Living LIGO's Belated 3rd Anniversary

This past Saturday, 5 October, was the 3rd anniversary of the Living LIGO blog (you can see the first ever post here).  I remember that because it also happens to be my birthday - I started this out of a desire to do something I always wanted to so what a better day to start than your own birthday.  (If you must know, I've just celebrated the 6th anniversary of turning 29.)

I know it has been a long time since I've posted.  I've been teaching at LSU and doing research at LIGO.  On paper my life looks great but the reality is that there are many details, both personal and professional, that have added up to me not being in a great place for a while.  I've been getting my jobs done but after that I've been pretty exhausted, at least mentally.  This has happened to me before, so I thought I would direct you to my thoughts on what it's like being down but getting up again anyway here.  (Also see my last section below: "A WORD OF ADVICE...".)

But there is one thought that has come up many times in the last few months:  "I'd like to write a blog post on that."  There are many different things, like continuing the series of posts I've started about methods of looking for gravitational waves or telling the story of where silver and gold come from (as in, how did it come to be on Earth).  So, I am going to dig myself out of my slump and get back on my metaphorical horse - starting now!


WHAT I DID THIS SUMMER

Let me tell you a little about what I've been doing since I've last posted.  I got to go to a large meeting called the GR20/Amaldi10 Meeting in Warsaw, Poland (where almost 850 gravity theorists and experimentalists gathered for this joint meeting) and gave 2 invited talks.  The first was a formal talk on outreach skills and media (featuring this blog) and the other was less formal and was on the benefits searching for gravitational waves can bring mankind focusing on spin-off technology (I've written about this before here).

This is a picture of the gates of the Uniwersytet Warszawski where GR20/Amaldi10 took place.

A view through the gates at my colleagues on a coffee break in the distance.

One of the best parts of meetings like this is that the meeting dinner is usually somewhere a normal person couldn't go.  Our dinner was at the in the Royal Castle in Warsaw.  And this is my husband and I on the lawn beforehand:

My husband, Derek, and I on the lawn behind the Royal Castle in Warsaw, Poland.

Just before my trip to Warsaw, I took a short holiday to Paris, France.  There was a debacle with lost luggage and then wrong luggage being delivered to us, but outside of wearing the same clothes for a few days (this is why I always pack extra underwear in my carry-on luggage), my husband and I had a great time just relaxing and wondering around.  My new phone takes panoramic pictures and this is a good one I got of the Louvre:

Panoramic view of the Louvre (Paris, France)
Click on the picture for a larger view.

Once I returned home to the United States, I had tons of work to do.  I've talked before about how LIGO has been testing its data infrastructure to prepare for Advanced LIGO here.  We are then had our 4th software engineering run; that means that I had to improve upon the gravitational wave simulation software I wrote to perform better, faster, and incorporate more features.  It was a bit stressful come the deadline, but it all got done and turned out well.


... AND THEN SCHOOL STARTED AGAIN

Then school started again.  I am teaching (at LSU) the first semester of physical science (sometimes referred to as "Physics for Poets" since it is more conceptually based than mathematically focused).  Most of my students in this class (this year my lecture has only about 100 students) are elementary education majors.  Some might think that teaching an "easy" class like this would be, well... easy.  But it is far from it.  The less math you can rely on to teach the subject matter, the better you have to be as a teacher in communicating what the math means.  Since I love challenges like this, this is one of my favorite classes to teach.  I am also team teaching a junior/senior level class on Science Methods for secondary education pre-service teachers majoring in science or math.  This class shows them how science is done by doing experiments using the scientific method, analyzing their data and reporting it in both papers and presentation (since these are the two main means that scientists communicate with each other).

At LIGO, I am working on a paper with a group of other LIGO scientists who are looking for gravitational waves from supernovae that may have occurred while LIGO and/or other gravitational wave observatories were in operation (before the advanced detector upgrade began).  And, as always, I continue to refine my gravitational wave simulation software.


A QUICK WORD OF ADVICE...

I'll be writing again soon (probably next week).  When I first started this blog, I promised you a peek into the life of a working scientist.  Lately I've been answering lots of questions about gravity and how to look for gravitational waves.  But since there has been something major going on in my life, and it kept me from writing my blog as I would have liked, I wanted to share that with you.

I am lucky since even though I know I have times when depression can get the better of me, I have wonderful support from my husband, friends, and family.  I'm not sure why, but they all seem to love me even when I can't stand to be around myself. 

