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Local high-schoolers analyze real LHC data at Duke

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On March 18, 2013

In Faculty, Physics, Science Communication & Education, Visualization

By Ashley Yeager

Duke physicist Mark Kruse explains a few finer points of analyzing LHC data to two NCSSM students. Credit: Ashley Yeager, Duke.

Duke physicist Mark Kruse explains finer points of analyzing LHC data to two NCSSM students. Credit: Ashley Yeager, Duke.

Thin, blue lines spider across the computer screen. With a click on one, a solid blue peak on a bar graph pops up. A click on the other line makes a similar graph. Looking at them closely, two high-schoolers decide if they could be signatures of a particle called a Z-boson.

The girls — physics students from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM) — log their analysis of the lines and move on to another set. They aren’t getting too excited about their possible Z-boson discovery yet because they still have 48 other sets of lines, or events, to analyze.

Once they’ve worked through all the events, they’ll know if what they’ve seen could be due to a Z-boson decaying into pairs of electrons or muons.

“This exercise isn’t that much different than what scientists do to look for Higgs bosons,” said Duke physicist Mark Kruse, adding that the exercise is a good illustration of the particle-hunting process. “It shows you that you can’t just look at a single event and say ‘that’s a Higgs boson’.”

Kruse shared this insight with the two girls and a dozen other NCSSM high-schoolers during a Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Masterclass held at Duke on March 16. The European Particle Physics Outreach Group runs the masterclasses annually with help from university professors such as Kruse. This was the first time Duke hosted the program for local students.

During the day, they got an introduction to particle physics and research at the LHC and an overview of ATLAS, the experiment Kruse and his collaborators use to search for Higgs bosons and other particles. Then, after a tour of Duke’s Free Electron Laser facility and a pizza lunch, the high-schoolers got their hands on real LHC data.

NCSSM students work on LHC data to find hints of Z-bosons. Credit: Ashley Yeager, Duke

NCSSM students work on LHC data to find hints of Z-bosons. Credit: Ashley Yeager, Duke

They were looking mainly for events that showed possible remnants of a Z-boson. But a few Higgs-like candidates were thrown in too, which excited the students, Kruse and his two graduate students David Bjergaard and Kevin Finelli. The group may have even found a Higgs candidate in one of the first event analyses they looked at during the day.

But, as with all discoveries, they had to take a closer look at their analyses and share their work with others. The group closed the day with a videoconference with high-schoolers in Medellin, Colombia who also went through an LHC masterclass at the same time.

“This was an impressive group. They asked a lot of great questions, sparking some incredible discussion,” Kruse said. The questions — like, does anything make up a quark — are ones other audiences are perhaps too intimidated to ask because they might think it’s a silly question, he said. But it’s these questions that really get everyone thinking about the fundamentals of physics and how much scientists still don’t know, including if quarks can break down into anything smaller. This is in fact one of the many questions LHC scientists are trying to answer.

Based on the success of the class, he is now thinking of running it again for physics students from other area high schools and possibly adapting it for journalists and policymakers. The goal is to illustrate to a wider audience the “gradual, cumulative nature of discovery” at the LHC, he said.

CERN particle 'a' Higgs, but not 'the' Higgs yet

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On March 14, 2013

In Faculty, Field Research, Physics, Visualization

By Ashley Yeager

This artist's impression shows a proton-proton collision producing a pair of gamma rays, in yellow, in the ATLAS detector at LHC. Credit: CERN.

This artist’s impression shows a proton-proton collision producing a pair of gamma rays, in yellow, in the ATLAS detector at LHC. Credit: CERN.

Scientists say the particle they described in July 2012 is looking more like a Higgs boson. But they can’t yet say much more than that.

Speaking at the Moriond meeting in Italy, researchers using the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva explained their latest analyses show the new particle’s “spin” matches theorists’ predictions for that feature of the Higgs boson.

