this process:
First we arranged three scintillators as shown above, with counter #3 being the test scintillator. Note, we plugged the scintillators into the trigger box in the correct order (counters 1, 2, 3). Now the way the trigger box is set up is that it delivers a constant 7 Volts to all the scintillators plugged in. When these scintillators were first being tested, they were found to have varying performances with varying voltage, with the efficiency of the scintillator increasing up to about 7 Volts, at which point the scintillators would just shut down. Since 7 Volts was the upper limit of the scintillator performance, the way the trigger box is set up so that it delivers 7 Volts to all scintillators, but that voltage can be varied for each specific scintillator by adding a resistor in series with the power supply, which will drop the voltage on the scintillator by Ohm's Law of V = IR, or the voltage drop across the resistance is equal to the current flowing multiplied by the value of the resistor. By looking at this equation we can see that the voltage is directly proportional to the resistance, so Nate had the genius idea of plateauing the scintillator's efficiency with respect to the resistance added on to the power supply, rather than the actual voltage, and this is what we did.
To set up the trigger box we had to pick resistors to use for our non-test scintillators (#1 and #2). Nate, who I believe already plateaued these specific scintillators, gave us some estimated values. Even though these were estimates, ideally if the resistance value is within a certain range the efficiency shouldn't change by much. This is because the efficiency 'plateaus', or levels out over a range of resistances, so by using a resistance in the middle of the plateau, even if the resistor's value changes slightly over time, the scintillators should still work well. So anyway, we used Nate's suggested resistor values. We then had to program the computer chip inside the trigger box, which needs to be reprogrammed every time you remove the usb cable or turn off the power on the trigger box, or the computer. The way to program the chip is:
On the desktop of the computer is a folder: Labview DAQ, in this folder is a program called shortcut to something. Open this program and run it (white arrow in top toolbar). When it is running browse for the file mariachi.rbf in the top box, and use the only selection in the middle box. then when it says in the bottom box that the Status is OK, click 'quit' and look on the actual chip for a green light. When the light is on, it means the chip is programmed.
Now here are the instructions for the program that computes the efficiency of the scintillator being plateaued:
In the folder Labview DAQ is another folder DAQ Logger, look for the program Mariachi_plateau.vi. Before running this program you can change the amount of time over which to test the efficiency. First we used a 60 second interval, but we then changed this to 120 seconds to reduce the statistical error.
A note about statistical error: whenever anything is being counted the error in a count N is the square root of N. Therefore, to decrease the percentage error (error divided by value) we increased the time interval to increase N.
A further discussion of error and uncertainty can be found [here].
Here is the plateauing results we've collected over the past few weeks: Data.
This was our somewhat failed attempt at creating a cosmic ray shower simulation, still needs to be worked upon, but for now this is what we have.
Week 7 (July 17-21)
Well this would have to be the most exciting week I've had so far. This week I was not at Brookhaven, I went to Syracuse. Why? you might ask. Well I'll tell you. Every year the [AAPT] (American Association of Physics Teachers) holds their annual conference for two weeks at a university in the country. This year it was at Syracuse University. What they do is break up their conference into two sections. The first week is only for the subgroup [PTRA] (Physics Teaching Resource Agents) a.k.a. high school Physics teachers. Now about a month and a half ago I received an email from the director of WISE (Women in Science and Engineering), a support program that I am a member of. She was forwarding a request from a lady in the Admissions office at SUNY Stony Brook who was looking for physics students to accompany her to Syracuse. The purpose of this visit was not clear in the message but I responded and said I would like to go, since it sounded like fun and I got permission from Michael Marx to take off work. Well when I did get in touch with this lady, Jeanne, she said we would be going to promote Stony Brook's program in physics as well as other sciences to these high school teachers, hoping that this will recruit their students. And after the fashion of our army, the idea was to win their hearts by providing them with twice daily snacks, something that they never had at their meetings. So while they would eat their Stony Brook sponsored food we would spread our propaganda and speak to the teachers about our experience. By we I mean myself and a freshman Chemistry student named Laura. Now she was going along because she was interested in Chemistry and Physics education. So now I will tell you about the trip.
