PHYSICS TRIP TO THE USA

On Thursday 10^th February 2011, during reserve days and the spring half term, a group of 22 senior sixth form students and teachers from CLS and CLSG met at Heathrow airport to visit the three main particle accelerators in the USA. This was an ambitious alternative to the annual CERN trip which started in 1990’s, and one which the Physics
department had been trying to realise for a decade or more.

The itinerary was full to say the least with our first port of call being the National Physics Laboratory in Brookhaven
on Long Island NYC.

The BA flight was on time, the only curved ball being one student who brought his brother’s passport which resulted
in a maternal dash across London and a public berating on platform 2!  Inevitably we were slowed down through US
Customs who were puzzled by the Billy Connolly accent from what appeared to them to be a potential terrorist, but Dr Khand took it in his stride. The transfer was relatively smooth and the accommodation at the Carlton Arms Hotel,
in Gramercy, lived up to its reputation of being a place where Tate Modern meets the Rocky Horror show, as the pictures below bear witness to. The reaction from the students was mostly ‘cool place’ although one or two felt
they might not sleep in a red room full of erotic art.

In spite of a confident driver taking one of the shuttle buses to the wrong site on Long island, we were very well hosted at Brookhaven with intensive tours of their magnet factory, where some of the most advanced superconducting magnets in the world were being made, their particle detectors, the astronomical telescope they were building and testing for Chile, as well as an awesome tour of their synchrotron experimental area (see below) by a university contemporary of our illustrious Head of Science. It was very interesting to note how research and development of fast detection systems for the accelerators was now being adapted for Home Security to allow moving vehicles and personnel to be scanned at speed for any potential terrorist material-animal vegetable or mineral! Having survived three days in NYC sightseeing and shopping without losing anyone, we moved on to Chicago to Fermilab, some 50 miles west of the city.

The flight was uneventful although we were concerned that we were entering a region which had just experienced
40cm of snow in 12 hours only five days before we arrived. Surprisingly the transfer was seamless and the efficiency with which the local authority had cleared roads was impressive by our standards. By declaring a snow clearing day, in which all transport other than snow moving vehicles were banned and everyone focused on clearing sidewalks and main routes, the City was fully functioning.  The hotel staff were perfect hosts and students quickly took advantage of the indoor pool, en suite facilities and local restaurants where the portions were enormous and relatively cheap.

The atmosphere at Fermilab was tense but again the visitor centre rose to the challenge to give our student s a high
level interactive tour and the guides were very impressed with the quality and in-depth questioning that the tour precipitated. After having a lecture and a question and answer session with one of their top physicists, who was their spokesman in Washington and had the gravitas of Morgan Freeman, we soon discovered that the tension in the facility was precipitated by the outcome of its fate in the national budget reforms and it turned out to be bad news the following day-they had mothballed the Tevatron in favour of CERN based research for the immediate future. The students experienced great architecture as well as fantastic physics (see group photograph) and even hands on time with analysis of large scale cloud chambers detecting cosmic rays. One such recently redundant commercial particle detector on a much bigger scale, called a drift
chamber, is shown in the gallery.

Although the weather had been sunny for the three days at Fermilab it was fairly cold so expectations for warmer weather in California were running high. Consequently it was disappointing to touchdown in the rain, which lasted for much of the three days we were in San Francisco. As an adjunct to the flights with BA and American Airlines, which
were on time and fairly comfortable, we were disappointed the Chicago-San Francisco leg of the journey provided no hot meal (although the hotel did give us a packed breakfast) but were equally surprised that AA quickly replaced two
damaged cases on the spot with new ones literally in minutes of the complaint! The accommodation in Paulo Alto was similar to Chicago but more like a motel than a hotel, but we were within walking distance of the student haunts around the campus in Stanford which made it very convenient. With two hired minibuses we were able to combine the tours of Stanford with some of the high tech industrial companies of Silicon Valley, such as Intel . We also fitted in two half-day trips to San Francisco itself to sightsee, shop and eat; which were well received by the students and staff alike.

In spite of seeing some of the best applied physics available in the US at Fermilab and Brookhaven we were still wowed by the scale of the Stanford lineac (below) and the  astrophysics simulations which were viewed in 3D on an enormous screen showing the formation of black holes, supernova etc. It brought the whole concept to life and
previously cynical students complaining that were being conducted around by a post doc astronomer and not a particle physicist, left the auditorium rather in awe, I sensed.

I suppose from an organizational point of view the trip was uneventful which meant it went to plan and the behavior of
the students, particularly their timekeeping, communication without mobiles but mostly their interest in what we visited, was simply impressive. A big thank you to CLSG staff, the schools and the John Carpenter Club for their joint support
in this joint venture which we hope to repeat in the future.   

RFD