For anyone reading this who has issues with depression and/or anxiety:  Don't fool yourself that everything you are feeling inside is not affecting you because you may be able to keep it together and have others think you are happy.  This will eat at you and everything you are feeling will come out sometime (and usually at the least opportune time).  If you are sad or anxious for long periods of time, even if it's on-and-off, find some help.  It is not weak to seek help (I've been told that before and it's usually by people who need help for themselves and are too afraid to get it).  It takes an inner strength to admit when you are hurting and need a hand up, an ear to listen to you, or a shoulder to cry on.  If that's not enough, talk to your doctor.  Not once has a doctor been anything but 100% supportive of me when I've gone to them seeking medical help.  NOT ONCE did they look down on me, or suggest that my feelings will pass, or that I need to "buck up".  With support and help, I've always clawed my way back to feeling like a normal person.  You can too!

Crawfish Boils and On the Road Again...

Last week's post came to you from the LIGO-Virgo Meeting in Boston, MA.  This week, it is coming to you from Atlanta, GA.  I just arrived here for the APS April Meeting.  My room is a beautiful corner room with two great views!  So I've chosen the better view from one of my windows:

Actually, I am here a day early so that I can attend the Professional Skills Development Workshop which is designed to improve the communication and negotiation skills of women physicists.  I'm looking forward to this as, while I would love to improve my communication skills, I really feel that I need to develop negotiation skills.  I am currently working to transition my current postdoc position (which is temporary by definition) into a more permanent position, not only because I love my work and the opportunities I have here, but my husband also works at the LIGO Livingston Observatory as an engineer.  The fact that I am this early in my career and living under the same roof with my husband, who is also happily employed in his field, is almost unheard of.  This is known as the two-body problem - when two academic professionals are challenged to find a way to find jobs together; I plan to write a blog post on this later.  That being said, I almost want to jump and any offer that can be scrapped together for me - the last thing I want to do is ruin the good thing I have going.  This is exactly one of the reasons that women tend to make less than men, even in physics - we undersell ourselves.  While I have no intention of trying to wring every penny I can out of a new position, I want to make sure that I am at least being compensated properly for my work.

As for the APS April Meeting, I will be giving a talk on the latest burst gravitational wave all-sky search results.  The information for my talk is here and the "plain English" science summary of the paper is here.  Once I give my talk, the presentation will be publicly available on the LIGO Document Control Center (DCC).  I will also be attending the APS Forum on Education Executive Committee Meeting and this will be the last of my term.  I have more than enjoyed the others I was privileged to serve with and it has been wonderful to get a chance to spread my wings a little more in physics education.  Of course, I have days and days of interesting talks and other activities to look forward to.  I will make sure to Tweet points of interest so make sure to follow me @livingligo.  You can also follow others' Tweets from the meeting using the hashtag #APSapril.

Between my trips to Boston last week and this one to Atlanta, I did get to be home in Baton Rouge for a few days.  Yesterday, the observatory staff was updated on the large scale status of the Advanced LIGO upgrade by the program leader, David Shoemaker.  While that was very informative (all is going well), the best part of the day of the crawfish boil we had outside afterwards.  For those of you who don't live in the American South (specifically the deep south), crawfish/crawdads/mudbugs/crayfish (but don't call them the latter around the natives lest you truly out yourself as not one of them) are essentially small freshwater lobsters that yield about the same amount of meat in their tail as a shrimp.  The meal takes "family style" to a new level: everything is served in heaps and you get a tray instead of a plate and it is heaped with the crawfish, sausage, corn-on-the-cob, and potatoes.  Oh yeah, and you don't get utensils.  This is a get-your-hands-dirty kind of meal.  Here is what my lunch looked like (before I started tearing the little critters apart - the communal aftermath from everyone at the table wasn't nearly as pretty):

This is considered a "dainty" portion.  A few other tips on how to fit in as a local:

• Don't sit while you eat crawfish - you stand so that the juice that can sometimes explode out of the body when you separate the tail from the head doesn't get all over you.
• Suck the heads!  Once your remove the tail, don't through away the top part of the body - that's where all the best flavor is.  As I have never done this myself, I am not sure if they are referring to the seasoned boil that remains inside or if they actually suck the "stuff" out.  To me, it just looks like the poor thing is trying to escape!
• Again, don't call them crayfish.

And a point of common sense - take your watch off!  Mine still smells like crawfish!