Monday
Today I woke up fairly early so I could gather the last bit of stuff I needed to pack and get over to the admissions office where I would meet up with Jeanne and Laura at 9. We then brought over our stuff to the state vehicle we were driving up to Syracuse. Basically the coolest part of this trip was everthing was paid for. So we took the Port Jef-Bridgeport ferry over to Connecticut and then drove up a lovely back-country road to I84, took that to Rt. 17 or as the sign say 'future I86'. We took this to I81 and took that all the way to Syracuse. The trip went by really quickly because we were listening to the Beach Boys and misc. oldies which was fun. We got to our hotel without much mishap and put our stuff down. We went to a grocery store to get some food and then to a restaurant for dinner. So that was a fairly uneventful evening, but just wait.
Tuesday
Today we had to get up really early. I woke up at 5:45 am because Jeanne thought we had to get over to campus by 7:15 or so. Well we did get there around that time but we had some issues since we had no idea where the physics building was or where we could park, but we found it eventually. We started looking around for someone to tell us where in the physics building we should be going and finally found this lady who said really we didn't have to be there until 8 so that sucked. But we found the break room where the snacks would be set up as well as our propaganda. We then brought all the boxes of pamphlets and papers inside and went down to what they call 'homeroom'. Homeroom is the morning meeting of all the teachers in the lecture hall where the people in charge say all the announcements they have and that kind of stuff. They started out by singing physics-related songs such as 'The Atoms Family'. I was thorougly amused. Then Jeanne was introduced and said some stuff about why we were here and we got up and waved. Once homeroom was dismissed some teachers came up to us on their way to their various workshops and said hi. We then went up to set up the propaganda, and waited for snack time to arrive. During snack time I met a lot of the teachers there and spoke to them about my experience in Stony Brook, the WISE program and the research I am currently involved in. They all asked me questions about what I want to do with my life which was disconcerting because I can't decide what I want for dinner, let alone my life. But I got through it and after snack time I went to check out one of the workshops. It was very pedagogically oriented and I got bored pretty easily but then I stopped by another room where a bunch of the teachers were setting up the famous Mentos and Diet Coke [experiment]. I watched for a bit but then I had to leave to go to lunch. After lunch I was really tired, having woken up really early so I just chilled out for a bit and read a book. I spoke to more teachers at afternoon snack and some told me about their experiences as teachers. This one woman from Texas mentioned that some high schools in her area are also involved in cosmic ray detection, which I thought was interesting. Some of the teachers wanted to know what courses I was taking in school so we schmoozed a bit. At about 4:30 or so we went over to the dorms where the teachers were staying since the big event of the evening was their annual Physics Bazaar (a.k.a Physics Bizarre). This is an event where the teachers bring nifty toys that have some physics involved or they bring some equipment and sell it for cheap. We helped set up the table and spoke to one of the people in charge of organizing for AAPT about what things they do. She said some really cool stuff like how they organize the US representation at the International Physics [Olympiad] where the top 5 physics students from the US go compete with other students around the world. This year it was in Singapore. Anyway this woman (I think her name is Maria Elena) was saying how of the 5 members, 4 received gold medals and the other a silver. She was also telling us horror stories about how some of these super-smart physics students get shunned by their high school teachers. That was an interesting conversation. We then went to dinner in the cafeteria and mingled and chatted with the teachers there as well. After dinner we went back to the bizarre bazaar. At first I was skeptical about how I would enjoy it but man, they had some cool stuff for really cheap. I'll list here:
'I Love Physics' keychain - $3.00
Spinning egg and board (its cooler than it sounds) - $2.00
Rocket Balloon (blow them up and when released they make a rocket sound deflating) - 3 for $1.00
Center of Mass ball - $2.00
'Physics Rules!' temporary tattoo - $1.00
toy car that never stops (cooler than it sounds) - $5.00
Misc. Einstein posters - $5.00 each
Magic ring and chain (super cool) - $4.00
Build your own car kit - $3.00
Well you get the picture, it was AWESOME! I had so much fun. Well anyway I had $18.00 in cash and I bought lots of stuff, in fact I got some stuff on IOUs. Well we took our purchases back to the hotel and hung out for a bit before I passed out from exhaustion.
