Well, it’s been a truncated but highly productive week for me. The return to MIT, if only briefly, was meant to focus my efforts on developing the simulation of a background veto system for the proposed “Braidwood Reactor Neutrino Experiment”:http://braidwood.uchicago.edu. One of the primary needs of this experiment is a robust and efficient system capable of protecting our primary detector from the intrusions of muons and neutrons into our experiment.
I’ve completed a few of the development milestones I set out to achieve. The basis of the simulation is a toolkit called “GEANT4”:http://wwwasd.web.cern.ch/wwwasd/geant4/geant4.html. I have spent a lot of time learning how to use this framework (many thanks to the organizer of the SLAC GEANT4 users’ workshop in 2004!). Right now, I’ve managed to make a multi-layered, multi-sided veto detector which is made ofsome well-defined solid material and which can register hits (that is, interactions between a muon and one of the detector elements).
Having managed this, I am very much looking forward to seeing my sister and brother-in-law, as well as my old pal Eric, down in Connecticut during the weekend. It’s only once or twice a year that I get to see any of them, so this will be a real treat for me. This weekend will also be a nice dividing line between the run through this week and the run through next.
