IOP Groups
Rachel's summer placement blog
WIPG Committee member Rachel Ashley is spending three months this summer working at TRIUMF in Vancouver and she has promised to keep us posted regarding her experiences over there.
12th October 2009
First I’ll fill you in on my last few weeks. After working on SHARC for so long there wasn’t as much time as hoped to work on SPICE, what I’d initially been hired to work on! SPICE is an in-beam spectrometer for TIGRESS (the germanium detector array) which uses cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) crystals and a magnetic lens, but is really in its initial stages at the moment. For my last few weeks I worked on testing the CZT crystals for the detector which were being used instead of silicon for many reasons including their functionality at room temperature and high Z allowing thinner detectors. The plan was to then develop a cooling system based on the Peltier effect, and I started creating the wiring for this, but unfortunately we ran out of time.
So that was my summer! Regrettably in less blog posts than intended, purely because I was too busy working! I can fully recommend doing a work placement to any physics student, regardless of what field you’re in or even if you don’t know what field you want to go into. The things you learn and the people you meet are a huge compliment to any physics degree. My placement allowed me to use skills I’d learnt as part of my degree and combine knowledge gained from my course with new experimental techniques. On top of that I was privileged to meet some great people along the way. The people I worked with really made me feel part of the team and helped me whenever I needed it; if ever my supervisor wasn’t around I could go to any one of them to ask questions.
Thanks to all that I’m starting my fourth year at Liverpool with a renewed vigour, a feeling of inspiration and much more confidence in myself. I’m not the top of the class and sometimes when I don’t understand something I’m hard on myself even after years of being told, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question.” Well, I don’t necessarily agree with that but I know that I work hard and if I don’t understand a problem or theory, it just hasn’t been explained in the right way for me! I can understand anything I put my mind to with the right support! It seems such a simple thing but I don’t think many people really appreciate, or have, that knowledge of themselves and it’s something one really has to discover, and not be told.
Finally I need to thank the University of Liverpool Physic Department for sending me out there, to use the cliché line: without them, none of this would have been possible!'
1 September 2009
Please don’t make me come home! They said I wouldn’t want to return to England and I scoffed. “How could it be so good that I’d consider taking a year out from my degree, having to take courses and graduate with people I barely know? So good that I’d consider putting off my lifelong desire of taking a year (or two!) out travelling? But it is that good. When I first moved to Liverpool I had this feeling, this “I’m in the right place” feeling that starts in your belly and warms you to your toes. I love it here and I have to live here again at some point in my life.
To the serious stuff: the experiment is coming to an end now and despite lots of problems with the beam (mainly to do with the thing that controls the frequency of the beam meaning it kept falling out of phase and so could not be accelerated correctly), it has yielded some good results. At the moment we’re in the process of calibrating and analysing the data.
I’m kind of glad the experiment’s coming to an end because I’m currently living in Surrey and have had to stay at TRIUMF House (TRIUMF’s very nice hotel) and with various people in order to be in as much as possible and work evening shifts. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been a lot of fun, I’ve learnt a lot and I’ve certainly got to know the team well (especially the “Newly-weds”) but it’s really tiring! It’s because of this (and because I want to explore the city more) that I’ve decided to move into the city for my last month and I signed to sub-let a place in Kits (really close to TRIUMF and on the major bus route into town) today!
In parallel to helping with the experiment I decided to do a talk for the student symposium last week. This is a day of talks given by the students here based on the work they’ve been doing at TRIUMF. The other students have been here significantly longer than me and all had plenty of their own research to talk about plus they’d known about the symposium before I even started work I think! Despite this, a week and a half before the symposium I decided to enter a talk because I figured it would be a good experience and would test my knowledge of SHARC. The talk I gave was simply titled “SHARC” and gave an overview to the reasons SHARC was created, what exactly it is and what we’re doing with it. I found out shortly before the symposium that it was not only to be given in front of our student peers but also a panel of judges who would decide whose talk was best with prizes for the winner and runners up. I’m afraid this is where I show my ignorance: when I was told that the first prize was to go to Banff and give the talk at a Nuclear Physics conference... I had no idea where or what Banff was! All I heard was: conference, in Canada somewhere which would be good but I’m sure I’ll get to go to lots of conferences in my career so I wasn’t overly bothered about winning it.
So it came to the big day, I was the second talk of the morning. I didn’t remember all the extra comments I wanted to add and so was 3 minutes under the allowed time but I think I answered all the questions I received well and all in all gave a good talk. The other talks were much more in depth as I’d assumed they would be and the standard overall was very high... so you can imagine my surprise a couple of hours later when I was sat in the canteen with the other students and the main judge came over, put his hand on my shoulder and said “Congratulations!”. I didn’t get it at first, I’d won! I then discovered Banff is an amazing ski resort and the conference is in February! When it sunk in the first thing I thought was “Do they know I’m from England?? Did they factor that in their budget?”
7 August 2009
When I wrote my first blog entry I was still in the initiation phase of working at TRIUMF, Canada’s leading physics lab; now I’ve been here almost a month and have definitely settled in!
Although I was employed to work on the SPICE project, I’ve actually been working on SHARC for the past few weeks. SHARC stands for Silicon Highly-segmented Array for Reactions and Coulex, which means it’s an array of 12 double sided silicon strip detectors which are segmented to give high resolution. They will be used to further understanding in areas of nuclear reactions research and Coulomb excitations (Coulex) research.
The array itself had to be delicately assembled, something I was very pleased to be deemed worthy to assist Dr. Christian Diget (pronounced Di-yert), the leader of the project, with. In the last couple of weeks collaborators from Surrey, York and Liverpool have arrived and everything’s been full throttle to finish all preparations before Friday afternoon when we “get beam”. Despite my official title of “minion” I feel a firm part of the team here and have also taken on the role of group photographer, I’m enjoying every minute!
Outside of the team I’ve made friends with the other “minions” (students) here, last weekend we hiked up Whistler (~23km) and went kayaking at Deep Cove. I’ve learnt how to play Volleyball (and have the bruises to prove it!) and am trying to teach the Canadian and American students how to speak correctly; “Say it with me: al-um-in-i-um”.
10 July 2009
'I knew Canada was big. I just didn’t realise how big. Canada is over 37 times bigger than England but with less than half the population of England. Even with crazy statistics like that I still didn’t get it, but the last couple of days feel like I’ve barely been out of the car (a rather large Ford pick-up) and I’m beginning to understand why Canadians are so nice and so happy. They can have their cake and eat it; they have space for big beautiful homes but without destroying the scenery because there’s still plenty of space for the forests and the mountains. They spend so long commuting (without being cramped like people who commute in London) that by the time they actually get face to face with another human being they are more than happy to talk.
I’m here till September working at TRIUMF in Vancouver, set to a backdrop of thick forest and blue skies I can barely imagine a nicer place to work. Perhaps I can find a placement in Bora Bora next time? I’m going to be working on a few projects that I’ll be able to describe more fully when I start properly. So far I’m working through all the safety training and meeting the team – who are of course all very nice and cheerful.'
^ To the top ^