First time travelling alone for a collaborative work.

Ok so my first time travel for a collaborative work occurred last Tuesday which brought me to the beautiful university town of Charlottesville, Virginia. I am helping to (almost done) build this neat electronic circuit, which is called a pockels cell switch, for a Qweak Collaborator and to do that I had to come down to University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Now Charlottesville is about 140 miles from Newport News and it takes about 2 and ½ hours to drive there. But for me it was sort of a big deal because that was the first time I had to drive alone. I mean alone alone. Earlier I had driven the car alone when we moved to Virginia from Ohio but I was following Rakitha who was driving the truck. But on Tuesday I had to drive alone! On top of that I had to stay in a hotel alone for the first time. Again, I have stayed in a room alone before on my first visit to JLab, but then I had friends staying in a room down the hall. So that was not scary. But this time I was doing things alone. I was nervous. So one may ask, 'whats the big deal? People do it all the time, specially graduate students!'. Well, being me the way I was brought up in my home country, I was still afraid of going to places alone and not to mention my parents don't like that either. That was the main reason my parents came to USA with me when I first came here for my graduate studies. But that was like almost 3 years ago and I have come a long way from being dependent to being independent. I have realized one don't need to be scared of doing things alone as long as one is sure about them selves. But still I was nervous.

Nervous or not I had to go. I was going to go. It was a personal chalange to me and I wasn't going to back away because I was afraid. So I packed my bags, rented a car, booked a hotel, took a GPS and just incase printed out the Google maps too, said goodbye to Rakitha and started my journey to Charlottesville around 2.30p.m on Monday. 20 miles in to the journey when I was feeling comfortable enough to do 70 m.p.h. on a 65 m.p.h. road it suddenly hit me that I forgot my suitcase! (Bummer!). It was on the trunk of our car and in all the excitement we both forgot about it. So I had to turn and go back for it (sigh..). It was lucky that I remembered it then. Otherwise I can’t imagine reaching Charlottesville around 4.p.m and realizing I had no cloths to wear for the duration of my stay. There was no way that I would have gone back for the bag then. It’s one thing to drive in daylight, it’s a whole different thing to drive alone at night and I was not ready for that yet. So the whole ‘suitcase’ scene lead to me reach Charlottesville around 5.p.m. I was just able to meet up with my Qweak Collaborator there whome I was supposed to meet around 4p.m.
So that was my first experiance traveling alone for collaborative work. Maynot be much for many people, but for me it was something that I will never forget. But all and all it was fun. I enjoyed my stay at the hotel and the university made me miss Athens sooo much!

Being true to the name.

"The journal of a grad student" ..
Well, I am being true to the name I gave for my blog. This blog is lacking some serious blogging!
What to do, grad students like me who doesn't have that artistic ability or time to put things nicely on a paper, find it really hard to maintain their blogs. Being too busy or too tired to think about this doesnt help either but that how things are right now, at least with me. I make this post for the sake of blogging and a feeling of pitty for my blog.

Wesak Lanterns in Virginia

Ok so its not quite the right time of the year to cellabrate wesak but nowadays it all comes up to how busy you are to make time for cellabrations. Therefore the gang here aorund virginia beach and hampton roads decided to built a wesak lantern that everyone here can enjoy last weekend. Me and Rakitha made our contribution by building four small "atapattam kudu" . It is hard to describe the art of making lanterns when one hardly knows what to call them in english! So I am not going to jump in to all that but we had so much fun building them. Ofcourse the two of us couldn't join the gang for the final preparations because we are totally devoted to Qweak now. But we managed to go and join them for the final cellabrations and the kadala dhansala they prepaired. It was small but that was just for our fun so it was enough for us and for the other SL famlies who came to enjoy the evening with their families. Lets hope next year we can make an even better lantern and maybe that time we will be able to do it actually on wesak day ..

Visit from the Ohio gang!

Last week was really happeneing for me and Rakitha. To start with we took shifts the whole week. I took day shifts for PREX the whole week except Saturday and Tuesday. It was educating and happeneing!. Then on Friday we went home expecting our friends from Ohio to visit us . They came around 2p.m. Nilantha came with Niwanthi and Tharusha from Cleveland (10 hr drive) and Dilupama, Harsha, Gayani Akka and Dhinali joined them from Athens (7hr drive). So they were dead tired but we were so happy to see each other after an year! The next day we took them to outerbanks. It was supposed to have been a fun trip but the weather sort of got in the way. Well ofcourse its still spring but I was hoping it'll be warmer than that. The wind was the thing that got us. If it wasnt for the wind it would have been really nice out in the beach.

