Name: Patrick Montalto
Hometown: Long Island
School: Rocky Point High School
Grade: Entering 11th

Workshop Journal

June 25th, 2007

Day 1

Today I arrived at MARIACHI, not sure of what to expect. After filling out an entry survey, there were multiple lectures and presentations given, by such people as Helio Takai and Michael Marx. We learned about the possible effects of cosmic rays, how they were discovered and when, and other aspects of the project. At the end of the first half of the day, we were left with many questions to ask, all of which we will attempt to answer this week.

We were also shown Cosmic Chris, a traveling scintillator created by Tara Newman of Hauppauge High School. Chris demonstrates how many cosmic rays the body absorbs per minute (around 500!).

After lunch, we formed several different groups under supervision of teachers and scientists. I was chosen to be in Dr. Spahn's group, the GRID group. There was a brief overview of the GRID and its capabilities, and information given on how to apply for a GRID secure certificate. The certificate is used as a secure login to access the GRID network.

As of right now, most scintillators are offline, the exception being Deer Park. Even so, Deer Park is not actively collecting data. There are even certain scintillators that have not been actively reported on since last year, such as the Hauppauge location. Currently, we are attempting to get a majority of the scintillators online to get data collection rolling, especially before Wednesday to show our progress to the public.

June 26th, 2007

Day 2: First Half

In the morning Helio and Richard Gearns answered questions that were posed yesterday. The question about the GRID Certificates however, was held for tomorrow for John Hover.

After the Q&A Session, we were split into groups of three. Then, Helio jokingly gave a presentation about why Physics is better than Biology. Then, we were taught how to use Marratech video conferencing. Gearns assisted me in logging in to the Mariachi server and connecting the USB camera.

Nuclear Structure Tour

At around 11:15, Richard Lefferts took my group to the Van de Graaff Generator and explained it's use, along with other things in the department. He discussed the particle acceleration process and how the Van De Graaff generator uses the ladder belt. Lefferts also talked about the origin of the Nuclear Structure Laboratory and its creation in the late 60's. Lefferts stated that the majority of the research being done is about the atom as a whole, rather than the components that make up the atom, such as the neutrons or electrons. Lefferts explained how atoms are seperated into neutral, positive, and negative ions. He stated that the neutral ions caused problems by leaving residue in the machine. The ions then later get involved in a series of other procedures carried out in the lab and by the Van De Graaff generator.

Nuclear Structure Tour Gallery

Machinery in the NSL

Power source

Lefferts explaining the copper module

The ionizing machine

Day 2: Second Half

After lunch, we arrived back to rotate our groups. Our group went to Zejie's station, and we immediately began experimenting with programs such as WiNRADiO and MATLAB.

WiNRADiO is an application used to receive radio signals on computers. We fine-tuned the receiver to 880 KHz and were able to get a weak reception of the CBS radio station.

We then were taught how to use MATLAB, a numerical computing language program that allows matrix manipulation and plotting of algorithms, functions, GUI creation, and interaction with other programs. After only a few minutes, we were all able to create plots and our own WAV files.

Then the day began to wind down, and Helio answered some more questions before departure. Tomorrow is the "Ribbon Cutting Ceremony" and the Mexican Fiesta BBQ. Looking forward to it! :]

June 27th, 2007

Day 3: First Half

In the morning, Helio and Marx conducted a Q&A session. Helio talked about the possible superhero powers of Cosmic Chris, and later mentioned a contest in which students would be able to add another member to Chris' family. Helio also talked about how to generate the cosmic ray shower visualization, by calculating averages of particles and distributions, and letting the computer "roll the dice." This process would be carried out by the Monte Carlo Simulation Method.

Marx then mentioned the Carbon-14 dating being done in the NSL with Rich Lefferts and others. More about this can be seen below.

MARIACHI Live!

After the Q&A session, we were free to visit the multiple stations set up at the workshop. The first station I went to was the Mariachi Live! station with Dr. Spahn. A main component of the Mariachi project is to create a live map which shows the status of live stations. While at the station, he showed us the Mariachi Live! system and the Google Maps system. He compared the two, concluding that the Mariachi Live!, while having capabilities of dynamic status and event updates, has many technical flaws. The Mariachi Live! system is difficult to edit, and lacks zooming capability. The background image is a static .GIF. However, the Google Maps system optimizes satellite technology which allows easy navigation.