Wednesday
I got to sleep late today (6:30). We went over to the homeroom where after some singing and announcements Laura and I were called up seperately to introduce ourselves in the front of the room and tell our stories in brief. When I got up front it was kinda scary cuz the lecture hall is huge. So I get up there and say 'Wow this is a lot different from this perspective' and that got a big laugh. I told them briefly about myself and mentioned that for any further questions I would be at snack time. I ended my little talk with a triumphant 'Thank you Syracuse I'll be here all week' which of course was totally false, but I forgot to say 'I'll be here all afternoon'. A bunch of teachers came up to me after my little chat because they felt like they knew me better today. They mentioned that my comment about how different the lecture hall looked was funny. I can't remember all the conversations I had with them but they were a varied and interesting bunch. After homeroom I went to this workshop where they were discussing amusement park physics. They showed some cool videos of amusement park rides and the physics involved. At snack time I mingled with the teachers and was pretty chatty. After snack I followed some teachers outside where they were performing the mentos experiment. They were doing some scientific stuff relating to the famous video clip. They had different groups investigating different variables. For instance they were using various sodas. All were diet soda though, the reason for which is that diet soda is too sticky. They tested diet Fresca, diet Dr. Pepper and diet Pepsi. They also tested out mint vs. flavored mentos and cold vs. room temperature vs. hot soda and diameter sized hole in the cap of the bottle and number of mentos. That was a fun display, and I made sure not to get soaked. You can read about it [here]. Anyway, I think by the time this was over it was lunch time, but before lunch all the teachers had their picture taken. That was fun because they were all wearing that year's bright orange t-shirts. On the way to lunch this guy from SU, Sam, took us to see the stadium. Syracuse has this huge covered dome but it is covered in this fabricy stuff. The whole huge dome is kept pressurized, which you cant tell when entering in from the revolving doors because they are airtightly sealed so no air leaks out, but when using the handicap doors a huge gale erupts from the door. It is so friggin cool. I used the doors to leave and you literally feel yourself being shoved out of the stadium by the wind. Here is the dome
Anyway, after lunch I went down the basement where one of the workshops was dying safety goggles. The lady in charge kindly let me partake and I dyed mine in streaks of purple, blue and red. That was pretty durn cool too. After this I stopped in on this presentation of something or another. Basically what they were doing was a practice experiment for high school students to test the properties of both visible and invisible light. So there were a bunch of workstations. Each workstation had a source of light and a pile of materials. We had to see which materials had an effect on the light. So for instance there was a flashlight, a heat lamp, am radio, fm radio, ultraviolet lightbulb and a remote control. So I joined one of the groups and we went around to the different workstations testing the properties of the different light sources. It was interesting. At afternoon snack time I mingled some more and then I kind of hung out and helped Jeanne pack up the remaining propaganda and get it back in the van. We went to dinner and had some discussions with teachers we sat with. Then the fun started. So on the agenda was a showing of a lecture on dvd by I can't remember their names but they made the Frames of Reference physics movie in the 60's (?). I really can't remember much. The dvd that was showing was not this movie, it was a speech by them about the making of this movie. I was kind of tired so I ducked out of this event early and headed over to the most awesome building on campus: the School of Music.
Anyway, I went to the School of Music because there was a scheduled trombone concert at 8 pm. Basically it was a trombone trio and they were the instructors of this trombone summer workshop, and pretty much everyone in the audience was their students. But it was cool anyway. Some of the music I really like, some I thought too discordant, but all in all it was a fun evening. I got to chat with a couple of the teachers who came and sat by me. One of them organized the Physics Bazaar and I mentioned how much I like it. Well that was a long night and by the time I got back to the hotel I was thoroughly wiped out.