March LIGO-Virgo Meeting in Boston

So, I am at the LIGO-Virgo Meeting in Boston right now.  As you may (or may not) know, our two collaborations are very close knit.  We schedule our upgrades to be around the same time, we always share our data, and we collaborate on our science to get the most from our work.  Being a part of a big international collaboration is exciting and gives you a new perspective on international politics - in science they exist, but are much easier to deal with since we are all working for the same goal.

Here is the gorgeous view from my hotel window:

Personal Complexes:

Another thing about being one of over 800 scientists and engineers working on a project is that you can feel small.  I've written before about the Impostor Syndrome - when people who are fully qualified and competent feel inadequate.  Sometimes, these meetings bring those feelings back to me.  Every time someone comes to me and asks me what I do, I feel like my worth is being weighed.  But it absolutely isn't!  After all, I do the same thing to new colleagues that I meet and I am only interested in learning more about them and maybe working with them in the future.

I was starting to feel inferior while I was traveling here...  I was sitting at my gate during a layover and a colleague I consider a friend was sitting in his seat diligently working on his computer.  What was I doing?  Reading a vampire book.  The self-loathing voice in my head immediately chimed in with, "See, there is someone who is deserves the esteem of the collaboration.  He works hard and makes the most of his time.  What are you doing?  Reading a book about things that don't even exist!"  As I was resigning myself to mediocrity, he put his computer aside and started talking with me.  During our short conversation, he paid me the most unexpected complement.  I'm not going to repeat it here, but I was speechless and ecstatic at the same time and tried not to tear up.  I smiled and thanked him because his words forced me to think well of myself (not that I told him that).  If he is reading this, you know who you are and what you said even though you don't know how much it mattered to me - THANK YOU!

I've been trying to work more on these issues but I don't ever expect to completely get over feeling inferior to my peers.  Not that I really want to - I've met many scientists who thought they were a divine gift to science and I can't stand them (even if they are right)!

The Science:

The final data analysis from our last data run is finishing up and we've been talking about these results and preparing for the demands the MUCH more sensitive Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors will place on our analysis infrastructure.  This has been a time of reorganization.  I gave a short talk about the functionality of the gravitational wave simulation software (called GravEn) I wrote while I was a graduate student.  This has been the standard software we've used to measure the sensitivity of of our burst data analysis methods.  We are also taking time to consider if there is a better way of doing it.  So far, it seems like GravEn is still the bee's knees and that makes me very happy!  (The science summary of the last burst data analysis paper is here.  The plots that show the sensitivity of our methods to different kinds of signals [the second and the third] were made using the simulations I produced.)

There have also been talks on the status of LIGO, Virgo, GEO, the Japanese KAGRA detector, and the status of what used to be the LISA space-based detector (this was a partnership between the ESA and NASA until budget issues forced NASA to cancel being a full partner).  There is progress being made on all of these fronts - even LISA (which is now led by the ESA and known as NGO for the New Gravitational-wave Observatory).  Every where you walk around the conference hotel, you see small groups working together on a project and a few very tall people in red uniforms (the Wisconsin Badgers are staying in our hotel for their NCAA Sweet 16 game tonight against Syracuse).

What Would YOU Like to Ask a LIGO Scientist/Engineer?

As part of a talk on the collaboration's outreach activities, this blog was featured!  (Those who don't know my science work will often still know me as the "Living LIGO Lady".)  It was also announced that I would like to feature interviews of gravitational wave people (scientists, engineers, etc.) on this blog.  When I originally started writing this, I wanted to make science human and accessible.  I feel like I am running out of human things about me to talk about (I'm not all that interesting).  But there are so many others with different backgrounds and stories that I would like to share with you.  I already have a list of questions I am thinking about asking (not all of them will be mandatory, of course) but I want to invite you to tell me what questions you would like to as a LIGO person?  Tweet them to me @livingligo or leave a comment here (below).  You can also email me at amber@livingligo.org.  I'm thinking of using my husband, a mechanical engineer for LIGO, as a Guinea pig (he can't cook and likes to eat, so I think I can convince him :P ).

Until next week!

Night Life at the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration Meeting

I've talked before in this blog about what it is like being at various scientific conferences including the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration (LVC) Meetings.  At the March LVC Meeting, I was able to share the exciting news about the "Big Dog" blind injection (my blog about it | official LIGO release) and discuss the value of blind tests in science.  Last week I was at the September LVC Meeting in Gainesville, FL and, while there was much to talk about, nothing was truly exciting except to those of us in the business.  So, I decided that I would share with you what the night life is like at a meeting like this.

