First Week

I've finished my first week as an intern at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, TN. I'm working with Dr. J. J. Das and Dr. Kennon Carter in the Physics division at the Hollifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility (HRIBF) on developing a Helium-Jet Ion source. I'll go into the science behind it a bit later. First, a bit of background information.

I graduated from Georgia Tech in December of 2009 with my bachelor's in Physics. I applied to the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) program, an internship program funded by the Department of Energy (DOE), and was selected for a 4 month internship. There were other people selected as well, though we're all in separate divisions. I ended up rooming with one of them in a nice apartment about 15 minutes from ORNL, Jeff G., and that's been working out wonderfully. All in all, I'm very happy up here. Going to work is a pleasure and something I look forward to and I've learned so much about nuclear physics and ion sources this week.

This first week has mainly been devoted to reading papers on ion sources and basic nuclear physics. Being able to read professionally written papers from Real Scientists (TM) and learn from them is a huge ego boos; it makes me feel as if I actually learned something while I was an undergraduate. Not only am I learning a lot, but I'm enjoying it immensely! I have never found a specific field in physics that I was this excited about. Nuclear physics is @#$%ing awesome! I spent two semesters in Quantum I and Quantum II learning about atomic physics, but I never studied anything about the nucleus of the atom. Learning about how the nucleus works is only one part of our field. All the different types of radiation, how they work, and what data collected about these different types implies is also packaged into this. In this first week, because of this new found fascination, I've been reconsidering what to do with my future.

I'm now considering going back to my original plans of getting a Ph. D. in physics. My biggest reason for changing those plans was that I was both turned off by my undergraduate research experience as well as being unable to find a field of physics that I was excited about. Graduate school for physics is all about specialization and I wasn't able to find something I enjoyed enough to specialize in. Unfortunately, it's too late for me to get into graduate school for physics in 2010. I still haven't taken the Physics GRE as well as getting a bunch of other documents in check.

It's not all bad news, though! Dr. Das has stated several times that he would like to keep me on this project after my internship. If we can figure out a way to make that happen I'm going to stay up here for a while and continue the project. Getting the ion source working is only the first step... after that we could be exploring nuclei that no other human being has ever observed or studied before. How can I say no to that? I can't! If I can stay on here for at least a year I'll have more time to learn as well as getting very good references for my grad school application. I'm looking at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (UTK) since they have such close ties to ORNL. All of that is a long way off, but I'm trying to get everything in line as soon as I can.

My next few posts will go more into the science of what exactly I'm doing up here. I'll try to make it accessible as possible, but my physics friends would never forgive me if I didn't wank just a little bit using as much jargon as possible, lol.