Argonne National Lab Open House 2023
On May 20 2023, Argonne National Laboratory was open for the public to showcase the scientific works lab has been doing. According to the official statistics, over 10,000 people signed up and visited the lab. The free tickets were overbooked and a lot of visitors were in the waiting list. But I think that the visitors enjoyed and appreciated the research we have been doing that benefits the national and global interests.
There are much cooler videos and pictures in ANL facebook and other public channels on open house. Here is a youtube video:www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVTmmeKu29I
This blog highlights our activity which was measuring the hair thickness using laser. The team members were from High Energy Physics Department (intensity and energy frontier scientists).
Here is the poster that we used to demonstrate how we can use the diffraction of light to measure hair thickness.
We divided into two groups. One explaining the physics and other doing the demonstration.
Large fraction of our audience were very young.
The screen behind Yuri (person pointing the TV screen) shows the projection of the diffraction from a hair sample. The green line running vertically is the diffraction pattern. The concentric circles were designed to show the places where minima would occur based on thickness of the hair that diffracted the laser light.
Rui Wang is behind the table ready to explain the statistics of human hair width....
Histogram of the hair thickness. Basically it shows that the histogram is mostly somewhat gaussian i.e. average human hair thickness follows a normal distribution. This particular is kind of skewed to green (60 to 80 micro meter): One reason why we need enough statistics to get a true picture.
Simon Corrodi explaining to the audience.
General audience attendance in the room exhibiting our activity. Across us were the Fermilab scientists explaining about the neutrinos. Live data of particles (including neutrinos) interacting with a neutrino detector in Minnesota from NoVA experiment was shown on a screen.
Yongyi Yu is trying to put the hair on a tape to mount it in front of laser.
Rui wang is explaining how to interpret the histogram made by recording the measurements of hair thickness from the participants.
Timothy hobbs is looking at the screen (out of picture).