On the evening of Tuesday September 27th, A good friend of mine called me to ask if I had any plans.  Since I didn't I asked what she had in mind and she told me that she and a bunch of other LIGO people were going out to a trivia night.  I had to think about this for a minute since I am very much a homebody and was looking forward to finishing the book I was reading, but then I realized that I tend to have no life at all and should go out.  So, off I went!

We ended up going to The Laboratory which is a science themed pub/cafe.  Below is a picture of me standing in front of The Laboratory:

Me in front of The Laboratory

When I got inside, I saw that the place was definitely "no frills" and a little divey but the atmosphere was still fun and settled in for an evening of showing off my vast intellectual prowess (read: know a few of the answers and hope my other team mates know more than I do).  I grabbed one of the few menus and took pictures for your enjoyment:

Front of menu (FYI: the URL listed on this menu does not work)

Back of menu

All of the food has a science themed title.  I chose the Dr. Hawking chicken sandwich (the item on the left bottom corner on the back of the menu pictured above).  How could I possibly order any other sandwich since I specialize in relativity?  I was so hungry when it arrived that I dove right in and forgot to take a picture for you.  So, here what it looked like when I woke from my hunger craze and took a picture:

What was left of my Dr. Hawking when I remembered to take a picture

As I was eating, more and more people started showing up for the trivia event.  And the place ended up being nearly overrun by all of the usuals and the mass amounts of LIGO people who showed up as well (I didn't actually count, but there wer about 20 of us).  The lights went off, the black lights came on and the trivia started, hosted by none other than Doc (get it?).  We settled into teams of about 6 people and played the night away.  There were 20 questions.  After each question the DJ played a song and that song usually had some kind of hint to it.  Once the song was over, the team had to turn in the answer on a slip of paper and you got a seconds chance (for reduced points) if it was wrong.  I'm not sure exactly where our team finished (not first and not last) but we had a great time.  Below is a picture of the row of us LIGO people who invaded (and we stick together).  And this isn't even everyone since some stragglers ended up sitting at their own table to the right of the picture:

Just some of the LIGO people who showed up for trivia (yes, all the way to the back of the picture)

And what would a science themed cafe be without lab coats?  Here is one of us brilliant specimens modeling one (with a nice glow from the black lights):

A real scientist in a real lab coat at The Laboratory

After trivia fun was over, a few of my friends and I headed back to the hotel since there was another day of the meeting the next day, but I also had to pack since I left the meeting after lunch to head home (which was an adventure in itself since my plane from Atlanta to Baton Rouge was diverted to Jackson, MS just before we started our decent due to a really horrible storm.  As you can tell, after hours of sitting in a closed airport I did indeed make it home.  And I was glad for it since I was away on travel to Long Island, NY for an APS Executive Board Meeting just before this trip.  Remember how I said I was a homebody?  This body was very glad to be home!

Using Astronomy to Teach Physics Workshop and AAPT Summer Meeting

I've just returned from a week long trip to Nebraska for 2 conferences, one in Lincoln and the other in Omaha.

Using Astronomy to Teach Physics Workshop:

The Lincoln trip was for a special workshop on Using Astronomy to Teach Physics (UATP).  The goal of this workshop is to bring educators in physics and astronomy together, share the information on the state-of-the-art science projects in their fields and then breakout into small groups to identify ways to bring this frontier science into the undergraduate physics curriculum.  I put together a professional poster (see my post on the different types of posters for more information on scientific posters) on the educational work done in the Science Education Center (SEC) at LIGO, both locally and nationally as part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration's Education and Public Outreach (EPO) group [this group has just announced its partnership with the 2012 US Science & Engineering Festival].  (I will put a link to this post as soon as it becomes publicly viewable.) While I was making this poster, I found pictures of all of the SEC staff and myself engaging students and the public in some way.  For my picture, I found one that I adore (which is shocking since I hate nearly all pictures of myself) that shows me talking to school students while giving a tour of the LIGO control room:

I found this workshop particularly interesting for 2 reasons: 1) there were talks on the different frontier astronomy projects to make sure everyone in attendance at least had a working knowledge of what the state-of-the-art is and 2) there were breakout sessions where groups who were interested in similar goals met to discuss actionable ways to incorporate the new astronomy into the undergraduate physics curriculum.  My big project that I am now working on as a direct consequence of this is a document I intend to publish in the American Journal of Physics on connections between the basic physics concepts taught in the undergraduate physics courses and the technology that makes LIGO possible.  For example:

LIGO is looking for gravitational waves that will change the length of its 4 km arms less than 1/1000th the diameter of a proton (that's 0.000000000000000001 meters).  At this length scale, one must consider the effects of quantum mechanics.  So, here's the issue: the thermal vibration of the atoms in the mirrors used in LIGO is going to be much bigger than the "big" gravitational wave cited above.  How can LIGO possibly hope ever detect gravitational waves distinctly from this thermal mirror vibration?  (The 'no math' answer is at the end of this post.)  

After publication of this document, I am thinking about approaching LIGO's EPO group to propose that we create a web site to support this kind of effort.  Basically, I would like to take the document apart and use it to make a skeleton for the web site.  Then, any time a LIGO member has a homework question, activity, etc. that they use in their classroom, they can contribute that content to the site so that anyone who is interested can also use that content.

AAPT Summer Meeting:

After 3 days in Lincoln, I then went to the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) Summer Meeting in Omaha.  There I got to make new friends in the Physics Instructional Resource Association (PIRA) and we did something together just about every night (which, if you know me, is remarkable since I am the type to hole up in my hotel room during down time).  I also co-presented an invited talk on LIGO outreach using demonstrations with my colleague Kathy Holt.  Demonstrations are really at the core of the outreach we so since we do demonstrations with teachers and give them the tools they need to take those demonstrations back to their classrooms, we do demonstrations during public open houses and there is often a demonstration or two when we work with student field trips.  It was great doing this talk with Kathy since the combination of our backgrounds (she was a teacher before working at LIGO) give different and useful perspectives on what we do in the SEC.

Then, besides going to other talks, I also had some academic service obligations.  I believe that I have mentioned that I am on the APS Forum on Education (FEd) Executive Committee.  Even though the AAPT is not affiliated with the APS, they work together closely since they both serve physicists but with different focus.  Because of this, the AAPT Executive Board meets with the APS FEd Exec. Comm. to coordinate efforts and we had a good lunch meeting this year.  I am also on the AAPT Committee on Graduate Education in Physics and this committee also met to make plan for the upcoming AAPT Meetings and to discuss the broader impact activities we are undertaking.

In past blog posts, I have included pictures of the city I happened to travel to as seen from my hotel window (see Long Beach, Milwaukee, Anaheim).  The view out of my window was a horrible view of a parking lot and another hotel.  Fortunately, the view from my colleague's room was much better (she got a room in the main hotel for the conference and I didn't since I waited too long to make my reservations).  So, here is the view of Omaha from the window:

OH!  One more thing...  When I was flying from Omaha (whose airport in actually in Iowa), the north terminal of airport of evacuated for a "suspicious package".  Luckily for me, I was flying out of the south terminal.  Once I got home, I found out that the hours long closing was due to someone's physics classroom apparatus that got TSA's panties in a bunch (it went through security as a carry-on).  I suppose it's good that they were awake enough to think something suspicious but what concerns me is that it is almost a certainty that the same thing was carried on the plane to get to the meeting at all.  I guess it wasn't as threatening then :) 

Answer to the quantum mechanics question posed above (highlight text below to uncover the answer):

The thermal vibration of the mirror's atoms would indeed make it impossible to measure a gravitational wave only if the laser was so well focused as to only shine on the area of a few of the mirror's surface atoms.  Fortunately, that is not the case in LIGO!  The beam spot on the mirror is about 10 cm (4 inches) in diameter.  In that area, there are MANY surface atoms that are vibrating.  By observing this large area, LIGO effectively averages over the vibration of all of the atoms that the light falls on yielding a zero net motion.  Thus, LIGO works just fine!

Giving a Talk on Behalf of LIGO & APS April Meeting Wrap-up

Sorry for taking so long to round out my summary of the APS April Meeting.  My talk was on the last day of the meeting (3 May) and by the time I got home the next day I was suffering from a nice case of jet lag.  I know that there is only a 2-hour time change between Pacific and Central time, but it really hurt me this time.  I am just glad that I was able to recover from it over the weekend!

