Flux magazine, Issue 9

Robotics Club!

page 16

Using magnets to analyze oil page 28

FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9 editor’s note

On problems, poems & grace

SPECIAL DEDICATION

This issue of Flux is dedicated to the memory of John Farrell, MagLab machinist and robotics club mentor.

What’s a typical day at the Magnet Lab like? Often, it’s about solving problems.

That’s what engineers Scott Bole and Lee Marks did recently. Their story began when Lee noticed something odd going on during a magnet-building project: When a technician had to wrap tape around a cable, everyone else had to stop work. Unfortunately, all the down time was adding up to missed deadlines, broken schedules and extra payroll expense.

So Lee scratched out a few ideas on paper — see his diagrams on page 9 — and gave them to Scott. The next thing you know, the problem was solved. You can read about it on page 8.

Problem solving is at the core of the robot-building adventure unfolding at a small high school in Tallahassee, too. For the last two years, MagLab technicians and engineers have helped the teens at SAIL High School build machines able to compete in high-school robot competitions. This school year, the colorful student club, known as the Octo-π-rates, is once again preparing to compete with the help of a few MagLab volunteers. But one of the club’s biggest lab mentors and supporters — John Farrell — will be absent from the excitement. Farrell, a superb technician and machinist, died in May of cancer. He will be missed by both his MagLab family and the teens he so dearly loved to help. We dedicate this issue — featuring the amazing high-school team he was so fond of — in his memory.

One of the tenets of the high-school robot competitions, run by the group FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), is something quite wonderful called “gracious professionalism.” It means helping each other out rather than caring only about what you can accomplish — and it’s a way of work heartily endorsed by the MagLab. You can read more about it, and the swashbuckling Octo-π-rates, on page 16.

Elsewhere in this edition, you’ll also find a pictorial story by MagLab chemist Amy McKenna that explains how she and other researchers can gain a wealth of valuable info from a mere droplet of oil. And in our new science and art section, you’ll discover what motivated accomplished poet Carol Lynne Knight to delve into string theory and other physics concepts and weave them into her personal narrative. Her latest work is a book of poems aptly titled “Quantum Entanglement.”

We’ve also got an intriguing story on noise — what physicists call noise, anyway — and a lively interview with physicist Ross McDonald, who works at our branch lab at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Enjoy!

—Kathleen Laufenberg

Contents whAt is this?

Photo essAy

10 Los Alamos: All Access Sidestep the security clearances and get a glimpse of the MagLab’s Pulsed Field Facility.

02 01001100 01101001 Decoding how the Internet works.

ProbLem: soLved

08 Teaming Up at the Lab 03 05 21 24

science meets Art Exploring the poetic nature of physics with Lynne Knight.

scientist spotlight Q + A with Ross McDonald, experimental physicist.

the nature of noise When Mother Nature whispers, physicist Albert Migliori listens.

28 32 33

What’s in an Oil Drop?

Our magnets take apart the world’s most complex substance.

Two scientists put their heads together and create a machine that speeds along magnet production.

summer at the maglab

Cover feAture

Dispatches from summer campers, interns and more.

last look: Cold magnet One of the coldest places in the universe is in Florida.

helium Comeback Conserving a resource essential to our operations.

CONNECT WITh US Find us on Facebook, Twitter & YouTube or visit magnet.fsu.edu

16 Robotics Club MagLab staff help local teens build a robot designed to score in basketball.

FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9 FLUX MAGAZINE

what is this?

Issue 9 / FALL 2012

Magnet Lab Director Gregory S. Boebinger Magnet Lab Deputy Director Eric Palm Director of Public Affairs Amy W. Mast Flux Editor Kathleen Laufenberg

LiNb03 : This is the Internet

BY AMY MAST

Graphic Designer Lizette Vernon Photographers Dave Barfield Kathleen Laufenberg

About

Flux is a twice-yearly publication dedicated to exploring the research, magnet technology and science outreach conducted at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory’s three campuses in Florida and New Mexico.

The Magnet Lab is a national user facility that provides state of the art research resources for magnet-related research in all areas of science and engineering.

The Magnet Lab is supported by the National Science Foundation and the state of Florida. It is operated by Florida State University, the University of Florida and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Subscriptions

Want to get some extra copies for a classroom or a favorite science buff? There are two ways: Amy Mast at: u Contact

winters@magnet.fsu.edu

v Subscribe online at:

www.magnet.fsu.edu/ mediacenter/publications/ subscribe.aspx

Contact

The Magnet Lab 1800 E. Paul Dirac Drive Tallahassee, FL 32310 (850) 644-0311

www.magnet.fsu.edu

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Optical switch from an.

Internet server.

Lithium niobate (LiNbO )crystal

Lithium niobate, a compound of niobium, lithium and oxygen, and its crystalline cousins are at the core of how we communicate with one another. To provide homes, businesses and classrooms with the Internet, the crystal (above right) is sliced into thin rectangular sheets, each around 5 centimeters long.

These sheets form the key piece of a device called an optical switch (above left).

Fiber optical systems are the fastest information-moving mechanism we know of.

They work this way: As light moves through the crystal, electricity can change the way the light moves, turning the transmission of the light through the crystal “off.” If you can build an “on/off” mechanism, you’ve built a light switch. Depending on the type, an optical

switch is worth between $1,000 and $10,000.

The Internet needs optical on/off switches because, like all digital communications, the Internet’s info is carried in bits of “0s” and “1s.” Think of it as analogous to Morse code.

Rather then sending a signal a couple of times a second, an optical on/off switch can switch the light “on” and “off” a billion times a second, so that information moves at close to a gigahertz.

So, how do you get gigantic single crystals with which to make switches and other useful devices? Crystal growers grow them in a complicated, high-heat process that takes about a couple of weeks. The one above is a bit larger than a soda can.

FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9 science meets art

The fine art of hard science

BY KATHLEEN LAUFENBERG Our world is full of places where science and art converge: in photographs of the microscopic world and the cosmos, in pictures and graphics that depict complex abstractions from math and science, and in literature, too.

It’s in that last category that Carol Lynne Knight’s “Quantum Entanglement” (2010, Apalachee Press) belongs. Knight’s poetry “mingles scientific curiosity with stunning meditations on language and the myriad ways life unfolds,” said reviewer and award-winning poet Naomi Shihab Nye. “We are in the wonderful presence of a truly original voice.”

In addition to being a wellknown Florida poet, Knight is a graphic artist, former art teacher and the co-director (with Florida A & M University English Professor Rick Campbell) of Anhinga Press, a 40-year-old literary publishing house based in Tallahassee. She’s also the winner of a Penumbra Poetry Prize and a Pushcart Prize nominee.

Q + A with POET Carol Lynne Knight What led you to get imaginatively involved with some of the theories in quantum physics?

Part of it came from reading (physicist) Brian Greene’s book “The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality.” I can’t say I understand most of the technical stuff in Greene’s book, but I did find it, overall, to be deeply fascinating.

The implications of multiple dimensions in the theoretical concept of string theory took me on a strange journey. The poem, “Variations on Dimension,” came from an emotional imagining of what other dimensions could house.

For me, they held memory of how measurement marks our past, wild neurons, maybe heaven.