Thursday
Today was travel day again, but we stopped by the homeroom again to say goodbye. After waving goodbye and stopping to ask Sam for directions to the highway, we were off. We drove and drove and drove (it was longer this time, I dunno why). I slept a bit in the car, and tried to get some sun on the ferry, but it was semi-drizzly. Anyway I got back and went to show off my toys to my suitemates. Thats all folks.
Week 8 (July 24-28)
Well I suppose I will give an update. The only problem is my memory is going, going, gone. I can't remember what Zina and I did and when, but for more details you can check her page. We have been working on coming up with a graph that shows the distance/area dependence of the coincidence rates, but that takes time and is still ongoing. In one of the links above you can find some of our preliminary results, but the files are being updated regularly. The main issue is we want to leave the scintillators running long enough so we get at least 1000 five fold coincidence counts, which for some of the larger arrays can take days. In the down times we have been working on updating Cosmic [Chris]. Zina and I dismantled him and then with the help of Joe and Rich, we worked on fitting his scintillators into a gun case.
Oh so my job this week was to fit a battery into the display case for Cosmic Chris. So after freaking out about doing this without much direct instruction (thanks for your help Rich) I finally started puzzling about all that needed to be done. first of all since the circuit was going to be changed I figured better to remove the existing power wires from the display board and redo everything. So after some issues de-soldering the connections I tried to attach new wires. No success. I tried all afternoon on Monday but it seemed that one of the holes was too small for the wire to fit through, so I let Rich attempt it. I thought it was just a matter of someone more skilled being able to do it but apparently the whole thing was messed up from being soldered too many times. Well Tuesday sometime Rich and I found a switch for the battery and after he drilled the hole for it I installed and soldered wires to it. I can't remember when Rich finally got the power wires attached to the board but eventually he did. Then Wednesday morning I finally put it all together. Got some velcro to keep the battery stable and soldered all the wires together. Then the moment of truth happened and sure enough, when I turned the battery on the display board lit up. Then another moment of truth came when Nate and I first connected the signal cables to the box, but no worries, it's all good. HUZZAH!!!
Thursday Dan and I (Oscar helped some too) began the final stages of putting Cosmic Chris together. All it took was some power tools (yes they finally let me control a deadly device, I can feel the trust building) and a lot of elbow and forearm grease. Basically Rich gave us a bag with a bunch of nuts and washers and about a meter length of bolt which he said we had to saw in pieces. The first thing Dan and I realized was that the gun case is wider than Chris's previous body, so the existing bolts were too short to hold the front and back plates on. Secondly we realized that the gun case is significantly heavier than the previous body, and therefore the three bolts were not going to be enough to keep the plates attached. Our solution was to drill some more holes in the front and back plates and saw up the long bolt into enough pieces to fit all our new holes. The trouble was there were two existing holes that we wanted to keep. The other issues is that we had to make sure our new holes were far enough apart to fit the gun case, but not too far that it would be wobbly. The problem with the two existing holes was that when we tried to line up the front and back plates to drill the new holes, the old holes were way off from each other. So eventually we drilled some stuff and then went to see if what we did would work. There were some stressful moments and a lot of work hand sawing apart that bolt, but eventually we had enough bolts to fasten the two plates in four places. We also worked out how to fasten the display case to the face plate. This was tricky because the display box was really heavy with the battery that I installed inside. What Rich said to do was to bolt it to the face plate using two bolts on either side for support. Easy solution no? NO! The problem was that since I had already soldered all the equipment inside the box, drilling new holes for the bolts was more than tricky. Plus we had to work around an existing hole in the face plate that was there for the cable leads. There were a couple of really difficult moments here. First was drilling the holes through the metal display case without damaging the wires or battery. But once that was done, we had to somehow align the display box with the face plate and then drill the hole in the plate. All said and done, our holes are not exactly aligned, but close enough. Eventually we got it all bolted in place. Then the assembly. We had to work to get all the bolts that fastened the plates together into the correct places, but we got it done. And then we tried to stand him up. And the gun case started to slide out from the plates. Uh oh. Well the solution to that was two holes on either side of each face plate, some holes drilled in to the edges of the hinges of the gun case, and some blue plastic zip ties. That pretty well fastened the gun case to the plates, so now I think it is stable. All that is left to do (and I have no clue when this is happening) is to attach some sort of kick stand so he can stand up, and, just to please Nate, a handle.
