My Life and Times
NEW FRONTIERS
Opportunities
Teaching Physics has given me opportunities to become involved with the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. At the Perimeter Institute's EinsteinPlus 2008, eighty teachers from around the world were invited to interact among one another on the topic of teaching Physics (especially Relativity and Quantum Mechanics) to teens.
We were housed at the Wilfrid Laurier University and visited PI and the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing. I had the privilege of 4 straight hours of chatting with likely one of the next Nobel Laureates talking Quantum Gravity and other Epistemologies.
When Professor Stephen Hawking visited PI, I was invited to a reception where the Stephen Hawking Centre was dedicated. I also volunteered its Gala Opening, where over 5 000 people from Waterloo Region learned about Gravity, Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Cryptography and Black Hole Cosmology.
SNOLAB
What’s up down in SNOLAB?
The article below appeared in OAPT's Quarterly Magazine
by Dennis Mercier (Peel District School Board and Perimeter Institute Teachers’ Network, November 2010)
“Sudbury is the perfect place to study snow!” asserted my aunt when I announced that I was coming to my hometown to present one of Perimeter Institute’s Search for Dark Matter workshops. Confused, I agreed. But then she asked why I would arrive in early November “because we don’t get much snow until December”. Smiling to myself, I patiently explained that SNOLAB (Sudbury Neutrino Observatory LABoratory) is getting a face lift and that this would be a wonderful opportunity to visit all the experiments while the apparatus was being renovated and expanded for further underground particle astronomy. “Oh!” said she…35 teachers from Northern Ontario attended the Perimeter Explorations Session hosted by Samantha Kuula, Education Outreach Officer for SNOLAB. Where better to attend such a workshop than the world’s deepest physics laboratory!
Thumbs up from 2 km underground!
Arriving at 0600h, we were hurried into underground mining gear after signing multiple waiver forms. We caught “the cage” in the active Vale-Inco Creighton mine to report for our 2.0 km descent into the Earth’s crust.
This rather jerky three minute experience was followed by a 1.5 km walk through the dimly lit drifts before arrival at the SNOLAB facility.
The first and most essential order of business was taking a water and
air shower and donning Tyvek clean wear. Having just walked for 20
minutes through one of the world’s dirtiest environments, we emerged
into one of its cleanest: the heart of SNOLAB.
Wearing a Tyvek suit inside SNOLAB
Since SNOLAB’s success (2001-2006) in empirically proving that solar
neutrinos come in three flavours (electron, muon and tau) that can
interchange spontaneously, the facility has undergone a huge
renovation. The original SNO project had ended, but the available space for research into the constituent make-up of dark matter has been more than tripled. Many new international experiments are being housed in the cavernous facility, shielded from cosmic rays by over two kilometres of Norite overburden.
Dr. Chris Jillings, a staff scientist at the facility, was our expert guide
for a tour of the experiments and the specialized environmental systems that support them. Since SNOLAB is a self-contained environment, it includes a bioregenerator as well as highly sophisticated water distillation, air purification and chilling systems.
Dr. Jillings’ personal quest is to answer three big questions:
· What is the universe made of?
· Why is there any normal matter in the universe at all?
· Are neutrinos their own antiparticles?
Only about 5% of the matter in the universe is visible matter while five
times that amount is dark (or non-baryonic) matter. Dr. Jillings showed
us, and described in detail, the dark matter experiments taking place
in SNOLAB. He himself is involved in DEAP-1: the Dark matter Experiment with Argon and Pulse-shape discrimination. The world famous PICASSO-1 experiment continues to run concurrently with DEAP-1, and there are plans for new, larger, experiments: DEAP3600 and miniCLEAN (for details visit their website).