The idea of multiple dimensions also sent me on an Internet search. I found an article about the mathematician, Shing-Tung Yau, whose calculations on unseen dimensions seem to lend credence to

string theory. And two years later, I am still musing over a quote from his interview about the math: “It’s exciting when you go deeper and deeper into a complicated structure that you can spend most of a lifetime working on. It was shocking when it showed up in physics, and it’s beautiful whether it’s true or not.” (From “The Math Behind the Physics Behind the Universe,” Discover, April 2010) The relationship between truth and beauty is a great landscape for a poet to wander. Should I follow (Romantic poet) John Keats (1795 – 1821), or a contemporary mathematician into the quantum world?

The book’s title poem “Quantum Entanglement,” begins with an epigraph from physicist Brian Greene’s book: “… the quantum connection between two particles can persist even if they are on opposite sides of the universe.

From the standpoint of their entanglement, notwithstanding the many trillions of miles of space between them, it’s as if they are right on top of each other.” What is it about this concept of quantum entanglement that caught your imagination?

I am in awe of this idea — that things on an unimaginably small scale are connected and can influence each other in such amazing ways. Quantum entanglement sounds like sorcery or magic. I was trying to parse what this phenomenon would mean to larger enti-

poetry of Physics

In this slim volume of 67 poems are nearly a dozen that weave metaphors for physics into everyday life. They include: “String Theory,” “Anti-Matter,” “Variations on Dimension,” “Paradox,” “Quantum Entanglement,” “There is No Atmosphere on Mars,” “Binary” and “Schrödinger’s Cat.”

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FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9 ties (like humans!). And this was before I had watched every episode of “Fringe.”

The poem ‘Quantum Entanglement’ starts out with a married couple, with a relationship. The woman in the poem is having a conversation — “If I tell you the world is flying apart, it could be true, / theoretically” — but then she goes on to say what she saw that morning: “…the backyard green/ rises, surrounds me with tendrils of prayer,/ and the first woodpecker of spring drills/ into the pecan tree outside the window.” And what she sees makes sense to her in a sensual way.

So the poem goes from the abstract to the physical. In part, it’s about that juxtaposition of what you can see or know, with what you cannot. It’s about that mystery, which pervades life.

Can you talk a bit about your poem “Schrödinger’s Cat,” and what prompted you, a cat lover, to write it?

First, I must credit Diane Wakoski (a Fulbright fellow and writer in residence at Michigan State University) with the poem’s title. Although the poem is rife with references about probability, paradox, and observation, I didn’t know about Schrödinger’s Cat when I wrote it. The title change was in her notes on the manuscript when she wrote a blurb for the back cover.

The reality-based parts of the poem are the sock and cat with static electricity, a foggy night drive from Havana, and an unfounded fear of falling off the Thomasville Road flyover, which was under construction at the time. And earlier, I had been reading about chaos theory. The er-

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Schrödinger’s Cat “Schrödinger’s Cat” is a thought experiment devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It presents a cat that might be alive or dead, depending on an earlier random event.

Petting the cat before dawn in winter, a flash, crackle, spark ignites my cold bedroom.

I think of this surprise on the way to work, and the steering wheel, the gas pedal, the brake — how I am connected to this vehicle, think I control it, and then I wonder how much sway I actually have.

A cat, startled by the shock

of being stroked on this brittle morning could shiver, whine, race across a yard wondering why his master’s hands, usually, so gentle, were electrified today — and this cat, set off by an ignorance of physics, could run in front of my car, and I would hit the brakes, maybe swerve, and then … the steering wheel that I trusted won’t stop turning, or maybe the car has been coerced by the natural spin of tires,

hitting a stone but not the cat,

who I missed, and who also seems to have flown into a tree, and maybe that is where I am going too — up in the tree with the static cat, without a plan, flying end

over end like a hubcap out of control.

A physicist could predict the course of a body released from a wheel at 40-miles per hour on a bridge with 10-foot concrete sections

suspended 30 feet over traffic flowing at five miles per hour — but with all these calculations, I’ve lost track of the hubcap, and the cat,

ratic nature of cats also influences the scenario. Yes, the cat lover in me did not let the cat die in this poem, although Schrödinger discussed the possible demise of the theoretical cat in his thought experiment.

The poem is a tumble through the fantas-

and am wondering if this steering wheel will ever stop turning, or if the cat is being propelled by dreams instead of terror, if there is a confusion of the two that doesn’t affect the cat, but is whirling around me while I am sitting still, but going a mile a minute.

If you could watch yourself from six feet back, you could see the off-kilter sway of your head, the way you beckon disaster without speaking — if you pet a cat at dawn and kindle the flash beneath his cheek.

It’s all planned — you could watch those dendrites flare and fire along the paths in your brain and someone with a million, million calculations could predict what will happen —

but I can’t.

If it’s not thought out, and practiced, I become that shiny disk spinning in an endless dream of highway, the dark slapping me with headlights, cats in the swale, so close, spill of searchlights to the south, sheath of night wrapping me in a moon fuzz of winter green.

The next morning still arid, still gray.

Before I bare my feet to the cold floor, I pull a woolen sock out of another sock — it glows like a lantern and crackles

over the sheets, over the sleeping cat.

I wake him up, stroke his chin — waiting, waiting for the spark.

tic and the unpredictable, or unmeasured, nature of our lives. And, even after all the crazy things described (almost ranted about), at the end, I act to make it all happen again, embrace all the possibilities: “I wake him up, / stroke his chin — waiting, / waiting for the spark.”

FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9 Scientist spotlight

Q+A with Ross McDonald, experimental physicist

BY AMY MAST y the time most aspiring scientists are finished with graduate school, they’re ready to take a break from their graduate advisors for a while.

So when Ross McDonald received his doctorate from the University of Oxford a decade ago, he packed his things and moved halfway around the world to Los Alamos National Laboratory … only to find his advisor, John Singleton, was planning a similar move. Like McDonald, Singleton is now a full-time staff member at Los Alamos.

McDonald has turned that parallel path into a fruitful, long-lasting and rare intellectual relationship, one that’s shared by many of the staff at Los Alamos — where the scientific problems are grand in scale, the quarters are close, and one experimental mistake can mean millions of dollars and years of delay. Here, he discusses his path to science and what it means to be an experimentalist.

In a couple of sentences, how would you describe your job?

I’m an experimental physicist. A large part of my job within the Magnet Lab is to do user support. Users are scientists from all over the world who want to come and do experiments in our unique facility at magnetic field strengths they don’t have access to in their own labs. I help them get the most out of their magnet time, which in turn has led to some great and long lasting collaborations.

What’s the best part of your job?

It’s like exploring everyday. We’re looking for something new, something different. And sometimes that’s a big step into the unknown, but more often it’s looking at the tiny details that end up informing those bigger steps. It’s not just boldly thrashing your way into the jungle exploring, it’s really trying to understand what you’re observing as you go and putting it into the context of the bigger

TIMELINE 1975 Born in Romford (London) 1997 R eceives Masters of Physics from University of Exeter 2001 R eceives Ph.D. from Oxford University 2001 S tarts post-doc at Los Alamos National Lab 2004 S tarts employment at Los Alamos

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FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9

“I was always interested in how things worked. A lot of scientists never grow up, they never stop asking why.”