Currently, the plans of the Mariachi Live! team and Dr. Spahn is to integrate both systems together. This would allow the user to not only zoom in, but see live status updates on the scintillators located across Long Island, visit a specific status page of that scintillator, and also compare activity across locations.

Plans to integrate the systems will most likely be carried out this summer, and as of today, the Mariachi Live! system is fully operational, as is the Google Maps system.

Cloud Chamber

The clould chamber is a fish tank model which demonstrates the activity of cosmic rays visually. The large particles seen are protons, whereas the smaller particles are muons and similar small particles.

Cyber-Infrastructure For Control & Carbon 14 Dating

At this station, students were able to manipulate controls of machinery and fine-tune settings from a remote laptop. On global scale, this will be used with the Carbon-14 dating. Users around the world will be able to remotely connect to the Van de Graaff generator and tune settings.

At the set-up users were able to control the fan, a voltmeter, and tune frequency. The SCI TEAMS Concept:

-AMS Carbon Dating
-Access Van de Graaff from remote locations
-Prepare Van de Graaff in NSL at Stony Brook University

Users were also able to manipulate magnets on a laptop simulation. This was an example of work being done with Carbon-14 dating. Students who received a perfect voltage of 25 uA successfully dated the sample.

Scintillators & Oscilloscope

At the scintillators station, students were able to witness scintillators in action. The oscilloscope monitored noise, while the coincidence monitor marked the number of times all three scintillators registered the same particles. Next week, fellow student Michael Lopez and myself will assist Dr. Spahn in setting up such a scintillator site at the Brookhaven Nation Laboratoy located in Upton, NY.

At the front of the room was the coincidence board, monitoring four scintillators.

Mariachi Radio

At the Mariachi Radio Station, we learned about the purpose of mariachi radio. The general objective of the radio is being able to detect and classify events based on measured radio signals. However, the ultimate objective is to be able to detect and identify signals due to the Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays.

Patrick using the Carbon-14 Simulator	The needle moved as students fine-tuned the controls.	The same for this one, except it is located in the VdG room.	The Coincidence Board
Teachers using the Marratech Video Conference	The Marratech Video Conference Projection	A Plastic Component	Students using the Cyber-Infrastructure Controls
The set-up controlled by the Labtop

The Ribbon Cutting Ceremony and BBQ

After we visited the stations, we had a special Ribbon-cutting ceremony. Many important officials spoke of the importance of MARIACHI and wished us luck with the project. Michael Marx even added that "Good ideas are like snowballs", as soon as its put in motion it gathers great people and ideas along the way. It was a very powerful ceremony that celebrated not only the opening of the NSL department, but the birth of both the Carbon-14 dating laboratory and MARIACHI as a stationed project.

Our Guests Today	Michael Marx Opening the Ceremony	President Kenny	McGrath
Sam Aronson, Director of BNL	Steve of SBU	Our Special guest from Washington	Local Assemblyman
Assemblyman Fitzpatrick	The official Ribbon Cutting

After the ribbon cutting ceremony, there was a Mexican Fiesta BBQ. The food was great, and there was even an actual Mariachi band! It was a great experience overall.

During lunch, Dr. Spahn, Mike Lopez, and I were interviewed by a local newspaper columnist. She asked us about Mariachi, it's importance, our expectations, and the future progress and hopes. I am very excited to see us in the paper! :]

The Mariachi band!

The food available at lunch

Students relaxing and eating

Teachers enjoying the food

Day 3: Second Half

Learning about the GRID

Once lunch was finished, we returned back to work. There, John Hover taught us about GRID systems and answered questions about the GRID.

The GRID is a system of uploading, downloading, and collaboratively using a secured network to access and analyze large amounts of data in an asymmetrically encrypted network which utilizes x509 certificates. There was also talk of giving certain students access to the GRID.

After John's explanation, we returned to our groups formed the first day. There, Dr. Spahn, colleague Isaac Degani and myself discussed the possibilities of the GRID system and MARIACHI. Our proposed ideas were:

• Tools for students to analyze large amounts of data on the grid.
• Tools to extract subsets of data.
• Getting access to Scintillator data.
• Securely work on Collaborative projects.
• Implementing subgroups for increased security.
• Using accounting capabilities to show the communal aspect of MARIACHI.
• Making data more accessible.
• Slicing apart data and computing standard calculations.
• Page for more detailed representation of all active stations.
• Adding additional data streams, including weather, UV, and cloud cover data.
• Matching together data streams to observe correlations or effects.