Physicists want to find a Higgs boson because it would give them clues to the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles. Finding one specific flavor of the particle would also complete the Standard Model of particle physics, a system that explains how the smallest particles and forces interact to run the universe.

“The updates show this particle is Standard Model-like, but my personal feeling is we can’t yet call it ‘the’ Standard-Model Higgs,” says Duke physicist Mark Kruse who works on one of the Higgs-hunting experiments at CERN. “For one, we believe the Standard Model is wrong.”

The model, he says, does not predict a candidate for dark matter, a form of mass that scientists can’t yet describe. And, he adds, even if the particle’s characteristics, such as spin, match those of the Standard-Model Higgs, scientists can’t yet rule out other theories that also contain Higgs particles with properties similar to the Standard-Model Higgs.

“All we can really say is that this particle is ‘a’ Higgs boson, but not necessarily ‘the’ Standard-Model Higgs,” Kruse says. “We have a lot more to understand and a lot of future research to acquire that understanding.”

Meat Glue — True to its Name

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On March 8, 2013

In Chemistry, Lecture, Physics, Science Communication & Education, Visualization

By Ashley Yeager

This is the third post in a four-part, monthly series that gives readers recipes to try in their kitchens and learn a little chemistry and physics along the way. Read the first post here and the second one here.

fish checkerboard

Students grab chunks of a fish “checkerboard” made from salmon and flounder cubes. Credit: Ashley Yeager, Duke.

Braided steak and checkerboard fish may sound exotic. But, freshmen in the Chemistry and Physics of Cooking had no fear fingering the meaty masterpieces into their mouths.

The students made this food art – one literally a braid of three steak strips and the other a combination of salmon and flounder cubes – using a molecule called transglutaminase, also known as meat glue.

In 2012, the media roasted meat glue’s reputation, branding it a dirty little secret meat vendors use to stick together cheap cuts of beef, lamb, chicken or fish and then sell as premium cuts.

“In this class, we’re not using the molecule to be dishonest. We’re using it to be creative,” said physical chemist Patrick Charbonneau, who leads the freshman seminar along with chef Justine de Valicourt and teaching fellows Mary Jane Simpson and Keely Glass.

During a lecture, Glass explained how meat glue — an enzyme that speeds chemical reactions — forms covalent bonds between some of the amino acids that make up the proteins in meat and meat substitutes. With just a sprinkle of the enzyme, which comes in a powder form, chefs can then weave together beef cuts, form game-piece patterns from fish or even bind beans, seeds and other ingredients into a veggie burger that doesn’t crumble after the first bite.

“Meat glue is like a lot of modern ingredients. It comes from industry, and you can use it to make industrial food,” like chicken nuggets, de Valicourt said. “But when you master it, you can use it in a very creative and delicious way.”

Chefs often use the fundamentals of chemistry and physics to shape other foods, such as chocolate. “We’re doing the same to shape meat,” Charbonneau said, explaining that the students used transglutaminase in lab to create beautiful, and delicious, combinations of meat far superior to chicken nuggets and other industrial food typically made with the enzyme.

To make your own meat masterpieces, try the following recipe:

Materials:

1 long sheet of plastic wrap OR a bowl
1 cutting board
1 knife
2 latex gloves for each person
1 mask for each person
1 meat grinder (optional)
1-3 gallon-sized Ziploc bags
1 scale

Ingredients:

1 portion fish, chicken, beef OR vegetarian protein (ie black beans and sunflower seeds)
10 g meat glue powder (available online here)

Instructions:

Gluing meat chucks together –

1. Choose meats
2. Place meat on plastic wrap
3. Choose meat pattern – braid or stack
4. Season meat with salt and pepper
5. Put on gloves and mask and measure 10 g of meat glue using the scale
6. Sprinkle meat glue on sides of meat you want to connect
7. Fold meat into desired pattern
8. Place meat in Ziploc bag
9. Refrigerate for 6 hours
10. Cook meat as you would any other time