— ross mcdonald, maglab physicist

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picture. By this I mean it’s really exciting when your measurements don’t just inform you about that particular material, but lead to a greater understanding of a whole family of materials. It might be a magnetic system, and you address why one material is more magnetic than another one. It might be a superconductor, and you begin to understand why one has a higher transition temperature than another, or why this is a better, or worse, metal.

I always liked the practical side of doing science and realized quite early in school that often someone else couldn’t provide a satisfactory answer. I think that’s the foundation for all experimental physicists: You’re trying to answer questions for yourself. Why does this happen?

What if I do this? Kids naturally do this, and I’m getting a real kick watching my own kids start this exploration. I just want to make sure schooling doesn’t make them grow out of it.

What about Los Alamos has kept you here?

The skiing. Entirely the skiing. No, what’s kept me at Los Alamos is something that’s common to the whole of the Magnet Lab. It’s the daily interaction with a wide range of scientists, not just within your particular group or department, like at a university, but the exposure to so many different people, ideas and materials. At Los Alamos, I’ve really liked the challenge of doing experiments in pulsed magnetic fields. I enjoy the innovation necessary to be able to pull off challenging experiments — being driven by the underlying physics problem to push the experimental boundaries.

But how did you extrapolate that curiosity into physics?

I was always playing with odd bits of electronics. Cobbling things together always seemed natural to me, and I guess I sort of fell into doing experiments.

Physics always seemed quite intuitive to me — and being lazy, I liked that there are very few facts to remember versus concepts to understand. Luckily I’m still learning, playing and tinkering every day.

Did you always know you wanted to be a scientist?

I was always interested in how things worked. A lot of scientists never grow up, they never stop asking why. My parents always go back to when I was 3 years old, and I took their vacuum cleaner apart.

Luckily it wasn’t a working vacuum cleaner, but the carpet and I were both black from the carbon brushes in the motor. Yet I still received nothing but encouragement.

What about being an experimentalist in particular suits you?

I’m a really hands-on person. I love making things, but I think I would be bored very quickly without the motivation from the physics, the samples, the materials. I may get engrossed in the details of how to make a particular measurement, or how I can improve the signal to noise, and I love that hands-on aspect, but it’s the fact that it’s so linked to these abstract concepts — for example, a material’s Fermi surface morphology or the nature of its magnetic interactions. From time to time, I’ll be up on a magnet platform banging things with a hammer or in the machine shop, but the thing that really gets me out of bed is the understanding, the science.

Maybe I spend a little too much time be-

FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9

What are high-temperature superconductors?

High-temperature superconductors are made from materials such as metal alloys and ceramics, and they conduct electricity much more efficiently.

Regular copper wires lose some of the electrical current that flows through them. You can feel that loss as heat emanating from the wires. This happens because the electrons that carry the current through the wire resist moving in an orderly fashion. Like a restless crowd forming a line, they bump and jostle into each other, and into the imperfections in the wire.

But in specially made superconducting wire, the electrons flow smoothly with no resistance and no collisions — which translates into no loss of electricity.

Why does that happen? Scientists don’t completely understand why — but they do know that it hinges on temperature. Really frigid temperatures.

They know that when certain materials are cooled

ing a jack-of-all-trades, but I think that’s a shared characteristic of everyone who thrives at the Pulsed Field Facility.

What’s the office environment like at a place like Los Alamos?

I guess it’s pretty uncommon to have a group of people maintain such a stimulating, intellectual relationship for a decade — longer than that for many people here.

We all get along well, and we all have some idea about each other’s research.

We are all interested in magnet design:

down to insanely cold temperatures, they become superconductors — i.e., they allow electricity to flow through them with no resistance. The catch is the cold: You’ve got to keep the material at temperatures that are minus 170 degrees Fahrenheit — and sometimes far colder — for it to superconduct. And keeping a material that cold is very expensive and complicated.

So researchers keep experimenting, hoping to find better and better superconductors — materials that require less and less cold to conduct a lot of electricity without resistance. They call the materials that transmit electricity with no resistance at warmer (but still very cold!) temperatures high-temperature superconductors. If scientists ever discover a material that could transmit electricity with no resistance at room temperature, wow! That would trigger an energy revolution.

— Kathleen Laufenberg

Why this magnet failed on a particular occasion, why is this measurement noisier than when we’ve done this sort of experiment before? We’re all involved in the hands-on details, as well as crunching the data and doing the calculations to design the next experiments. I think one of the neatest things about being here is that our doors are usually open — which really fosters a collaborative environment where it’s the norm to work together.

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FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9 ProbLem: soLved

+ 1 CONUNdRUM When the going gets tough, the tough get creative — at least, that’s the motto of MagLab engineers Scott Bole & Lee Marks. And they’ve got a new machine and a couple of awards to prove it.

BY KATHLEEN LAUFENBERG

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T

here had to be a better way. That’s what Lee Marks, a MagLab research engineer, thought every time he watched it happen. Technicians had to stop building a powerful 35-tesla hybrid magnet so someone could manually wrap insulating tape around a 40-foot stretch of cable. The task, which was tedious but critical, took at least 30 minutes.

“It was a real time-waster,” Marks said.

“It was throwing everything off schedule.”

So Marks and a co-worker did what engineers and technicians often do at the lab: They brainstormed solutions until they came up with an idea they thought would work. In this case, their clever problem solving would later win them both well-deserved recognition and two awards.

dreAm mAChine

Marks guessed that there was probably a machine available somewhere that could do the manual tape-winding task for them. So he and fellow engineer Tom Painter looked and Googled, but ultimately came up with nada.

“There just wasn’t a machine out there that really did what we wanted,” said Marks, who has been at the lab for 15 years. “So I came up with an idea and scribbled out something.”

Marks showed his drawings — penciled onto the back of a couple of sheets of graph paper — to engineer Scott Bole.

“Lee kept putting the bug in my ear: ‘We got to do something about this,’ ” said Bole, who has worked at the lab for 19 years. “He was kind of the spearhead of the whole thing, and I was kind of the enabler. I just did the mechanics: figured out the sizes of everything, the nuts and bolts stuff.”

Over the stretch of four to five months, Scott designed a machine — weighing about 100 pounds and powered by a small DC motor — to wind the insulating tape around the cable. Then they took it out for a trial run.

FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9 with its official, patent-pending name: Automated Insulation Machine. But Nicole Walsh, a lab assistant who helps build new magnets, has another moniker for it.

“I call it a lifesaver,” Walsh said. “It streamlines everything.”

The new machine quickly and accurately winds the tape, and the magnetbuilding team no longer has to stop working. But wait: There’s even a dab of whipped cream to top off this already sweet story.

“The best part about this whole job,” Bole said, “is that we did it in skunk works mode.”

Say whaaat? Skunk works mode?

“That means you’re doing it in secret; you don’t tell anybody, you just show up one day and say ‘Look what we got!’ We weren’t given the job to do this, we just saw the need and in our spare time, we put this thing together.”

Drum roll, please

“We weren’t given the job to do this, we just saw the need and in our spare time, we put this thing together.”

— scott bole, maglab engineer

Sly solution

“We just turned the switch on and it worked,” Bole said. “I’ve designed a lot of rotating machinery in my career, but I don’t know of any other machine that I’ve

designed that we just flipped the switch and it worked. There’s always some little glitch. So that was pretty amazing.”