Let's talk about giving talks as a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.  When we speak on results that took a substantial number of people to produce (which is most of our results) we need to give talks "on behalf of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration."  Not only does this let the audience know that the person giving the talk isn't taking all the credit for the work, but that the talk has also been reviewed by the respective collaborations and approved.  This process isn't meant to be censorship; it is meant to ensure that there aren't people claiming to have results that are later refuted or otherwise change before a paper is published (like "we detected gravitational waves yesterday" [we didn't, this is just an example]).  That being said, my talk was on behalf of LIGO and Virgo and discussed the work we have been doing to collaborate the EM observatories to image parts of the sky where we think a gravitational wave may have originated.  My talk needed to be done at least a few days in advance to be sent out for review to the specific committees that give the final OK and to the working groups that produced the results I was speaking on (I sent my talk out on Friday and my talk was on Tuesday afternoon).  The final approved talk that I gave can be seen in the LIGO Document Control Center (DCC) here.

The talk went well with the one exception that I ran a little long in time.  I tend to like to talk about things that get me excited, and the topic of my talk certainly did!  However, I had only 10 minutes to talk followed by 2 minutes for questions.  I did finally wrap it up before they got the hook out for me though!  :)

In a previous post, I talked about the "Physics of Hollywood" session at the APS Meeting that included some Hollywood veterans.  The APS "Physics Buzz" blog also covered this in much more detail than I did.  If you would like to read more about it, you can read the first post (Q and A with Q, et al) here and the second (Writing Science Fiction: Trying to Avoid “The Button”) here!

Finally, I want to continue what seems to be a tradition of mine in sharing some of the more mundane views from my life by sharing the view from the 15th floor of the hotel I stayed in while I was in Anaheim, CA: 

This is facing south, if I was only facing north I would have had a peek at Disneyland!

Weekend at the APS April Meeting

The APS April Meeting started in full swing on Saturday 30 April.  The meeting is composed of many (~12 or so) parallel sessions during the day (form 8:30 am to 5 pm).  These sessions are composed of invited talk (about 30 minutes each) and contributed talks (about 12 minutes each).  In the evenings, there is usually a feature presentation and on Saturday night was on of the best ones I've been to.  This event was titled "The Physics of Hollywood" with panelists Bill Prady (executive producer and co-creator of "The Big Bang Theory"), Bruce Miller (executive producer of "Eureka") and John de Lancie (the character "Q" from "Star Trek: The Next Generation").  Junnifer Ouellette (author of "The Physics of the Buffyverse" was the moderator.  The picture below is from the back of the room when they were showing a clip from "The Big Bang Theory":

The panel at the front is hard to see here, so here is a zoom:

The people seated by the screen are (from right to left): Ouellette, Prady, Miller and de Lancie.  It was great!  They even answered one of the questions I have wondered about for a while:  Exactly what positions do these characters hold at the university?  They are clearly not grad students but they don't seem to be faculty members either.  Well, it turns out they are just like me...  They are postdocs!

I also had another "in the wild" sighting of the "Gravitational Waves" poster I worked on with the APS.  The picture below is the poster as it was distributed on the APS outreach table:

 

After another full day of listening to talks (I primarily go to sessions focused on gravity or education, unless there is something I don't specialize in that seems especially appealing) on Sunday, I had the Executive Committee Meeting of the Forum on Education (I serve on the Committee as an APS-AAPT Member-at-Large).  The FEd is just one of many units that members of the APS can join that address their special interest and their executive committees are the way these units are governed.  (Perhaps I should write a blog post detailing the governance structure of the APS - but perhaps that is more bureaucracy than anyone is really interested in...)  I may be very early in my career, but I have always felt welcomed by these physicists who are much more distinguished than myself.  So, I love going to these meetings (we only have one face-to-face meeting a year) and I get fed too!

That pretty much sums up my weekend at the APS April Meeting!  There are 2 more days left and I speak on the last day (Tuesday).  I am in the final stages of getting my talk approved by the LIGO and Virgo Collaborations since my talk is on their behalf.  I will write more about this process, how the talk went and about a few other things I got to do while at the meeting.

April APS Executive Board & Council Meetings

I've arrived at the site of the APS April Meeting after a few delays in my flights (the storms in the south and mid-west on the 27th required flight plan changes and congestion at airports).  As long as I make my connections (which I did since I had a 3.5 hour layover), I don't mind since I have a Kindle full of books (vampire books are my guilty pleasure).  However, I did land over an hour late at the Orange County Airport and after taking the SuperShuttle, I arrived at the hotel over a half an hour into the Executive Board dinner.  I was disappointed since the food is usually wonderful and the conversation even better but it wasn't horrible to jump into the shower and get to bed early.