Making meat patties –

1. Choose meats, grind in meat grinder, and mix in a bowl (Or, buy ground meat and mix)
2. Season meat with salt and pepper
3. Put on gloves and mask, then measure 10 g of meat glue using the scale
4. Add meat glue to meat and knead until fully mixed
5. Separate into two portions (or more for patties) and seal each in a Ziploc bag
6. Roll with rolling pin, if desired
7. Refrigerate for 6 hours
8. Cook meat as you would any other time

Activist targets inner child not 'target audience'

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On March 4, 2013

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Business/Economics, Climate/Global Change, Environment/Sustainability, Faculty, Lemurs, Science Communication & Education, Visualization

By Ashley Yeager

A baby albatross carcass full of plastic “food.” Credit: Chris Jordan.

When artist Chris Jordan works on a photograph or film, he doesn’t think about his audience. He said he thinks the phrase “target audience” is a disrespectful, manipulative business concept.

“I want to be as authentic as possible with my work,” Jordan said, explaining that each of his pieces instead taps into that “universality in us that we all carry, a deep appreciation for the abiding beauty of our world and the miracle of our own lives.”

An environmental activist as well as an artist, Jordan is challenging others to target that universality too as they convey messages about the issues that affect the planet.

Jordan spoke March 1 as part of a working group to discuss questions about how environmentalists, neuroscientists and artists can work together to better communicate about issues affecting the planet. The Nicholas School of the Environment and the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences sponsored the discussion.

Duke ecologist Nicole Heller moderated the discussion, opening it with the idea that scientists are frustrated with their inability to communicate with politicians and the public about the environment.

“In the ’70s, yucky or scary images might have worked, but now they don’t. That’s no longer appealing. We need different kinds of imagery to reach across people’s biases,” Heller said. She invited Jordan to speak because of his reputation for being able to move audiences from diverse backgrounds and education levels.

“Second graders are some of the most passionate and responsive to these issues,” Jordan said, adding that perhaps the best thing we can do is to appeal to an individual’s inner child – that curious spirit we have to understand how the world works.

One example of this approach is the film Jordan is working on to explore the mating dance of albatrosses on Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. He’s photographed dead baby albatrosses, whose stomachs are full of plastic trash their parents fed to them because they mistake the plastic for food. The work was to make people aware of the plastic vortex, or Great Pacific Garbage Patch, swirling beyond the horizon and therefore beyond our conscious concern.

Jordan decided to capture the wonder of the albatrosses as they mate, rather than just their rotting carcasses, hoping to feed his audiences — no matter their background — with life, rather than depress them with death.

“Like the albatross, we first-world humans find ourselves lacking the ability to discern anymore what is nourishing from what is toxic to our lives and our spirits. Choked to death on our waste, the mythical albatross calls upon us to recognize that our greatest challenge lies not out there, but in here,” Jordan writes on his Web site.

Diffusion a la Chocolate Lava Cake

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On February 21, 2013

In Chemistry, Faculty, Physics, Science Communication & Education, Students, Visualization

By Ashley Yeager

Note: This is the second post in a four-part, monthly series that will give readers recipes to try in their kitchen and learn a little chemistry and physics along the way. Read the first post here.

Making chocolate lava cakes demonstrates the diffusion of heat. Credit: Ashley Yeager, Duke.

Between bites of hot lava cake and vanilla ice cream, freshmen taking Chemistry and Physics of Cooking talk about diffusion. Their conversation isn’t so esoteric that an outsider wouldn’t understand.

Instead, it’s a simple chat about how long to cook a cake based on how heat moves.

Understanding diffusion is a way to make sense of cooking times, says chemistry and physics professor Patrick Charbonneau, who is leading the class along with chef Justine de Valicourt.

Diffusion of matter is how particles in a liquid, gas or solid intermingle and move from a region of higher concentration to one of lower concentration.