For flair, they attached an orange and yellow flame logo onto their invention

While creative problem solving is frequently part of a day’s work at the lab, this time it won special kudos for Bole and Marks.

Creating the machine earned them a 2012 Davis Productivity Award and a 2012 Jeffrey Gabor Superior Accomplishment Award.

Florida State University gives the Gabor award, which comes with a $500 savings bond, to exemplary employees. The Davis award recognizes state employees whose work increases productivity and promotes innovation. The Davis award is co-sponsored by Florida TaxWatch, the Florida Council of 100 and the state of Florida, and its winners are honored at a banquet.

“Scott and Lee never cease to impress,” said Mark Bird, director of the lab’s Magnet Science & Technology. “They’re constantly developing new and excellent ideas, and implementing them, ultimately saving everyone some time and money.”

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FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9 Photo essAy

PFF UNDERGROUND PHOTOS BY DAVE BARFIELD / STORY BY AMY MAST

Los Alamos National Labs can be … less than tour-friendly, at times. Sure, you can schedule something, provided you have identification handy, plan way in advance, and travel to the mountains of New Mexico first. But we decided to make it a little easier.

Our Pulsed Field Facility (PFF) is home to, among other research resources, the world’s strongest pulsed magnet system. Pulsed magnets are a type of research equipment that delivers ultra-high magnetic fields for very short periods of time — just a fraction of a second, in fact. Those fractions are enough time for researchers to glean valuable information about the fundamental properties of materials, from metals and superconductors to semiconductors and insulators.

Let’s take a peek at some of the infrastructure and instrumentation that makes this place work.

Santa Fe National Forest Los Alamos

TA-03

TA-61 TA-35

TA-73 TA-60 TA-53 Photo courtesy of LANL

LOS ALAMOS NAT’L LAB 1,280 BLDGS. SPREAD ACROSS 36 SQ. MILES • 47 TECHNICAL AREAS • 1 POWER PLANT • 10,751 EMPLOYEES • EST. 1953

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Los Alamos airport

TA-21

PULSEd FIELd FACILITY 3 BLDGS. LOCATED IN TECHNICAL AREA 35 60,000 SQ. FEET • 12 MAGNETS • 1 GENERATOR • 32 EMPLOYEES • EST. 1996

TA-74

FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9

What is that thing in the front yard?

The rusted thing in the front yard of the Pulsed Field Facility actually used to fit inside the building. The Pulsed Field Facility is the building’s third scientific use. The first was a giant carbon dioxide laser, and the thing you’re looking at was the housing for that laser. The experiment lost its funding and the housing was put on blocks in the grass, where it has stayed. The second use of the building was dubbed ATLAS, a failed fusion attempt that, like the giant laser, required a large capacitor bank. Giant holes on the interior of the building point to where the original housing was mounted.

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FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9

CAPACITOR BANK

This capacitor bank is the link between the PFF’s huge generator and the biggest pulsed magnet in the world. No wonder it gets its own room. Its job is to store the energy produced by the generator before it is dumped into the pulsed magnet. The capacitor bank must be charged by the generator for each individual 15-millisecond magnet pulse.

The amount of electricity carried by this bank is extremely dangerous and training is required before you can pass the fence (much less touch anything).

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Bldg. 294 - Floor 2

FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9

CRYOSTAT FOR 100 TESLA MAGNET Pulsed magnets — and most research magnets, for that matter — are not built of a piece, but are made up of thousands of parts requiring decades of research. This seven-foot-tall pole is the cryostat for the 100 T magnet system.

It slides inside the outer body of the magnet, controlling the experiment’s temperature and other factors. The magnet probe, holding the experiment itself, slides inside the middle of the cryostat.

For more information about pulsed magnets go to www.magnet.fsu.edu/define-pulse

100 T magnet

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FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9

SINGLE-TURN MAGNET

The single-turn magnet, with a magnetic field of 190 tesla and a pulse of 4 milliseconds, is an interesting, dangerous business: The magnet’s housed in a metal cage and its central pieces self-destruct and must be rebuilt after each use. When it’s fired, you must house your body in a different cage until it’s over. Pictured are PFF director Chuck Mielke (with goatee), staff scientist Scott Crooker, and Rice University’s Layla Booshehri, mid-experiment.

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FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9

Underneath the 1400 MEGAVOLt AMPEre generator The Pulsed Field Facility’s 240ton generator is so massive and so powerful that it can’t sit on the ground; the vibrations it produces would destroy anything you tried to place it on (including the bedrock of the earth). The generator instead rests on a massive spring system with an empty basement floor below it. When the generator is running, you can place your hands on the pictured walls and floors and feel them vibrating.

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FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9 Cover feAture

By KAthLeeN LAuFeNBerg

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FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9

buiLd-A-bot

Members of SAIL High School’s robotics club spend their afternoons drawing, designing, measuring, welding, wiring, drilling, cutting, writing code and assembling a robot that can shoot basketballs. With help from teachers and MagLab staff, they make it all the way to an international competition.

“Want to build a robot?”

That’s the question JaSun Burdick, a highschool science teacher, posed to his physics students at SAIL (School for Arts and Innovative Learning) two years ago. He’d heard about an international robot competition for high-schoolers and thought it might be fun.

His students agreed. They chose a name for their robotics club — the Octo-π-rates (pronounced Octo-Pirates) — and launched a search for the necessary booty. They needed a variety of tools and the right people to teach them machining skills and offer engineering expertise.

Enter the Magnet Lab. MagLab master technician John Farrell, engineer Scott Bole, research assistant Jerris Hooker and a host of others spent countless hours mentoring the teens,

who often dye their hair purple (their team color) to show their enthusiasm. Farrell also donated scores of his own drills, wrenches, saws and other tools to the team, and the MagLab donated a lathe and mill.

“We started out with just about nothing the first year of the robotics club,” Hooker said. “But more and more people kept getting involved, and by the second year, things just fell into place.”

By mid-February of 2012, the Octo-π-rates had drilled, welded and done the math needed to complete their second robot and compete at the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition in the University of Central Florida Arena.

CONTINUED >

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FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9 piled into three rented vans. And they were off.

MOre hurDLes

An initial drawing of the robot.

Each of the 64 teams entered in the competition had received the same instructions and parts kit in January. Each team then had six weeks to completely build a robot that could shoot basketballs and traverse a small bridge.

Before the mighty Octo-π-rates could scuttle south to compete, however, a critical test remained. They needed to power up their machine — dubbed “the Farrell Beast” in honor of their MagLab mentor — and make sure it worked.

But aaarrgh, matey! The ’bot shook violently and nothing more.

“It should have worked,” said SAIL senior Cory Jackson, 18. “We knew we had a problem with our flywheel. We knew it wasn’t centered correctly. But we had no clue how to fix it.”

They did know whom to call, however: the beast’s namesake.

“John came over and walked us through how to change it so it would work,” Cory said. “Instead of doing things for you, he would kind of show you how to start it off and then let you take over and do things for yourself, so you could learn.”

Ready to go, the team hoisted the 111-pound Farrell Beast into Burdick’s old Ford pickup. Most of the 16 Octo-π-rates

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On the way, Burdick’s 15-year-old truck broke down. SAIL science teacher and club co-sponsor John Schaller stayed to work on it while the rest of the team zoomed onward to the Orlando robot matches. It was the OctoOcto-π-rates’ second time to compete in the annual March throw-down, and they were raring to go.

