Listing in the Open Seas

1. Here's a rundown of what I'm doing at the cyclotron these days.

• Designing clamp things to fit around one inch diameter acrylic light pipes and hold photomultiplier tubes
• Tooling around on the lathe, trying my hardest not to break anything (including myself)
• Making clamps out of rigid, tooling rubber (I got the really strong stuff, baby) for the purpose of holding thin, fragile objects (plastic scintillator with a bundle of optical fibers) that need to be optically cemented (clear glue!) together.
• Searching the planet for germanium microfoils that are appropriate for use as a target in a nuclear beam experiment

2. I have to do a research paper for a class I'm taking. The paper is on experimental evidence for asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). That's a lot to swallow right there. Protons and neutrons and other hadrons are made up of quarks (carrying "color charge") which interact with each other by exchanging a boson called a gluon. In this way, as a theory, QCD is completely analogous with quantum electrodynamics (QED) in the sense that particles with electric charge interact with each other via a field of photons. The difference is in how the strength of the coupling between particles varies with distance. The strength of electric charge dies off as you get further away, it is inversely proportional to the distance. Whereas the strength of the color charge only gets stronger as you try to separate quarks. This leads to confinement, which is the principle that quarks cannot be found to exist unbounded by another quark or group of quarks. In fact, when you pull quarks apart, new quarks appear out of the field of gluons and bind themselves to the pulled apart quarks to form new hadrons, which are seen in particle physics experiments as jets. Asymptotic freedom comes hand in hand with the idea of confinement. In the bound state, the quarks are free to move about as they damn well please because the strength of their interaction is so weak.

3. I really enjoyed watching the World Baseball Classic this year. The US performance was pretty disappointing, but seeing how fans in other cultures make a celebration out of attending each game is very interesting. The Classic is definitely a great teaser for a summer full of MLB action. Too bad the next one won't be until 2013.