Heat diffusion describes how hot particles warm up cooler particles around them, which allows the inside of a dish to cook, even though only the outside is heated.

Before turning his students loose in a kitchen in Smith Warehouse to eat a product of this process, Charbonneau and his teaching fellows had the group work through the equations that describe diffusion.

“Solving the diffusion equations of heat gives you a first estimate of how long to bake a cake or cook a turkey,” Charbonneau says. The cooking time for lava cake is especially critical in order to get the outside it to bake, while the inside remains gooey, de Valicourt adds.

In class, the students calculated that to make a muffin-sized lava cake with ingredients at room temperature in an oven at 400°F (204°C) would take about 10 minutes. In the lab, they found that the calculation was fairly accurate, but for a more exact estimate of cooking time, they needed to factor in the temperature of melted chocolate chips in their recipe.

“Still, with the cooking time being not so mysterious, it’s one fewer thing left to chance,” Charbonneau says, adding, “then you can be more creative with the recipe in other ways.”

He and de Valicourt, who have partnered with the Alicia Foundation to offer the Chemistry and Physics of Cooking class, have provided the following recipe for experimenting with diffusion and hot lava cake.

Hot Lava Cake —

Ingredients:
60g (1/3 c) dark chocolate chips
60 g (1/2 stick) butter
60 g (1/4 c) sugar
3 eggs (or 2 egg and 45mL (3tbs) coconut milk)
30 g (1/4 c) flour
small pinch salt
Non-stick cooking spray

Materials:
1 bowl (bain-marie)*
4 ramekin dishes or 1 muffin tin
2 medium bowls
1 scale (if weighing ingredients)
1 sieve
1 cooking thermometer (optional)

* You can make a bain-marie by placing a bowl over a saucepan of simmering water.

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 400°F/204°C.
2. Melt chocolate and butter on bain-marie. Stir. Do not boil the water or the chocolate could burn.
3. Combine eggs and sugar (and coconut milk) in a medium bowl and whisk until bubbly.
4. Combine flour and salt in another bowl and pass it through the sieve.
5. With one person whisking and another pouring, slowly add the chocolate mixture to the egg mixture.
6. Add the flour and salt to the wet ingredients and whisk well.
7. Spray ramekins or muffin tin with non-stick cooking spray.
8. Fill the ramekins or muffin tin a little more than halfway full.
9. Place the ramekins or tin in the oven on the middle rack.
10. Bake until the cakes start growing. The interior of the lava cake should be around 158-176°F/70-80°C and the outside around 203-212°F/95-100°C – ie until the edges of the cake are set, but the center is still a liquid – about 7 to 10 minutes (less for smaller cakes).

Third Mahato Viz Contest, Deadline Oct. 21

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On October 3, 2012

In Engineering, Science Communication & Education, Visualization

2011 People's Choice "Cold Atom Cloud," by Yinghi Zhang - Duke Graduate Student in Physics

Nearly 5 years after the tragic death of engineering graduate student Abhijit Mahato, the Duke community will once again honor his memory with a photography and visualization contest.

Deadline for entries is October 21, 2012. Rules are here: http://mahato.pratt.duke.edu/contest

This year’s awards ceremony and exhibit of entries will be Nov. 7 at 5 p.m. in Schiciano Auditorium. The keynote speaker at this year’s event will be Kellar Autumn, professor and chair of biology at Lewis & Clark College, who led a research team that discovered the trick gecko feet use to stick to any surface without an adhesive.

The first two contests produced a spectacular collection of beautiful images from scientific research to exotic locations to mundane objects like lightbulbs and jelly glasses viewed in startling new ways.

 

Learn More: http://mahato.pratt.duke.edu/

Taking a 'DiVE' into Neutrinos

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On September 21, 2012

In Physics, Science Communication & Education, Visualization

Physicists can now analyze neutrino events, such as this one, in 3D. Courtesy: Berkeley Lab.