Or so they thought.

Upon their arrival to the three-day event, they freed the Farrell Beast from its box. They readied their remote control and — something went awry.

“We had written new code that we hadn’t really tested and nothing worked,” Cory said.

They tried not to panic.

“That’s one of the things they had to learn: Do not panic,” Farrell said of the skills he tried to teach. “You cannot panic.

You just fix it.”

At first, staying fairly calm wasn’t too hard.

“But as the day went by, and it still didn’t work, that changed,” said Brenna Wonsey, a 16-year-old SAIL sophomore.

All day, the team tried to puzzle out what was wrong. The Farrell Beast — powered with a 12-volt, 18-amp-hour battery — worked fine when they plugged their controls directly into it. But when they tried to run it remotely, in order to compete, it went kaput.

“It wouldn’t even drive when we brought it out on the floor in front of everybody,” said Burdick, the team’s advisor.

“It would just sit there and do nothing.”

Luckily, the first day of the three-day meet is all about fixing whatever unexpected problems each team encounters — and many of the 64 high-school teams were scrambling to fix their robots. The less experience a team has in building ‘bots, the more likely they are to run into snafus. And while the Octo-π-rates would put on a stunning final showing, they still

ABOVE the first day of competition, teams run around trying to help each other out. the octo-π-rates can be seen on the lower right.

FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9 had some surprises ahead of them.

By the end of the first day, things truly looked grim. When the judges announced, “time to go home,” the Octo-π-rates still hadn’t gotten their beast to budge.

“We said, ‘No, no — you have to help us fix it!’ ” Burdick recalled. “We’d met with everybody we could. We’d tried everything we knew how. But we didn’t know how to fix it.”

Then, at the 11th hour, their swashbuckling determination paid off.

COMPETITION SOUVENIR

The Farrell Beast can shoot hoops, traverse uneven terrain and cross small bridges.

FLYWHEEL SHOOTER SPONSOR STICKERS

gettINg grACIOus “Some really high-up expert with National Instruments came by, and he had this little special pin drive that he plugged into our computer,” Burdick said.

A line of code was missing, he told them.

Wendy Chan, a mechanical engineer as well as Burdick’s spouse, stepped in and quickly wrote the needed code. The Octoπ-rates were finally ready!

Actually, the unknown expert was modeling what the contest organizers call “gracious professionalism.” They nurture this trait during the matches with special awards and points. As a result, the teens really do help one another.

“Every five minutes, someone from another team comes into your pit and says, ‘Hey, do you need help with anything? You need any materials? You need a programmer?’ ” Burdick said. “And if they didn’t have it, they would go find it for you. So the really strong teams, with huge numbers and lots of resources, actually come help the other teams that are weaker or just rookies.”

Once the competition starts, however, the battle is on. Then, at the end of each round, it’s back to helping each other.

“I’ve never seen that in any other form of life, not in college or in companies,”

CONVEYOR SYSTEM

MECHANICAL ARM

AXIS CAMERA

BATTERY

MOTOR (SPEED) CONTROLLERS

ROUTER

COMPUTER

BALL PICK-UP

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FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9 Tallahassee team likes to relax: juggling.

In order to be an Octo-π-rate, you’ve got to become a juggler, too.

“They all thought it was really cool,” Emily said. “Everyone was like, ‘Wow! Robots and juggling!’ The whole competition was like a three-day adrenaline rush.

When I got home, I said, ‘Wow! Now that’s living!’ ”

‘the KIDs DID It’

lEFt the Farrell beast (3502) shoots a basket during competition.

RIGht JaSun burdick with emily gardner as she accepts a Dean’s List Finalist award.

Burdick said. “The organizers have really spent a lot of energy trying to foster gracious professionalism.”

And blimey, but the Octo-π-rates liked this gracious policy!

“After all the hard work, you really want to see the best robot win,” Cory said.

“That’s what I really like: It’s all about the skill. It’s about the best robot.”

After a shaky start, the Farrell Beast soon found its stride.

“During the main-event day, we were unbelievably in first place until the final hour or so of competition,” co-sponsor Schaller said proudly. “We — and everyone else — were amazed that a secondyear team rose to the top and stayed there through most of the day.”

“Nobody expected it,” Hooker agreed.

“It was absolutely crazy. The kids got so To see robot-building, competition footage and more visit: www.youtube.com/octopirates

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excited. They were screaming and jumping up and down.”

But in the last round of matches, Schaller said, “we fell steadily from first to fourth to seventh.”

Out of the 64 high-school teams (some coming from as far away as Australia and Germany) competing, the mighty Octo-πrates ultimately came in 7th — a fantastic showing for a second-year team.

“We were just thrilled,” said Burdick.

“All our hard work from the year before really paid off.”

Team member Emily Gardner, 17, also won the Dean’s List Finalist Award, given to individuals who are technically savvy and exceptional team leaders. She kept everyone up to date on the Octo-π-rates’ Facebook page and showed her team spirit with serious pirate panache: She was one of several Octo-π-rates to shave the number 3502 into her hair (the competition number assigned to the team’s robot), dye her tresses purple and wear purple at the competition.

She and other Octo-π-rates also graciously showed their competitors how the

What impressed MagLab engineer and Octo-π-rates mentor Scott Bole about the SAIL club was that the kids themselves do the lion’s share of the work.

“If you see a weld that’s messy, that’s because the kids did the welding, not their parents or a hired professional,” said Bole, who was instrumental in helping the club design its first robot. “If you see extra holes, that’s because the kids put the robot together themselves.”

The team came to the MagLab several times to learn machining skills from Farrell, welder Willie Nixon, machine-shop supervisor Vaughan Williams and others.

“When we went to the machine shop, it was like, ‘Wow! This is how it really is!’”

Emily said. “That’s what I want to do. I like making things and problem solving.”

After learning how to safely weld, use a band saw and lathe, she also learned about proper measuring.

“Measuring was a big thing for me. Basics like that can really make or break your final project.”

Watching the kids learn made all the effort worthwhile, their MagLab mentors agreed.

“Their sense of accomplishment, it was pretty overwhelming,” Farrell said.

“They worked hard, and we’re all really proud of them.

“Next year, I bet they’ll do even better.”

FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9

fuZZy reAdings

Powerlines, radio waves and telephone signals all produce electrical noise which can interfere with sensitive scientific experiments — especially the kind done at the MagLab. Though we can shield experiments from those kinds of interferences, one kind of noise will always remain constant, because it’s caused by the heat of moving atoms.

mAgLAb reseArCh

What’s noise? (We can explain)

BY AMY MAST Do you know a scientist? Old or young, student or professor, most experimentalists have a beef with noise. It’s messing up their experiment!

There’s too much of it! The people who designed their equipment weren’t taking it into account!

When scientists complain this way, they (mostly) aren’t talking about acoustic noise — the sound of babies crying, pans rattling, car doors slamming or crowds cheering. They’re talking about the whisper of Mother Nature at work, says MagLab physicist Albert Migliori. We’ll dig into what this whisper is, why it matters, and how, complaining aside, noise can be a scientist’s friend.

Albert, what is noise?