And scene.
Week 9 (July 31 - August 4)
Curtains rise on this week revealing Helio, triumphantly returned from a trip to Hawaii sporting some Hawaiian shirt. With the return of our fearless el capitan came new and exciting work to do. Does my sarcasm fully translate to the typed word? Get back to me on that. Basically what needed to be done was via some approximate simulations, determine if our experimental data fit some theory or not. After reading through the papers Helio gave me many times and still being a bit confused about exactly what to do next, Nate finally came up with this program we should write to calculate something. The goal of this I am not sure, but I can say what the program is attempting to do. Basically the user inputs the area of an array of scintillators (at this point it is assumed to be square). The user also inputs the density of particles on the ground as a result of an initial particle of particlar energy. Then the computer computes the number of particles that should fall within the given area. Then comes the fun part. The program cycles through a variable number of showers of that energy, and then goes through each particle, assigns and randomly generated position to it within that area, and then tests to see if it falls within the detectors. After going through each particle in one shower, it then tests to see if all the detectors have 'seen' at least one particle. If this is the case, then we consider that this array has detected this shower. From what I understand so far, this is the first step to figuring out everything we want to figure out. Ever.
Fun stuff.
Week 10 (August 7-11)
Nate and I finally got the program running, and I configured it so I could have it run a bunch of times until I entered a value to make it stop, which was convenient because we decided to do a graph of efficiency versus density which kinda looks intersting. Basically the graph plateaus. Anyway then Nate added in the factor that each scintillator works at less than 100% efficiency. Right now I'm working on getting the spreadsheets with our data as neat as possible so I can post them here.
Tuesday Zina and I finally wrote up a rough draft of an abstract. Then Wednesday morning I went back and did a rough revision and sent it off to Zina and Michael Marx. Wednesday was the poster presentation and this luncheon for the WISE program and women scientists at BNL to work out how they can collaborate more in the future. It was kind of boring but ok. Then I worked some more on the spreadsheets. Thursday Nate and I went back and did a major revision of the abstract and I think by now it is pretty good. Oh the guys got a stop work order because of some violations of something or other so technically we all can work on computers but are not allowed to touch equipment. Its pretty fun just watching everyone trying to come up with stuff to do.
The day as come. Today is my final day here. Oh please don't cry, it'll be ok. Anyway I suppose now would be a good time to summarize what I've done this summer. Oh wait, that is what this whole page is about. Well then I'll just put my results here:
This the coincidence data we've been compiling, at last: Coincidences Also included in the above file is a graph generated by a program Nate and I wrote that shows the efficiency of detection based on the particle density.
This is a little graph Nate generated that shows the difference between a square and rectangle array: It's hip to be square
And now that my stay here is nearly through I think I should thank all that made this stay a bit more bearable (yes this would be my Academy Awards speech too):
I'd like to thank primarily my co-worker Zina without whom these weeks would have dragged by slowly like a b horror movie.
I'd like to thank Zina's parents for purchasing such comfortable couches, thus enabling me to get my daily nap.
Oh and also Nate for putting up with my annoying questions with such maturity only possible by being the oldest child.
Right, and of course the people responsible for me being here: Dr. Marx and Helio who have challenged me to come up with answers to their questions and results for their projects, I am sorry I haven't provided all of you with more.
Also Rich, how could I forget your helpful comments like 'I don't know, figure it out'. To that I say this: I hope I have.
And since rarely are all of you here on the same day, you all get lumped in to one category: Dan, Oscar, Alicia: this is for you
Even though I only met you a few weeks ago, you have provided me with hours of entertainment, from reading tarot cards, analyzing crazy dreams, being the perfect target for cruel jokes (I should apologize Oscar, but that would be cheesy), and of course angry german kids.
You've been a great bunch, at least in my opinion.