By Ashley Yeager

Using a virtual, 3D environment, scientists are getting their closest look yet at neutrinos’ interactions with matter.

Neutrinos are subatomic particles that “interact with matter only very rarely, maybe once in your body in your entire lifetime,” said Duke physicist Kate Scholberg during a Sept. 21 talk, which the Visualization Technology Group hosted.

Scholberg explained that to study neutrino interactions, scientists use large, underground detectors, which may only record one event per day. That might not seem significant. But, as Scholberg explained, scientists need to observe the events to determine how the universe developed with more matter than anti-matter, a phenomenon that allows life to exist.

Typically, Scholberg and her colleagues analyze neutrino interactions from their Japan-based detector Super-K in a two-dimensional computer program. Recently, however, Scholberg “stepped” into the Duke immersive Virtual Environment, or DiVE, a six-sided, cave-like, virtual-reality theater programed with data from Super-K.

Inside, Scholberg got her first look at neutrinos interactions in 3D. She was able to see a representation of Super-K and thousands of its light detectors. She could also see data from a recent neutrino event and was able to walk around the detector simulation and visualize the neutrino interaction from all sides. The software had even traced out the “sonic boom” of light, which looks like a circle in two-dimensions and a cone or ring in three-dimensions, given off after a neutrino event.

“This is what I’ve imagined happens a million times after an interaction,” Scholberg said, showing a video of her experience in the DiVE. “It’s entirely different seeing it in 3D,” she said, adding that the drawing of the cone shape of a Cherenkov ring has never been done in a neutrino event display before.

Benjamin Izatt a student at the University of California, Berkeley was the mastermind who developed the 3D neutrino simulation, called Super-KAVE. He designed it to help Duke physicists explain their neutrino research to the public.

But, Scholberg said, the tool may also help her and her collaborators at Super-K better understand complex neutrino interactions and sort out where the particles’ rings and cones overlap. She added that in future simulations, “we may also be able to see particles and interact with the particles, which would be not only fun, but helpful.”

A second crack at the nature of glass

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On August 13, 2012

In Computers/Technology, Faculty, Field Research, Mathematics, Physics, Visualization

By Ashley Yeager

Glassblowers shape molten silica before the glass transitions from liquid to a more solid structure. Credit: handblownglass.com.

Patrick Charbonneau and his collaborators have taken another crack at understanding the nature of glass. Their latest simulations show that a key assumption of theoretical chemists and physicists to explain the molecular structure of glass is wrong.

Glass forms when liquids are slowly compressed or super-cooled, but don’t crystallize the way cooled water turns to ice. The liquidy pre-cursors to glass, like molten silica, do become hard like a solid, but the atoms in the material don’t organize themselves into a perfect crystal pattern.

The result is a substance that is as hard as a solid but has the molecular arrangement of a liquid — a phenomenon that scientists can’t quite explain, yet.

Previous theories assumed that at the transition point between a liquid and glass, the material’s atoms become caged by each other in a “simple” Gaussian shape. This same shape describes the distribution of people’s height in the U.S. and is known as a bell-shaped curve.

But new simulations, described online Aug. 13 in PNAS, suggest this assumption is wrong. The simulations model the interactions of glass particles in multiple dimensions and show the shape of the particle cage is much more complex than a Gaussian distribution.

The discovery is a “paradigm shift in the sense that so many people have been having the same, wrong, conception for so long, and they should now revisit that basic assumption,” says Charbonneau, a theoretical chemist at Duke. “The assumption was actually constraining how they thought about the problem.”

Even with a new shine on the way scientists think about glass, it is not clear how close or far the theorists are from writing an accurate description of what happens at the liquid-glass transition. But “the path to get there seems clearer than it has been in a long time,” Charbonneau says.