Noise! What a wonderful subject! I can talk about noise the way some people talk about love.

When scientists talk about noise, they’re talking about something very different than you might think. You have to realize that there are some things that are so perfectly controlled by Mother Nature that they become immensely valuable to science. Noise is one of them in the very best sense.

But what IS it?

The kind of noise I’m talking about sounds to the ear like a hiss. The hiss doesn’t have any

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FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9

GLOSSARY

Here’s a list of some of the terms Albert uses:

Noise A random fluctuation in an electrical signal. Noise determines the limit of the smallest thing measureable in an experiment.

Signal-to-noise ratio The proportion of useful versus not-useful information in an experimental process.

Thermodynamics The study of the relationship between heat and other forms of energy — and where you’ve got energy, you’ve got noise.

particular quality about it. If I listen to the hiss 10 minutes from now it sounds exactly the way it will sound five minutes, 20 minutes, or two seconds from now. The hiss of noise is a steady background that sounds like a waterfall or running water.

Interference, which is the stuff that men and women make — man-made and electrical noise — would come from the spark plugs firing in a car that’s started outside the lab, or the graduate student texting on their cell phone and hitting send, or the radio station on campus transmitting in the same frequency noise where we’re trying to measure. Those are common causes of interference; we also get them from lightning during storms.

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Absolute Zero The lowest temperature theoretically possible, in which absolutely minimal heat energy would be left in an atom. (Or you can just call it minus 459.67 degrees F.) Generally, the less heat is present in your experiment, the less noise there is.

Entropy The number of states available to a system at a given temperature.

Frequency How often an event occurs in a given period of time.

So noise is a hiss?

After we get rid of interference — all that man-made stuff and lightning and that sort of thing — what’s left is the purest kind of noise. Mother Nature’s thermal noise comes to us because we are not at Absolute Zero in temperature.

That noise is really, really special. It connects to the most fundamental arguments about the arrow of time and nature, about thermodynamics, which is a set of approximations of how heat and energy are connected. And even though they’re approximations, they’re very precise and that’s one of the few phenomena in physics that tells you which way time is marching. Noise, thermodynamics and entropy are almost the same things, to a physicist.

Wait, so do you like noise or not?

For the scientists at the MagLab, noise is our enemy because it clouds our ability to see the results of an experiment. Yet it’s also our friend because it tells us when we can stop trying to make the experiment better.

Mother Nature, in almost all circumstances, puts a quantitative number on what noise has to be. Mother Nature tells us that you can’t make things “quieter” than a certain level. That level is determined by the temperature of your experimental environment, and nothing else. If you’re a scientist at the MagLab, this is a relief.

Say you have an experiment and you have a lot of noise and you need to get rid of it. Somebody’s yakking in the hallway, you can close the door, right? But scientists have radio transmitters and cell phones and all this stuff in our modern world, generating electrical noise. You keep shielding and shielding, but then when you get down to Mother Nature’s limit, you can stop. You don’t have to keep working on it anymore because you can’t make it any quieter.

Why is having a lot of noise a problem for a scientist?

When you’re driving down the road making a cell phone call (which you shouldn’t be doing) with the windows open (which is even dumber), the wind noise makes it hard to hear the voice on the cell phone. Then, the wind noise goes through the cell phone microphone and makes it hard for the other person to hear you. That’s exactly what noise does in the laboratory. It introduces random signals that are not what we’re trying to measure.

Minimizing those random signals makes it possible to see something more clearly.

Now, the problem at the MagLab

FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9 is that many of these signals are really, really, really tiny. It’s not like at a rock concert where it’s impossible to drown out the concert speakers.

At the lab, all the experiments are whispering to us. That is often the problem scientists face at the MagLab, and to hear that whisper we need to make the rest of the room absolutely quiet. That means we have to get rid of every possible source of noise that we can get rid of. Because Mother Nature has given us the answer to what the minimum is, we know exactly how far we should go.

What does the scientist do to control/ understand/ mitigate noise?

The physicist does exactly the same thing that the guy who built your car radio does. You’ve

What does noise look like to a scientist?

This graph depicts a simulation of “Johnson noise” (also refered to as thermal noise). When you remove all other noise — made by people, machines and the earth — what’s left is thermal noise generated by moving atoms.

The fluctuating white line on the graph represents the pressure you feel in your ears when you hear the noise.

got a radio antenna sitting on your car. Say you turn it to an FM station. Why is it that you can hear that station and not the police, air-traffic controllers, cell phone conversations, and other radio stations? How in the world does that work?

How does that antenna only pick out one?

It turns out that the amount of noise energy at any given frequency is fixed, and it’s all the same out to very, very high frequencies. If I can make a radio transmitter located on campus put out more energy at a particular single frequency than Mother Nature’s noise, then I win. In fact, even at 100 miles from a transmitter on a 100foot tower putting out 50,000 watts, I can beat Mother Nature’s noise at that one frequency.

So now I make a radio receiver that only senses that one frequency and doesn’t pick up anything else by doing a little bit of electronic magic. The magic is straightforward and we’ve been doing it this way for 100 years. It’s just a little technical engineering trick that says I can’t see anything but this particular radio frequency.

So the scientist does the same thing. Once you’ve gotten rid of the noise you don’t really want, the noise that remains tells us a lot about physics systems. The properties of noise, and the way they come out of some physical process that we’re trying to understand at the MagLab, are really powerful, because they’re so tied up with the most fundamental systems of thermodynamics and entropy. Anything that modifies that thermal noise tells us tremendous amounts about the physics if we’re sharp enough to use it. Looking at the noise itself becomes a powerful experimental technique.

I can’t hear you!

“Imagine driving down the highway at 75 MPH with all of your windows open while trying to understand someone whispering to you from the other end of your cell phone. That is what noise is like,” says Albert Migliori, MagLab staff scientist.

To hear this noise go to: www.magnet.fsu.edu/noise

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FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9 MagLab research

Recycling helium

Many of the research magnets at the MagLab use liquid helium.

Since the heliumrecovery system upgrade, the lab is recycling more and consuming less.

What goes up, must come down

Helium-recovery project means major savings, more focus on science

BY AMY MAST Helium is big news lately, and for the most part, the news isn’t good.

The global dwindling of this nonrenewable, lighter-than-air resource has been underlined by the government’s 1996 decision to liquidate its reserves by 2015 and to privatize the industry — a move that’s already had a global impact on prices, worried hospitals that use liquid helium for MRI, and has some scientists calling for a ban on (gasp!) party balloons. The MagLab is a major helium customer and, with the construction of a heliumrecovery system, is poised for major helium conservation (and major savings).

The ongoing project, which began in 2006,

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met its two key goals: to better serve the supply needs of the lab’s scientific community, and as more magnets are built, to position the lab to grow.

Of course, the cost savings don’t hurt either.

“Last year, a million dollars worth of helium gas left the building and went into the atmosphere.

Whether it came though the recovery system and vented, or came out of leaky pipes, it may as well have been dollar bills,” said DC Facilities and Instrumentation Director Scott Hannahs. “This year will transform that.”

Helium is used to cool each of the lab’s many superconducting magnet systems: the lab’s flagship 45 tesla hybrid magnet, the three magnets

FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9 upwards of $1 million per year on helium deliveries. That number is expected to drop to a projected $250,000 annually.

