Gadgetory

in my hand right now I'm carrying what's called a dosimeter and it's a tool for measuring radiation why do I need a dosimeter well although there shouldn't be any significant radiation where we're about to go there could be because we're here at triumph the particle acceleration laboratory here in British Columbia Canada that houses the world's largest cyclotron and soon the world's most powerful linear electron accelerator of its kind and what do they do here not just casual things you know like advancing the fields of physics medicine material science and much much more so without further ado let's head inside and talk about how they accelerate particles to about 75% of the speed of light and also why the heck you would want to do that in the first place story blocks video offers you studio quality stock video clips for a fraction of the cost check it out today at the link in the video description when you think particle accelerator the first thing that probably comes to your mind is CERN they are famous for digging this great big tunnel that allows them to accelerate two beams of particles too near the speed of light then smash those two beams together and see what happens well triumph is a little bit different they are more about directing a single beam of superfast particles at an object like say a piece of uranium by doing this they can achieve a couple of things one they can create isotopes or forms and elements and compounds that generally don't exist naturally fluorodeoxyglucose for example is used for brain research in the nearby university of british columbia or two to actually produce elements that either wouldn't naturally occur or that would be very difficult to study inside the neutron star merger you'd have to travel to in order to find them before we get into that though let's go all the way to the beginning with this rather unassuming bottle of compressed hydrogen so the hydrogen gets sucked up through this tube right here all the way up to this spot right here and then this chamber this whole thing is kept under a vacuum so that takes care of the pumping then it comes down into this plasma bucket which is right here where a 2,000 degrees Celsius tantalum filament ignites the plasma strips the electrons from the atoms and then the hydrogen and ions so these are the hydrogen atoms that pick up extra electrons are fired out through here and like really fast because our 12,000 volts here is not compared to ground but rather to the entire source room that we're inside which is kept at 300,000 volts compared to ground when the accelerators running it's a good thing it's not on now we're on the outside so directly above me is where our hydrogen and ions leave the source room so from this room to the wall here are a bunch of linear resistors so the potential then goes smoothly from the room up to 300,000 volts at the wall and when the particles leave here they'll be traveling at roughly 140th the speed of light to put that in context that's about a hundred and sixty thousand times faster than the top speed of my car now dealing with a huge electric potential like this isn't easy while our power supply here isn't actually working as hard as you'd think it only uses about 1 million once charged to maintain that potential if given the chance it will gladly create a literal bolt of lightning between in the room here and the wall so to prevent this they've had to do a couple of things first of all this entire room is a Faraday cage and no wires can go between it and the wall or it'll be spark city in here so all of the data and the control signals are sent over fiber optic cables which is pretty standard but then what about power you can't do fiber optic power well that is where this comes in so rather than just running a wire remember we can't do that or balloons they ran this non-conductive shaft with a 30 horsepower motor on the other side of the wall that allows them to convert mechanical energy here into electrical energy just like a bog-standard generator pretty clever now we're above the particle accelerator where are wicked fast anions are coming shooting down this tube but we have a problem since they don't just come out in a nice orderly fashion like a laser but rather tend to scatter like a flashlight the main goal here is just getting the particles down there which requires some real you know particle or wranglin and all along this line is triumphs sort of h minus particle prod of choice basically they're precision manufactured electrostatic plates called quadruples that act kind of like lenses for the charged particles to keep them in line and same technique gets used right here where the particle beam actually gets turned before being sent one floor down into the real need of the particle accelerator the 520 mega electron volt cyclotron the largest in the world so before we go inside there's a few things that we've got to do any contamination on the surfaces inside the cyclotron will need to be cleaned after we leave so they've asked us to wear lab coats so we don't shed any unnecessary dust and also to wear booties and not like kneel down on the floor or anything like that just to create as little extra work as possible for all the texts that keep this place running smoothly this is a very high technology contamination control barrier here I like it okay now we are getting into where the magic happens the cyclotron that sorry getting a nasty look here sorry not magic science magic isn't real sciences anyway at this point our h- particles are entering the circular track at 140th the speed of light where large RF resonators provide the acceleration and massive deionized water cooled coils of aluminum hold the particle on orbit now there are two coils both with 15 turns positioned around the cyclotron and each one carries 18,000 amps but that incredible power doesn't mean that the researchers here don't also have a fair degree of control over the speed of our particles so as they whip around the loop the h- particles will go faster and faster it actually takes about 16 a hundred laps before they'll reach full speed that's about 3/4 of the speed of light but what they'll also do is a kind of spiral outward taking a wider path around the accelerator kind of like how in your car if you're going faster it's hard to take a tight turn that means that when it's time to apply the last step using a thin piece of carbon foil to strip the electrons off so that we're left with just bare protons the energy of our protons can be fine-tuned according to where the carbon is positioned on the inside of the cyclotron gives us slower lower energy particles or write out that the edge of the cyclotron gives us the full 520 mega electron volt experience once the electrons are stripped our coils will no longer keep the stream going around the track so we're left with a straight stream of positively charged particles that'll turn whatever pore sample is on the other side into matter soup of course you can't have those particles smashing into anything unintentionally like air so the entire cyclotron needs to be held at a vacuum of point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one bar to accomplish this they use sounds so cool turbo molecular pumps that's been at 40,000 rpm basically like smacking the air molecules out and not allowing them back in now this does create the small problem of making the vacuum chamber which is above us want to collapse in on itself however