July 20, 2010

Once again, today the REU students attended the weekly Tuesday Lunch Meeting. We heard Thomas Hemmick give a talk entitled "300,000 Times Hotter Than the Center of the Sun." Basically, he talked about the Phenix project at Brookhaven National Lab and about plasma. He used a lot of terminology I had never hear of before and although the talk was very interactive, I had trouble understanding the point he was trying to make. I suspect that the entire talk was build up to the last thing he said, which was that the group eventually veryfied that something they were studying had to be 300,000 times hotter than the center of the sun at the beginning of the experiment.

The LTC students also listened to a talk from Marty Ligare from Bucknell University later in the day. He went over a problem he worked out about "Classical thermodynamics in Atom Traps," which had to do with how to describe a system where the pressure and density of your gas is not constant and the volume is not defined. I got the impression that this was something very much relavant to Dr. Metcalf and Dr. Schneble's fields, but I need more convincing about the math to accept the results and to actually understand what they mean.

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