Well beach or not we enjoyed our selves. We went to all the islands. Wish we had more time to look around more. They were supposed to leave on Sunday because the spring quarter was starging in OU on Monday. On Sunday we went to VA beach and it was a warmer day than saturday. We strolled about the beach for an hour then they had to leave after taking lunch.

But all in all, we all had a great time. I wish they could have stayed for longer though. But given the circumstances, I am glad that at least they took all the trouble to come here even for just two days. That means a lot to the two of us who miss being at Athens sooo much..

Qweak and me

Its 5.36 p.m. in Newport News now and I am waiting, all packed-up to go home, for Rakitha. He is doing some timing analysis of the QwAnalysis, the analysis software that is going to be used for the Qweak experiment. Timing is important and also one has to make sure that the analyzer don't crash in the middle of an important analysis. That will be a disaster!

So while I wait, I thought I should familiar my self with the art of blogging. I have had this blog for a looong time, but didn't had the time to write anything. In fact I totally forgot about it! I came across this accidentally when I was searching for a good blogging tool. : ) Makes me wonder am I that PhD'd? So anyway, here I am, trying to make up for the lost time and well trying to pass time while I wait.
Hmm where shoul I start.. ok so lets start with this Qweak thingy..

Qweak is a particle physics experiment at the Thomas Jefferson Laboratory and it aims to measure the weak charge of the proton. Obviously, many people would have heard of the electronics charge of the proton but what is this weak charge?? Well, when the proton interacts with another particle, say an electron, via the electromagnetic force, we say that the proton has some amount of electric charge that defines the magnitude of the interaction. Now there is another type of fundamental force in nature called the weak force and when a proton interacts with another particle via the weak force we say it has some amount of weak charge. Since the weak force is weak, this charge is very very small. In fact its predicted by the Standard Model (SM) of the particle physics to be close to zero. The goal of Qweak is to measure this weak charge using parity violating electron proton scattering.
Why do we want to measure something that is so small and infact is said to be almost zero? One reason is that it has never been measured experimentally and another reason is that it will be a test of the SM. The SM explains the interactions occuring between the fundamental forces and particles and as with every theoretical prediction, it is always being tested experimentally. It is one of the biggest and successfull theoretical frameworks in particle physics. Why do we want to test SM if its so successfull? As everything else in this world and universe, SM is not perfect. It has few glitches here and there and once in a looong while experimentalists will discover something like nutrino oscillations that the SM cannot explain. So physists around the world are carrying out experiments to test SM. They either use high energetic machines like the LHC to discover new particels or particles that are predicted by SM like Higgs or by they do low energetic experiments like Qweak to test SM predistions, like the value of the protons weak charge.
So with all this goals inmind, Qweak collaboration has embarked ona long journey that started on 2000 and that is going ot end in 2012. Qweak has already begun installation and I love to go down to the Hall C when ever I can and stare at the huge QTOR (Qweak Toroidal magnet) and the rest of its parts that are slowly begining to take shape in the fammiler drawings we have seen so many times.

Me and Rakitha we both work in Qweak. We joined Qweak before we started going out and we discovered that we have so much more incommon than the thesis experimenta and thesis advisors!. Our advisor, Paul and Julie, are are really good, the best advisors anyone can have and I am not just saying that. Its not like I am saying this cos they let us get away with doing nothing! no no. We do work and they do a good job of guiding us and thats what is really important to graduate students. That means I really dont have time to sit around and pore my heart out on to a blog but today the computer I was working on (Hans computer) froze cos Rakitha is doing his work on it too and I am sure the poor thing ran out of memory. So I took a break letting Rakitha have all the memory the pc can give him.
We will start commissoning on April and its going to be areally hectic time after that. Qweak will run for 2 years (2200hrs) and thats becasue we are measureing somehting that is soooo small. Our asymmetry is 0.25ppm! So we have to run longer to get good statistics. Did I mention we plan to measure the weak charge to an accuracy of 4%? Well thats how accurate we want to be and for that one trick is to run longer.

Ok Rakitha is finally done. Its 6.16p.m. and we are going home! I have shifts on PREX tommorw (the current expeiment in Hall A) and Thursday and Friday. I am looking forward to the weekend cos our Ohio friends are comming to visit us. That will be fun!!!