SciDi: Physics – Parsing Particles
Music; Ambience: static sound from detector
MK: “We are an hour into our beam time and we are now looking at fragments. And you can just hear what’s going on.”
JM: Welcome to Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries, a glimpse of the world of science from the inside. Micha Kilburn is a graduate student of physics, working at Michigan State University’s National Superconducting Cyclotron Lab. Well, physicists use Cyclotrons to move particles at extreme speeds, they’re learning about a particle’s properties by observing what happens to it as it whizzes around an enclosed track and smashes into other atomic nuclei. But what exactly is a particle?
MK: “A lot times I throw around the word particle. And that can be confusing because different physicists use the term particle to refer to whatever it is they study. So, a biophysicist may talk about particles when they’re talking about molecules. Something like water that has two or more different elements in it. An atomic physicist is going to be talking about atoms. A nuclear physicist like myself, whenever I say particle, I’m usually referring to the nucleus. That’s the atom without the electrons. It’s just the protons and the neutrons in the middle.”
MK: “That static that you hear really isn’t static. That’s particle counts on our detector, so that we know that particles are getting through. We know that our detector’s working. We can actually hear the particles hitting it, per se.”
JM: The particles Micha studies give new meaning to the word tiny.
MK: “How small is the atomic nucleus? If you think about the entire solar system, that’s really big. Think about how small you are compared to the whole solar system. That’s how small the nucleus is compared to you.”
JM: We’ll hear more about Micha Kilburn and her work at the cyclotron in future programs. Please visit our website, pulseplanet.com. Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries are made possible by the National Science Foundation.