Dr. Jillings, Dr. Fraser Duncan (associate director of operations) and
Dr. Christina Kraus of Laurentian University also took the time to walk
us through the former SNO (now called SNO+). Here a new scintillation
technique using an alkylbenzene compound has been designed to detect the poorly understood neutrinoless double beta decay. The goal is to determine whether neutrinos are Majorana particles (where the neutrino is its own anti-particle) or Dirac particles (with distinct particle and anti-particles). The neutrino has become a major suspect in the “Mystery of the Missing Matter”. Our understanding of the Standard Model suggests there ought to be a fine balance between matter and antimatter. Since observations show an asymmetry towards matter, accounting for only a small fraction of the mass in the universe, scientists have been studying the neutrino, which interacts only through the gravitational and weak forces. The dark matter experiments are designed to detect WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), a postulated exotic particle that would interact only through the gravitational force. The difficulty with these delicate experiments is that all the evidence is indirect and circumstantial. By a process of elimination of other known processes, the mystery will be eventually revealed.
Re-donning our mining gear, we walked back to the cage while grilling the about the nature of reality, the proofs for the Standard Model and the state of research physics in Canada.
Simulating Gravity in PI's Dark Matter Workshop
My workshop on Dark Matter and its Gravitational Evidence needed to be cut short, as we had not foreseen that our first prolonged underground excursion would lead to widespread exhaustion amongst the participants. Dr. Nigel Smith, the director of SNOLAB, summarized current global efforts in astroparticle physics, including his own research at the soon to be completed IceCube neutrino detector in Antarctica. Dr. Smith left us with the many major questions that researchers at SNOLAB are seeking to answer:
What is the physics beyond the Standard Model?
· What is the nature of the neutrino?
· What is the mass, and mixing parameters, of the neutrino?
· How do stars ‘burn’? How do stars explode?
· Where does the heat of the Earth come from?
· From where does Universe's matter-antimatter asymmetry come?
· How do fault slips develop?
· How does life evolve in extreme environments?
· How do the most extreme astronomical events evolve?
· What constitutes most of the mass of the Universe?
To learn more about the successes of SNOLAB and the recent additions like SNO+, watch Introduction to the Science of SNOLAB on YouTube.
To have a virtual experience of our tour, watch the 8-minute long Neutrinos Uncovered on YouTube.
Matière Noire
In May, 2014, I was invited to address Francophone Physics Teachers at the CAP 2014 (Canadian Association of Physicists) Congress on The Mystery of Dark Matter in French.
The most recent information suggests that Dark Matter is likely a neutralino or another exotic particle that will soon be discovered when CERN fires up the LHC is 2015. Recent research has found so-called Fermi Bubbles at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy (and in others as well). There are many indirect detections of high energy gamma and X-ray sources elated to the annihilation of Cold Dark Matter (CDM) which also helps the experimentalists to focus in on the energy needed to synthesize these mysterious non-atomic particle
We also visited SNOLAB again and witnessed the much larger scale experiments and heard from actual experimenters on the continued search for the elusive CDM particles.
Me with the DEAP-3600 detector and COUPP-4 apparatus
Very recent News: Link to PhysOrg August 2014
Officiating
Ice hockey and In-line hockey for 15 years...
Most of these are taken in Atlanta, GA.
I was often accused of being the "Smiling Ref"...
I don't know why! Just having Fun...
More To Come...
As the Adventures continue.
Perimeter Institute
I have since hosted Webinars with Dr. Damian Pope, collaborated on various video resources for Outreach and translated some materials into french to bolster Physics education in the francophone community. Learn more about the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics at this YouTube site which shows the original building. The Stephen Hawking Centre was opened in September 2011, where I volunteered to bring the subtleties of General Relativity and Theoretical Physics to the public. This involved explaining that, contrary to all the Physics that you learned, Gravity is NOT a Force, but simply the Warping of Spacetime due to our position in a Gravity Well caused by the Earth!
Check out the Alice and Bob in Wonderland Series (by clicking on the picture) that I had the pleasure on which to work...
What Keeps Us Stuck To The Earth?
My Life and Times © 2014 | PRIVACY POLICY