After updating our group wiki page, we were able to watch a show put on by Helio and a cooler of dry ice.

Helio blew soap bubbles into the cooler, where the bubbles would float, suspended in air. It was extremely interesting and fun to watch. Mike and I want to try it at home one day for fun.

Overall, day 3 was an amazing experience. I experienced hands on activities, enjoyed a great party, was able participate in a great ribbon-cutting ceremony, learn about the GRID, and overall, have a great time with Science. I am looking forward to continuing my work with Mariachi for a long time.

June 28th, 2007

Day 4: First Half

In the morning, Helio held another Q&A session. He talked about Meteor Burst Communication. He said that MBC is a method in bouncing off radio waves off of meteor ionization to redirect the signal to a far away location, such as New York to Florida.

After the Q&A session, Astronomer Mike Inglis of SCCC gave an extremely interesting presentation on Black Holes, The Sun, Red Giants, White Dwarfs, and Planetary Nebulae.

After discussing the characteristics of each, he talked about a hypothetical situation in sending a human (poor Helio) into a black hole. He mentioned the time lapse effect and what he would experience, and what an observer would see. Basically, observers would witness Helio stuck on the event horizon (surface) of the Black Hole for all eternity. Helio would witness about 15 billion years or so of history until he would be sucked into the Singularity (center) of the hole.

This is purely theoretical, however, and outside causes such as blue-shifted moonlight would radiate Helio with gamma rays, eventually vaporizing him.

Black Hole Notes

• Fact: No black hole has been found with 100% certainty
• Black holes take forever to form
• There are fully formed black holes
• Our Sun will explode to a Red Giant in approximately 6 billion years
• Will reach out to Saturn/Jupiter (but who cares about those planets anyway? ;])
• The Red Giant then becomes a white dwarf
• More mass = smaller size due to gravity
• Carbon made from Red Giants
• White dwarf is a dense, hot ball of carbon (diamond)
• There are no more reactions in the death of a star past Iron(Fe)
• Exploding Stars make Gold (Au)
• Big stars get pulled into oblivion from immense gravitational pull
• Singularity - has zero physical dimensions, a place where quantities which are used to measure the gravitational field become infinite. Such quantities include the curvature of space time or the density of matter.
• Black Hole is supposed to exist at center of every galaxy
• Cygnus X-1 could be a black hole
• Theories exist to create a special type of matter immune to gravity, however, it is merely a theory. No such matter exists yet, or may never exist.

The presentation overall was great, and gave a great overview to a mysterious topic in astronomy.

We then went outside to observe sunspots. Isaac, Mike, and I were all able to see the sunspot on the bottom right corner, however, clouds soon took the better of our observations, and we were forced to wait for cloud coverage to dwindle down.

Day 4: Second Half

After lunch with Isaac and Mike, we returned back to our larger groups. It was my groups turn to visit Dima's scintillator and Data Acquisition (DAQ) device station. There, he showed us the open scintillator and it's components. After showing us the basics of the oscilloscope, we learned How to make efficiency curves which graphed the efficiency of the coincidences. There, Adam and I began to experiment with the oscilloscope, the power-supply, the DAQ software, and excel. After several attempts, our graph was beginning to come together. However, we were getting short on time, and decided to save our data for another day.

We then reformed our group and Dima showed us a set-up of scintillators which rotated in a wooden cylinder device. There, we experimented with efficiency rates and the angle the scintillators were on.

We then decided to conduct a test with cosmic chris. We decided to compare the number of cosmic rays received by chris in the lab in comparison to the Van De Graaff Generator room with a 4 foot concrete ceiling. The results: Cosmic Chris detected only 150 less rays in 3 minutes in the NSL room than in the Mariachi workshop lab room. The concrete had little effect on the amount of rays received.

After our tests with cosmic chris, we decided to bring the workshop back together and meet to discuss about progress done in our topic groups. I mentioned our proposed ideas for GRID, and then Helio and Marx decided to propose the idea to setup student emails for access to the GRID. They said they will ask Dean about the emails soon.

We also discussed future workshops/projects. Currently, we are looking into what could be done throughout the summer. Students will most likely come back to the lab throughout the following months to collaborate on research, and then during the school year people will attempt to keep contact via cyber-infrastructure. Tonight I plan on adding possible research topics and other ideas I have. Currently, I am thinking of a way to create a more accurate scintillator that has more surface area and that would also tell us the location of the rays as they hit. I will add more on this later.