The Executive Board Meeting started at 8:30 am on the 28th.  Like the last Board Meeting, strategic planning for the future years of the Society took up more than half of the day.  This planning is led by a facilitator to focus our discussions on a topic and organize the brainstorming conversation that results.  The experience has been a fulfilling one since I had a few ideas develop in the process and feel that they may become a reality in the future.  It feels good not only to have your ideas valued, but to feel like you are making a lasting impact on something.

Today is the Council Meeting.  Since I am writing this during this meeting, I don't have much to share so far.  However, the schedule for today is very similar to the meeting I described last November.  I did take a short walk to the back of the room and I thought you might be interested in what a meeting of the Council looks like:

Here, we are discussing the budget for 2012 and comparing it with the actual income and expenses for different activities (like publishing journals and professional meetings) of the society in past years.

As far as the April Meeting is concerned, over the last two days preparations for this have become apparent.  Registration booths have gone up outside of the hotel lobby, and display boards for research posters are up (see this post about what professional conference posters are like).  There are also more physicists milling about.  I find it interesting that I can identify other physicists but I'm not exactly sure what it is about a person that indicates that they are like me...  Is it they way they carry themselves?  Or is it they way they dress?  Or is it that these are the people who don't look like they are planning a day of fun at Disneyland (just up the road)?  By tomorrow, it will be very easy to tell since all of us will have name tags!

Well, it is almost break time in the Council Meeting...  I write more soon.  Have a great weekend!

Off to the APS April Meeting & Another View Out of My Office Window

This week I will be heading out to the American Physical Society's (APS) April Meeting.  There are 2 main meetings of the APS every year - the March Meeting and the April Meeting.  These meetings are separated by sub-fields of physics.  The March Meeting hosts materials physics, polymer physics, biological physics, condensed matter physics, chemical physics, etc.  The April Meeting hosts astrophysics, gravitational physics, particle physics, etc.  Since the communities of the April Meeting's sub-fields are fairly small (but related), the April Meeting is the smaller of the two.  I work in gravitation, so I go to the April Meeting (although I did get to go to the March Meeting for a day last year since I was invited to give a talk on the work done at the Science Education Center here at LIGO Livingston [read that abstract here]).

I plan on giving you a first hand account of the meeting from my experiences!  Thursday and Friday I will be in the APS Executive Board and then APS Council Meetings (which I've written about in the past when discussing professional service), and then the meeting itself starts on Saturday.  I will be giving a talk on Tuesday afternoon (the last day of the meeting); you can read the abstract for my talk here.

Until the excitement begins, I wanted to share with you a sight that I see out my window from time to time:

What you see here is the #2 dewar being filled with liquid nitrogen (you can see a condensation cloud to the left of the truck).  There are 4 such dewars on site, two on each arm with one being just outside of the corner of LIGO and one just before the end of the arm.  This liquid nitrogen is used to cool segments of the arms to near absolute zero (about 77 K) so that any stray gas that may have been introduced into LIGO (this includes residual gas from work being done within an end or corner chamber) freezes to the side of the segment and does not contaminate the vacuum in the rest of the arm.  The arms themselves have not seen atmospheric pressure since around 2000.

LIGO is one of the largest ultra-high vacuums on the planet with over 300,000 cubic feet of volume with a pressure about 1 trillion times less than the atmosphere.  And the scene above is one of the ways we are able to maintain such a high quality vacuum over long periods of time.

Last Day at the LIGO-Virgo Meeting

Today is the last day I am at the LIGO-Virgo Meeting in CA.  While the main meeting is over, last afternoon and today is the Education and Public Outreach (EPO) retreat.  This is different from the education work I do at the LIGO Livingston Science Education Center (that is physically on-site at one of the LIGO observatories) since the EPO group seeks to serve the all of the public (not just those people geographically near the observatories) and this work is done by all of the collaboration, in this country and around the world.

One of the fun things that have been developed recently and used for education and outreach are computer games about gravity and gravitational waves!