Because recycling a liter of helium costs a relatively modest $1.50, that dramatic drop in expenditure should recoup the cost of the system in three to four years.

The MagLab is a major helium customer and with the construction of a helium-recovery system, is poised for major helium conservation (and major savings).

An essential research resource

MagLab staff pitch in to help lay in new pipes as part of the helium-recovery project.

in the lab’s Millikelvin Facility and the 900 MHz magnet, which is the world’s strongest MRI scanner. Because we use so much of the stuff and are located near a major distribution center, the lab is relatively lucky; the MagLab pays between $4.00 and $5.50 for a liter. Compare that to $10-$12 a liter in New England and up to $25 a liter in China, and you see why

conserving, recycling, and monitoring the remaining supply of helium is international news.

It was this need to both conserve helium and cut costs that prompted the lab to launch its helium-recovery project.

Today — six years and $7 million later — the projected savings are staggering.

Pre-upgrade, the lab typically spent

Labs like the MagLab use liquid helium because it gets colder than anything else so freely available, and it remains liquid even at the lowest temperatures. At minus 452.1 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s got the lowest known boiling point of any element on the periodic table. Superconductivity — a phenomenon both studied at the MagLab and used in our magnet systems — is only presently possible in ultra-cold environments, and our suite of superconducting magnets couldn’t function without it. Helium is the only commercially available, easily transportable substance that gets so cold.

Of course, the lab has plenty of resistive

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FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9

The Life of a Liter How Helium Recycling Works

Amarillo, tX tallahassee, FL tampa, Fl

MAgNet LAB

1. HELIUM PLANT The Magnet Lab gets its helium gas from Amarillo, Texas. Helium gas is released from the ground as a by-product of natural gas extraction. Helium cannot be made artificially, which makes it a nonrenewable resource.

magnets that don’t require the use of helium, but these often can’t facilitate the same kind of low-noise environment needed for subtler scientific observations, and they’re useless for the type of imaging you can do in an MRI machine.

imProving diAgnostiCs & infrAstruCture

Imagine if instead of a check engine light or a temperature gauge, your car had only a blinking light that said, “SOMETHING IS WRONG.” Pretty annoying, right? That’s roughly what the lab’s cryogenics support staff were working with before the upgraded system was installed. A broken recovery system could also result in some tough choices — stop a scientist’s experiment or continue it and waste helium?

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2. TRANSIT A train picks up the helium and takes it to Tampa. From there, a truck transports it to Tallahassee and delivers it to our receiving area at the back of the lab.

Hannahs says of the transition, “With the old recovery system, we had very little instrumentation to try to figure out what was actually going on. Keeping helium clean is a huge job. When helium gets polluted with water or air, it’s a nightmare and you have people working until 3 a.m. to make sure it doesn’t cost users magnet time. Air in the helium is bad, and water is REALLY bad. With the new system, it’s really improved diagnostics and given our team members the tools to do their job a lot better with a lot less stress and a lot more reliability. It takes away that feeling of crisis mode that our cyrogenics team has taken as part of its job for 15 years.”

Equipment can only take the lab so far; retooling the lab’s helium efficiency requires an infrastructure overhaul

3. BACKYARD STORAGE The helium is stored in bullet-shaped storage containers in the backyard until it’s needed, then it’s pumped into the building via underground pipes.

from the (under)ground up. On many weekends, crews roam the lab’s halls trying to isolate sources of helium leaks and contamination. These leaks harm efficiency, of course, but they also bring air and water into the purifier, costing more time and money than necessary.

Some sections of pipe are so deeply buried inside the building that the facilities team is still figuring out how to access them.

moderniZing mAgnet systems

Helium loaded into a magnet stays cool for a highly variable amount of time, depending on the researcher’s goals and the magnet’s construction. Keeping a steady, stable, experimental environment is a heck of a lot more helium-efficient than an experiment where a sample must

FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9

compressor 4. LIQUEFACTION & DISTRIBUTION The gas is supercooled and liquefied, then it travels directly into the 45 tesla hybrid magnet system or it’s poured into individual containers (called dewars). During that pour, contact with the air causes about 25 percent of the liquid to boil off.

be rapidly cooled.

The lab’s 900 MHz superconducting magnet, otherwise known as the world’s strongest MRI machine, uses a full quarter of the lab’s helium on its own — as much as 1,500 liters a week.

Built seven years ago, the 900 MHz was the first magnet of its kind. Were this magnet designed again from scratch, its consumption would be lower. Another quarter of helium is used by the lab’s Millikelvin Facility — where not only does the helium cool the magnet, it also cools the sample to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero.

This might sound outrageous, but everything’s relative, and superconducting magnet systems operate far more cheaply than the lab’s

5. MAGNET POUR Scientists roll dewars down the hall to the magnet that needs it. It’s poured into the magnet, and during the pour, another 25% boils off into the air.

electromagnets. Fifteen hundred liters of helium in a week at $4 dollars a liter is $6,000, right? Compare that to the thousands of dollars per hour a resistive magnet can use in electricity costs, and it’s easy to understand why engineers are moving toward superconducting systems.

At the MagLab and elsewhere, newer magnets and MRI systems are designed with helium efficiency as an important consideration. One new magnet will have a self-contained recycling system with a built-in fridge, and should use only 300 liters of helium per year.

“We’re going to get more large superconducting systems and hybrid magnets; it’s how the lab will grow,” said Hannahs. “It comes down to smart design meeting smart resource management.”

6. RECYCLING After its (highly variable) time in the magnet, helium travels through pipes back to a gas bag, which looks for all the world like a massively inflated plastic grocery bag with no handles. From there, it’s compressed, purified and stored for the next round.

Beyond Research Other Uses of Helium • Party balloons • Blimps • MRI machines • Gas leak detection • Semiconductor manufacturing • Used to relieve nitrogen narcosis (“the bends”) in deep-sea divers

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FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9 MagLab research

What’s in an oil drop?

A tiny oil droplet can contain hundreds of thousands of types of molecules. At the MagLab, we can count every single one. complex recipes

Cooked up inside the earth over thousands of years, petroleum is the world’s most complex substance. Using the MagLab’s ICR magnet system, chemist Amy McKenna deciphers every one of it’s 300,000+ ingredients.

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PHOTOS BY DAVE BARFIELD / STORY BY AMY McKENNA, MAGLAB CHEMIST

Y

ou might think all crude oil looks, smells and feels the same. On a certain level, that’s true: All petroleum is mostly made up of molecules that contain carbon and hydrogen. But on a molecular level, crude oil also contains wildly varying amounts of nitrogen, sulfur, oxygen and heavy metals.

In fact, crude oil is the most complex substance our planet has ever cooked up — one sample can contain more than 300,000 different types of molecules. Those molecules harbor important information about the oil. They can tell us how much gasoline it can produce, if it will rust steel pipes or form nasty deposits in pipelines, and even exactly where it came from (important for determining who is responsible for an oil spill).

Petroleomics is the analysis of crude oil at the molecular level. It’s the field I specialize in, and it’s one that the MagLab has aggressively pioneered in recent years. The lab boasts some of the best instruments and most experienced

scientists in the field and, by the end of 2013, will house the strongest magnet ever used to examine chemical samples. The new magnet will be at the core of a state-of-the-art Fourier Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance (let’s just call it FT-ICR) mass spectrometer to be used to pick apart crude oil and other samples.