to combat that we're actually currently below the cyclotron do you see all these poles here well you might actually think that these are these are supporting the cyclotron like struts or something but they're actually pulling down really hard to make sure the whole thing doesn't just flatten itself so that was pretty sweet but just like you guys will occasionally get the itch to upgrade a graphics card even if you don't really need to but you just want the latest and greatest well after 45 years of operation he eventually the thrill of shooting protons at 3/4 the speed of light around the cyclotron started to wear off a little and the researchers at triumph needed a new way to snack stuff together at super high speeds and continue to push the frontiers of understanding so they built the world's most powerful electron linear accelerator or ela knack so when it reaches full power in 2025 the ELA knack here will be able to propel a hundred kilowatts of electrons at a blistering 99.99% the speed of life Wow so to accomplish this they first need yet another three hundred kilovolts our supply in a Faraday cage of it what is it with these guys in their three hundred thousand volt power supplies in Faraday cages like a nice nice round number or something anyway that gives the electrons a pretty nice kick in the butt too roughly 77% the speed of light but that's that's just too slow that's like peasant stuff where they really start cooking are in these radio frequency wave chambers so the insides of these are cooled down to just 2 Kelvin using liquid helium surrounded by a liquid nitrogen cooled heat shield I guess that's why they call it the super thermos and in there the electrons are accelerated by the radio frequency field in here oscillating rapidly 1.3 billion times per second with these oscillations synchronized to the speed of the electron going through it so what that means effectively is that the electron is always being pushed along to the next segment kind of like a railgun now one of these accelerators would get our electrons up to 10 mega electron volts but that wasn't enough for them so they got three three in a row gives it a total of 30 mega electron volts of particle smashing power so all in all this accelerator consumes 1 million watts watts or about enough power for a thousand homes all right so we've had a lot of talks so far about particles going out of seeing speeds but now it's time to transfer all that momentum into something useful now depending on the experiments what happens next can vary a lot but normally it consists of getting the beam to a point where it smashes into samples of materials called targets where the particles have enough energy to split the nucleus of the atoms this can create all kinds of fun things neutrons muons or rare isotopes via nuclear fission or spallation and it also creates a big old pile of matter garbage so at risk of sounding like a broken record here this is where things get tricky because you might not have a lot of time to grab the important bits some of the rare isotopes that they want to study might only last for a few milliseconds before decaying so nanomaterials are designed and brought to temperatures white-hot around 2,000 degrees Celsius to release the isotopes superfast then depending on what exactly is smacked together some of the longer lived isotopes might get collected locally while other particles would need to go through several switching stations some of which are below us here or for further acceleration to arrive at an experimental detector the one behind me here called the titan ion trap accurately measures and isotopes mass using its cyclotron frequency so basically there's a combination of magnetic and electrical fields that trap the particle in a confined space and then you can calculate how fast the particle moves around a track and from there calculate its mass alternately your isotope might get switched off of the main line over there and end up in something like Griffin which is kind of like a microscope that's looking for nuclei so Griffin is actually the world's most powerful tool for the decay spectroscopy of rare isotopes and it provides triumphs scientists with an unparalleled view of the interplay of forces that create nuclear structure here on the other side the isotope atoms are delivered into the black ball that it was showing when we were here for B roll so we could show it to you but I can't point it now and then they're deposited on a tape reel and as they decay gamma rays are emitted and then are measured by these detectors that go completely around the sample giving a full 360 degrees of detection after the measurement is performed the tape reel gets spun some of which have decayed into daughter nuclei that create unwanted gamma ray background noise come out through the lead wall on the other side which shields the detectors from the daughters more isotopes can then be deposited on the tape and it's good for another go these isotopes are used to help us understand fundamental physics but there are also lots of other applications isotopes created here at triumph have been used for things like tracking the movement of plankton detecting brain disease or cancer treating cancer characterizing candidate materials for superconductors understanding how metal ions make proteins and enzymes in our body do what they do and you know what honestly if I liver to list at all in this video we'd go on for another 10 or 20 minutes but but this light is I'm sure you've been screaming at the screen for the last 10 minutes or so when are you getting to the cool computer's okay okay now so behind these doors is a Tier one data center that analyzes experiment data from the Atlas particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider it has a 100 gigabit fiber pipe capacity that connects to the LHC over at CERN in Switzerland and other sites around the world so that they can share the ridiculous amount of computing and storage needed to analyze and store the massive amounts of data that Atlas produces so in there they've got 12,500 CPU cores 12 petabytes of disk storage and 31 petabytes of tave storage oh it that is does open but I'm haha I thought it was gonna be locked unfortunately we're not actually allowed to go in there something-something currently holding the record for tier one computing uptime something something me getting close to it I don't know I don't really know I don't really know what the issue was so this was really cool and it's the end of our tour but it's hardly the end for the work being done here at triumph they're actually expanding like crazy along with ramping up the ELA knack they're gonna be tripling their rare isotope production capabilities in the next couple of years adding another building and continuing to employ around a hundred co-op students every year to teach them about particle acceleration so maybe then we'll have to come back when they've got another big update to show us maybe we can get behind those data center doors next time yeah but in the meantime I just want to give a huge shout out to Stu for coordinating our tour and to the Legion of experts that showed us around it was a lot of fun to get to spend a day with who are probably some of the smartest people here in Canada gets to do quality stock video clips for a fraction of the cost with story blocks video download all the stock video your heart desires 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