12/12/02

12/12/02

Your intrepid hero, flying kites at windchill : -45 C. It was really cold and somewhat more windy, and I almost killed my camcorder today.

I had a very busy day today. The usual: up at 4 to start uploading movies, pictures, and journals.
Then, I wrote an article about 2 of the scientists I've met for the Antarctic Sun, a weekly newspaper put out by the National Science Foundation at McMurdo. The Sun features a lot of excellent science writing, and they maintain a great web presence. Check it out at http://www.polar.org/antsun/Sun120802/index.html
We had a fire under the dome. No big deal, just a stuck washing machine belt got hot and rubbery and set of a detector. But think about it: fire here is very bad, for a number of reasons. I was very impressed to see how quickly the fire crew got on it. It only took seconds.
Then, off to the store, where I spent every last nickel of US money on shirts and postcards.

I've discussed talked a lot about AMANDA, the Antarctic Muon & Neutrino Detector Array I cam down here to work on. Well, except for the electronics in the lab, AMANDA is buried 2 km deep in the ice. So what's to see ? Nothing ! Here's a kite aerial photograph of one of the melt holes. I gave the physicists a bad time about this: "If people are ever going to get behind your project, you're going to have to give them something better to look at than this !"

Then Philipe & Julia & I hiked over to MAPO, and ran the last set of calibration tests on the AMANDA detector. Modern physics is as much about understanding your machine as it is about understanding the thing you're studying. This was a case in point. In order to detect neutrinos, you need to know precisely when each of the individual detectors in the array was "hit". So precisely, in fact, that if anything is changed in the detector, a wire, an amplifier, that may change or delay the signal time. So all those delays have to be measured and calibrated, so that when you get a real hit, you can know what it means. But calibrations, while crucial and neccessary, are rather tedious. I made a time-lapse movie of the process. It's funny, because not much happens.
Then, lunch.

	Bai is working on an experiment to detect horizontal muons. Muons are secondary particles created when energetic particles enter the earth's atmosphere. Most are vertical, so the horizontal rate is quite low. The SPASE array uses scintillator detectors in brightly colored orange boxes. A pair of these is to the lower left, and another pair is inside at the far end of the pit. The chance of a muon passing through all 4 scintillators is quite low, so this experiment will probably run until just before Bai leaves the Pole on the 23rd of December.
	An aerial view of the SPASE (South Pole Air Shower Experiment) I've helped Bai with. The little blue building holds all the electronics. It's crowded with 2 people in it. In front, with the flags around it, is the pit with the ice tank muon detector that's given us such fits.
	A kite aerial photograph of the Martin A Pomerantz Observatory building. The South Pole is one of the world's great observatories. It's remote, and really cold, but the air is cleaner and dryer than just about anywhere else on Earth. The AMANDA lab is in the 2nd floor of this building

Then, kite flying. I only had to use one kite, for the first time here. The wind picked up and it was really cold, and I almost killed my camcorder. A tape got jammed, and I had to reset the processor.
Then, dinner.
Then Robert, one of the winterovers, & I tried to fly his stunt kites at the pole. Great photo opp. No wind.
It was a bust.

Tomorrow, I'll stream live audio & video into my physics classes at Roosevelt using Apple Computer's QuickTime Streaming Server software. This was a bear to figure out, but we've tested it & think it will work (I waved to my wife in Seattle on Sunday). It should be fun: each webcast, I'll feature a different scientist talking about their work.
To make period one, which starts at 7:45 am in Seattle, I'll need to get moving at 3 am. No problem, it's always daytime
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My article for the Sun:

Back in Seattle, I told my high school students, " I'm going down to the South Pole to work on AMANDA". That got a lot of laughs. Note for physicists: when choosing acronyms for future experiments, don't use people's first names.
My name is Eric Muhs, and I came down to the ice for the first time this year as part of the TEA (Teachers Experiencing Antarctica and the Arctic) program run by the National Science Foundation. I teach physics at Roosevelt High School in Seattle, and came all the way to the South Pole to "work on AMANDA".
AMANDA is the acronym for Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array. My new friend, Belgian physicist and AMANDA collaborator Philipe Herquet, wonders why physics is so fascinated with acronyms: "These acronyms don't save any time or space. Whenever you're writing, you end having to explain the acronym in a long parentheses. What's the point?" Maybe he's right, but choosing the right acronym seems to be crucial to any modern experiment. The next big thing after AMANDA will be called ICECUBE. To my mind, that's a much better acronym, with more "street credibility" and toughness. However, like AMANDA, it creates problems when you try to find either project's websites. Imagine the hits you get from searching on AMANDA. Or ICECUBE.
AMANDA is a big international astrophysics project. The goal: "catch" neutrinos from energetic events out in the universe. The technique: melt 2-kilometer deep holes in the South Pole ice. Then lower strings of detectors down the holes, and collect the very faint light that results from the one-in-a-trillion neutrino which makes secondary particles as it passes through the detector array. Neutrinos are very difficult to detect, as they rarely interact with ordinary matter. Trillions have passed through you since you began reading this article.
But AMANDA has found high-energy neutrino events, and demonstrated how to build a deep ice detector. ICECUBE is "Son of AMANDA": same principles, refined techniques based on the lessons garnered from AMANDA, and will be much larger: a cubic kilometer of instrumented ice. ICECUBE construction is projected to begin in 2004.
This summer, I met a lot of the US collaborators, including AMANDA PI, Bob Morse, ICECUBE PI Frances Halzen and Jim Madsen, my personal mentor and neutrino guide, all from the University of Wisconsin. Great folks all, and very committed to communicating the goals and science of the project to the greater world. That's why they brought me along.
But coming down to the ice, I had the fortunate misfortune of getting stuck at McMurdo for nearly 5 days with two European AMANDA collaborators, waiting for a ride to the South Pole.
Philipe Herquet is a physicist from the Universite de Mons-Hainaut in Belgium. He's got a son who's a theoretical physicist (that means he'll probably never get his hands dirty and cold on a real experiment down on the ice), and a wife who was not at all eager to send him off for his first trip to the pole. It's been fun getting to know him. Folks seem to get jaded on Antarctica pretty quickly: "Oh yeah, sundogs. Oh yeah, Scott's Hut. Whatever. I've been here before." So it's been good to be with someone who, like me, is taking it all in for the first time.
Philipe also claims that french fries are really Belgian, and that Belgian waffles are not served as a breakfast food. And the tri-color Belgian flag at the South Pole is not really in use anymore, as there are two distinct flags in use in the two distinct language regions in Belgium. There's some work to be done here at the pole, to get straight on all things Belgian. Plus he & I both need some espresso.
Christian Spiering, a German physicist from the Desy-Zeuthen Institute in Berlin, has been south a number of times. So we were lucky to have him along, because he knew how to rescue our bags from the cargo of the delayed plane. Thanks to him, we all got showers and clean clothes, and everyone at McMurdo seemed friendlier to us after that.
What do you do at McMurdo for 5 days? Well, I got to watch the physicists fret a little. They're on a tight schedule at the pole, with crucial calibration work to do before the next winter season begins. And now they're behind.
We checked out Hut Point, and Observation Hill, and Crary Lab, and flew kites, and stumbled into a party at the coffeehouse for Alaskans, and I got to explain Thanksgiving and football while we ate turkey on Turkey Day.
Using my laptop, we recorded Russian and French versions of a 5-minute movie about AMANDA. And Philipe & Christian talked about the physics experiments they'd been involved with over the years.
These are two very experienced experimental physicists. Their paths overlapped many times in Russia and Switzerland, and during the Cold War, and both had ridiculous and funny run-ins with the secret police. Their combined experience in neutrino physics is quite astonishing, and it was a rare privilege to sit in the galley out on McMurdo's sea ice runway during a snowstorm flight delay. I got a 2-hour presentation on the current state of neutrino experiments worldwide.
2 professors, 1 student (me), weak coffee: a nice morning

Those are my footsteps. Am I making progress?

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