FT-ICR and other kinds of mass spectrometers (MS) are a very precise kind of “atom scale” that weighs and counts molecules in a sample. Each type of molecule on earth has its own unique mass. Water (H 20) has a mass of 18.0106 atomic mass units (or amu). Octane (C8H18) has a mass of 114.23 amu. Our sensitive FT-ICR machines measure that weight based on how that molecule behaves inside a magnetic field.

The combination of magnetic muscle and sensitivity provided by FT-ICR MS results in a “molecular fingerprint” for each sample.

The following pictures show how I use the lab’s unique tools to map out these complex substances.

FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9

2. PREPARe the sample Because the ICR machine is so sensitive, the oil doesn’t go into the machine full-strength. Just a fraction of a drop of oil is enough. First, I weigh it and dilute it in a solvent (toluene).

CONTINUED > A sample of crude oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

1. START WITH A Sample The MagLab’s FT-ICR facility tests hundreds of petroleum samples every year. The sample pictured here came from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill: Scientists wanted to know its exact chemical makeup so they could better monitor the spill’s long-term effects on the fish, plants and other elements of the Gulf of Mexico’s ecosystem.

Solvent Oil dilution

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FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9

Evaporation chamber

3. LOAD THE SAMPLE Next, I load the sample into the machine via a specialized rig. The oil dilution enters a custom-made nozzle that tapers to a tip so narrow a human hair couldn’t pass through. A high voltage (+) is applied to this tip, charging the molecules as they pass through. Sharing the same high charge, these molecules repel one another almost violently as they leave the tip in a hairspray stream and burst into an evaporation chamber.

Having done its job, the solvent in these droplets evaporates, leaving behind the charged petroleum molecules.

Petroleum molecules Nozzle tip

Amy McKenna holds a magnifying glass, which she uses to inspect the flow of the sample into the machine.

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4. Monitor, adjust, tweak Okay, that was the science. Now comes the art. In order to get good results, I have to monitor and tweak constantly. Petroleum tends to stick to everything, so it’s tricky to work with.

If the voltage is too high, the spray will split into two streams. If it’s too low, it will sputter. I use lights and a magnifying glass to look at the spray cone.

It becomes borderline OCD to keep an eye on the spray, but stable spray is the key. The near-fanatical care taken throughout the process results in better measurements.

FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9

Oil molecules in the sample are prepared for their journey to the center of the magnetic field.

The ICR magnet

5. Guide the sample into the magnet The next trick is to deliver the sample into the magnet.

This is a feat in and of itself, because the molecules must travel from normal atmospheric pressure to a pressure like that of outer space! This incredible drop in pressure sucks the molecules inside the magnet.

Amy McKenna and David Podgorski observe data from their experiment.

On the top of the screen is the funnel-like time domain signal. Below, that signal has been converted to a mass spectrum.

The rig

Measuring equipment

6. Weigh and interpret Each type of molecule has a unique mass and, when charged and exposed to a strong magnetic field, it will interact with that field by rotating in a unique way. Which means, in a nutshell, that I must sit very quietly and listen very attentively to the signals each molecule makes.

Once I have my data, I do some pretty fancy math that results in a list, by weight, of all the different molecules in the sample.

As impressive as the length of this list can be — remember, crude oil can be hundreds of thousands of molecules long — even more impressive is the capacity of MagLab instruments to tell the difference between molecules very close in atomic mass. In fact, we’re better than anyone at picking apart near-identical molecules — and we have the world record in mass resolution to prove it!

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FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9 education + outreach

Research Experiences

S presenting posters

Teacher Faith Shiver, who worked on a superconductingwire project with fellow teacher Mark Hall, explains the project to a visitor during a poster presentation at the Magnet Lab.

working in the lab

While undergraduate intern Lorena Sanchez and graduate research assistant Shermane Benjamin discuss some of Shanchez’s findings, they joke about transistors.

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ummer was busy at the lab this year: 11 teachers and 18 undergraduates did internships here. They came from as far away as California and Puerto Rico to study with some of the best scientists and engineers in the world.

“I’m totally thrilled to have had this experience and to be able to come back and share some of it with my students,” said Mark Hall, a 41-year-old eighth-grade science teacher from Tennessee. “When I teach electromagnetism this year, I’m going to do a few things differently after spending the summer at the lab.”

Instead of having his students present their findings by writing a paper, for example, Hall plans to have them create large posters.

Scientists at the lab present their method, data and findings via posters, which line many of the lab’s hallways. Hall and his lab partner, fellow teacher Faith Shiver, created and presented such a poster on their joint superconducting-wire project at the end of the internship.

Lorena Sanchez, a talented undergraduate engineering intern, found both inspiration and motivation in one of her lab mentors, scientist Eden Steven, who was exploring using cocoon silk to make transistors.

“Seeing Eden’s enthusiasm, and just being able to input my own ideas, that’s really nice,” the 22-year-old said. “It’s more like you want to be here instead of you have to be here.

That’s the atmosphere of this lab. So the last few nights, I’ve stayed here until 7 or 8 p.m. just because I want my ideas to work. It’s more like a drive now.”

Then Sanchez discovered how much fun research could be when she began working with research assistant Shermane Benjamin.

“It’s nice to be in the lab with people who have similar interests. You can laugh and talk about transistors, or get real excited about something. You’re not the only geek in the room! Shermane is really funny and Eden is always trying different things. He stayed up here until 2 in the morning trying some crazy paper idea. It didn’t work, but he’s always trying different things.”

INTERNSHIPS

Think you might be interested in spending your summer investigating superconductors, nanoparticles, crystals, transistors, Martian meteorites — or perhaps learning how to build magnets? Teachers accepted into the Research Experiences for Teachers program spend six weeks at the lab working with a mentor and receive a stipend of $3,600. Travel reimbursements are possible, too. Students in the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program receive a stipend of $3,600 as well, and spend eight weeks at the lab. Housing is also provided. For more info, go to: www.magnet.fsu.edu/education.

FLUX MAGAZINE Issue 9

last look

What is B/T?

B refers to the magnetic field.

The T stands for temperature.

Scientists come to the High B/T facility to conduct experiments in high magnetic fields (up to 15 tesla) and at very low temperatures (down to 0.4 millikelvin).

At left

Postdoctoral scholar Chao Haun works in a magnet bay at the MagLab’s High B/T Facility at the University of Florida.

above

The High B/T Facility at THE University of Florida

If you stood where Haun was standing and you looked up, this would be the view.

At the Magnet Lab’s University of Florida High B/T facility, scientists use ultra-cold temperatures to slow down particles enough to attempt to understand how they move. Experiments are subtle, analyzing data is time-consuming, and a single experiment can take six months.

The cramped quarters inside the facility are akin to that of a submarine.

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Issue 9 1800 E. Paul Dirac Drive Tallahassee, FL 32310-3706 (850) 644-0311 (850) 644-8350

magnet.fsu.edu

on the cover Industrious students enlist teachers and MagLab staff to help build a robot that shoots hoops for a robotics competition. Find out how they did in the “Robotics Club� story on page 16.

Flux is supported by the National Science Foundation and the state of Florida

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