The next step in the research is to understand the relationship between glassy states of matter and those that are jammed, like pieces of cereal wedged in a grain hopper. Charbonneau and collaborators are already at work about how to study the connections between the two forms of matter.

Citation:
“Dimensional study of the caging order parameter at the glass transition.” 2012. Charbonneau, P., et al. PNAS Early Edition. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1211825109

People, Embedded in a Network

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On April 30, 2012

In Behavior/Psychology, Computers/Technology, Visualization

Guest Post By Steve Hartsoe, Office of News & Communications

“While social network analysts 20 years ago struggled with networks of hundreds of nodes, we now routinely face networks of hundreds of thousands,” according to James Moody, a Duke sociology professor and director of the school’s Network Analysis Center.

James Moody analyzes networks.

Moody, who was studying social networks long before they became a movie title, says that the abundance of material now available has created new opportunities to test scientific models for cultural behavior. But that growth has also generated a need for new tools and investments in computational social science.

He was one of the featured speakers at an April 26 symposium in Chapel Hill called “Social Networks. Analysis: Opportunities and Realities.” The event also featured  speakers from Duke’s Social Science Research Institute, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Odom Institute for Social Science Research, and the iLab at North Carolina A&T State University.

A common thread was how to adapt to the abundance of information now available via the Web, and how to make the best use of high-tech tools for analyzing social networks.

Moody urged the audience to stay focused and consider the merits of working with smaller samples. He also told participants to think of social networks as simply “people embedded in a context.”

An image from one of Moody's earlier studies on social networks.

“There’s a lot of data out there, but a lot of that data doesn’t answer the question you want to answer, right?” Moody said. “So I think there’s a data-question mismatch in some cases.”

Moody also stressed the importance of using the right tools for analyzing social networks. “Don’t trade a good idea for a bad instrument,” he said. “Global networking tools can easily apply to a network of 20 or 30 nodes.”

Speaking remotely via an audio feed, John Haaga, deputy director at the National Institute on Aging, urged researchers seeking federal funding to follow a basic tenet for hitters in baseball: Start smaller “and then swing for the fences.”

More than one attendee in the rapid-fire, three-hour discussion likened it to being on the receiving end of a fire hose of information.

Molecule traps treasure like a kid with M&Ms

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On April 16, 2012

In Chemistry, Lecture, Visualization

By Ashley Yeager

A new guest molecule knocks out the captive one in a cavitand just before it snaps shut. Credit: Lubomir Sebo.

Kids know when they’re going to get a tasty treat like M&Ms. They hold out their hands, palm up, and the snap their fingers around the chocolaty treats like a venus fly trap around a fly.

About a decade ago, Julius Rebek of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and his collaborators created a molecule that could do the exact same thing, trapping other molecules in much the same way.

Rebek’s goals was to understand how molecules behave when confined to small spaces. To do this, the chemists created a molecule called a cavitand, which self-assembles through bonds of hydrogen atoms into hand-like structures.

During an April 11 chemistry seminar, Rebek described how the walls or “fingers” of a cavitand use strong hydrogen bonds to curl around and snare another molecule. As a result, prying the cavitand open is a lot like trying to take candy from the closed grip of a child. It can be done but it takes energy and a bit of coaxing.

Rebek said that the cavitands’ finger-based hydrogen bonds can rupture. In response, the molecule then acts like a kid who opens his hand to show his M&Ms to a sibling, tempting her to take some. The captive molecule in the cavitand is exposed, and another can come in and knock it out of place, like a sister throwing something into her brother’s hand to knock out M&Ms for herself. Both the hand and the cavitand clasp shut quickly, taking a new type of treasure into their clutches.

By designing cavitands and other self-assembling molecular traps, chemists have begun to explore the way acids bind when trapped, how to control nano-sized spaces and how to switch molecules in and out of these nanospaces. The discoveries, Rebek said, will help scientists understand the binding and movement of molecules and the nanospaces where life’s most fundamental chemical reactions occur.

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