We then discussed how to go about creating a concept into a research project. First, pose a question, then, think about how to answer that question. Then, think about how to come about creating the devices/methods needed to generate that answer. What practicall can we do?" is a great question to start with. Knowing the basics, and what Mariachi needs, and how you will contribute. For example, one goal of Mariachi is to create a radar technique to monitor cosmic rays, however, a problem with that is that cosmic ray radar is too open to outside interference.

June 29th, 2007

Day 5: Final Day

The final workshop day began similarly to any other day, just somewhat later. We took the same entry survey given to us when we first came, which for some reason seems like an eternity ago. This time I felt much more comfortable, for when I first came to the workshop, I had minimal knowledge in the field. I was able to understand the basic concepts based on what I was taught in Chemistry Honors this year.

This summer, college students Matt Captaine and Matt Lucia are working with Dr. Marx and Dima here at Stony Brook. Today, they gave a presentation about the data they collected and analyzed using 2 fold, 4 fold, and 5 fold methods. They created multiple sets of graphs that compared these methods. They concluded that the amount of shift of each graph may correlate to shower density.

Helio then went over the Mariachi research ideas students and teachers submitted. There are many great topics to look into.

Other than that, the day was very quiet. We had a long lunch break, followed by a presentation by Tom Madigan.

Isaac and I then gave a presentation about features we would like to be added to the Grid, and uses of the Grid for Mariachi. After that, Isaac, Mike, and I went to talk to John Hover and Dima Vavilov about the Grid, setting up scintillators, and using DAQ.

The day was then over, and the workshop ended with Helio's speech. There were no famous last words...just famous bad jokes.

Before I left, Mike and I talked to Dr. Spahn and Dr. Marx about more work to be done over the summer at the lab. Both Mike and myself are incredibly excited to begin our research projects that we hope will evolve into something we can enter into a competition such as Siemens.

This concludes my Mariachi Workshop Journal. It was a great week overall. I learned a great deal about Mariachi, cosmic rays, and just physics in general. I am looking forward to summer research and more active involvement throughout my future.

From now on, Michael and I are keeping a Lab Notebook to organize our thoughts, data, schedules, and other things. Visit it if you want to see what we're up to.

And finally, I have to again thank Dr. Spahn for giving me this opportunity. My selection for the workshop is much appreciated, and I am glad to have someone with his experience guiding Michael and I through the research field.

~Patrick Montalto

Research Topics

Patrick takes an interest in a multitude of interesting research topics, such as the ones below.

Future DVDs

Currently, the largest capacity public storage discs are Blu-ray and HDDVD. However, there are many new DVDs being created in labs. Some of these proposed discs can hold up to 50 terabytes of data! Such new discs include the HVD, PCD and PH-DVD. These discs have multiple layers that are read by different lasers to store a max capacity of info on a single side. The HVD, for example, is a multi-layer disc that is read by both a red and green laser that each decipher data differently.

Mars Direct

Mars Direct is a proposal for a low-cast mission to Mars utilizing current rocket technology. The plan was written by Robert Zubrin and David
Baker in 1990. It was later expanded upon by Zubrin’s 1996 book The Case for Mars. Zubrin is the head of the Mars Society and is devoted to its colonization. Zubrin's overall objective is to warm Mars by releasing greenhouse gases, which would create a water supply and eventually transform Mars to a planet with conditions such as Earth.

Fuel Cell

At Brookhaven National Laboratory and other numerous labs across the globe, there is research being done to create an energy efficient fuel-cell. Currently, BNL is undergoing a large study to research the usage of hydrogen in a cell. Ever since Patrick's involvement in the Envirothon and Earthstock club, he has become intrigued to this field. The possibilities of hydrogen look extremely promising, and he hopes to one day possibly play a role in determining the most cost-efficient hydrogen fuel-cell.

Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia is a neurological condition in which two or more senses are coupled together and react simultaneously. There are many forms of synaesthesia, such as grapheme to color synaesthesia, in which letters and/or numbers are perceived as inherently colored. There also exists forms of synaesthesia where people believe that things such as days of the week or letters have personalities. For example, one may believe that Tuesday is a kinder day than Wednesday, or that green is a gentle color that can be trusted. This is a personification form of synaesthesia is extremely difficult to understand.

Currently, work with synaesthesia has began to pick-up. The direct causes of synaesthesia, along with a better understanding, are hoping to be discovered and researched.