I got several texts lately from someone. I personally don’t know so much about her. However, I might not see her, because I don’t like the way of her writing. Her texts have a lot of abbreviated words. Not only I am having hard time to read and understand, but also it sounds awkward. How do you feel when you read texts or emails which have a lot of abbreviated words, such as bc = because, r = are? I do not see any intelligence and sense of beauty and sound. I am feeling so, while I am listening Bach: Invention No.13 A minor BMW 784. I am not a classics person though. I don’t think this is because I am reading a foreign language. That happens also in Japanese. It seems I got old enough to claim the beauty of language.
I keep researching the instrument which is so called ‘Triple axes spectrometer’ which was invented by Bert Brockhouse (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1994) at Chalk River in Canada. The instrument is used at reactors to study several kinds of excitations in materials, magnetic structure analysis, and so on. This instrument is used at neutron scattering experiment. It seems several points to make this instrument better.
- Back ground.
As experimental physicists, firstly, we are expecting to observe something which might be anticipated by theory or which might not. However, we do not know ‘something’ before we observe. The signals from ‘something’ sometimes are much weaker than we expect. So, the best we can do is to reduce the noise in the process on the experiment as the least as we can. This is also applicable for the triple axes spectrometer. We have to check the experimental environment carefully, keep finding out the cause of background of the experiment. It takes for 1-2 years, because the neutron is the quantum particle, we can’t actually see it. It comes sometimes like crowds.
2. Focusing
Triple axes mean ‘monochromator, sample, and analyzer’. Using monochrometor, we monochromize the neutron beam, which make us know what kind of beam we are using for incident, and let neutrons scatter by sample, then analyze the scattered neutrons by using analyzer. By analyzing the beam, we can know what kind of beam we get as the final. Since, the condition for sample changes when we change our sample. We have to do focusing every time we do experiment. We have to get the best focusing condition for the monochrometer and analyzer at the same time. We need to get the best conditions for monochrometer and analyzer ready for the experimentalist.
3. Software
You might wonder why physicist cares about the software, but the experimental user friendly software is sometime crucial to observe new phenomena. Even we are trying to find ‘something’ keenly, too much information or too less information sometimes make us look the other way. Also it is important to have the software which is easy to use, understand, and prevent us from humanly mistakes.
I will study this subject further. I am going to use Triple axes spectrometer so long time, I think it worth spending a lot of my time.