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SPACE TIME QUEST (created by the gwoptics group at the University of Birmingham, UK)

You are the principal investigator (PI) of an interferometric gravitational wave observatory like LIGO.  You select the location for your detector and design it to fit within the budget for your project.  At the end of the game, you turn on your detector and look for gravitational waves.  The deeper into space you can detect gravitational waves, the higher your score (and you can compare your score against others' high scores).  My first try at the game, I was able to detect gravitational waves from more than 29 Mpc (~94.5 million light years) away.

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BLACK HOLE PONG (also created by the gwoptics group at the University of Birmingham, UK)

This is a new take on the classic game "Pong" except instead of paddles, you use black holes to gravitationally move and sling a mass into your opponent's half of the screen.  Every time the mass enters your opponent's space, you score a point.  This is currently a 2 player only game (you can't play against the computer yet) and you can even use your Xbox controllers!

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SLINGSHOT (created by the RIT Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation)

The goal of this strategy game is to shoot your opponent's spacecraft on the opposite side of the screen.  However, there are planets in between that attract your projectile gravitationally (they warp space-time) deflecting it from a straight path (the game name of Slingshot refers to the fact that stars, planets and moons can be used as a gravitational slingshot to speed up spacecrafts or other masses - NASA used this to get the astronauts from Apollo 13 back to Earth when they were low on fuel).  The strategy is to account for these deflections and still destroy your opponent's spacecraft.  This 2 player game can be very addictive!  Download it here.

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Talk to you next week!  (Below is a picture of me at the LIGO-Virgo Meeting taken by my friend, Cristina Torres:)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY...

Like I mentioned in a previous post, being at the LIGO-Virgo Meeting always overlaps with my sister's birthday.  That being said:  "Happy Birthday, Brie!"

This is Brie and me at her high school graduation last May (I am much older than her [don't you dare ask how much] and no, neither one of us is adopted).

The LIGO-Virgo Meeting on Normal Days

Wow!  I can't believe the attention my last blog post got!  I was meaning to post everyday, but with the reception of the "Big Dog" post, I couldn't think of anything nearly as interesting to follow it immediately.

The rest of the LIGO-Virgo Meeting has been continuing on at its usual frenetic pace.  The meeting starts at 8:30 am and lasts until 6:30 pm (assuming we aren't running late).  Monday evening was the meeting dinner which is always nice to catch up with colleagues you don't get to see often (with more than 800 members of the collaboration spread across the country and around the globe, meetings are sometimes your only time to talk face-to-face).  On Tuesday morning I had the pleasure of organizing a Women's Breakfast for the collaboration and I believe this is the first time something like this was done (it was suggested and sponsored by the LIGO Lab Diversity Committee).  About 40 women from all levels of LIGO (student to professor, engineer to scientist) came and contributed to the discussion.  It was very informal and the conversation was productive!  I believe that this will become a regular event and I would like to move it from a breakfast event for two reasons:  First, we had a limited time to talk before the main meeting started and second, I am not a morning person!  The breakfast started at 7 am (don't you feel bad for me) and I prefer not to acknowledge that anything before that time exists :)

Today is the last day of the meeting proper.  This afternoon and tomorrow is a special EPO (Education and Public Outreach) meeting where all of us who are interested in doing outreach get together and organize our efforts.  There were also 2 days of informal meetings before the LIGO-Virgo Meeting started on Monday.  These meetings are by the individual search groups to discuss their data analysis.  There are 4 main sources of gravitational waves: continuous (long duration), inspiral (binary pairs merging into each other), stochastic (noisy background gravitational waves, perhaps the relics of the Big Bang), and burst (short duration gravitational waves from unanticipated sources or from sources that we aren't sure what to expect).  Each of the groups search the data looking for their special kind of gravitational wave and publish their search methods and results.

In closing, about 340 people attended the LIGO-Virgo Meeting and this was the view from near my seat this morning (my seat and computer is in the middle at the bottom):

The "Big Dog" in the Envelope

So, there has been a lot of excitement in the LIGO and Virgo Collaborations because we thought that we may have had a gravitational wave detection candidate from the early morning hours of 16 September 2010.  Because the potential source was localized in the vicinity of Canis Major constellation, the candidate event was informally dubbed the "Big Dog" (get it? we think we're cute).

I was especially excited since I was one of the first people to know about the event.  I mentioned in a previous blog entry that LIGO and Virgo have developed an effort to process the data that we collect rapidly so we can tell our traditional astronomy colleagues (those with actual telescopes) where to look for a potential optical signal component of the event.  I was one of about 25 scientists that were notified when a candidate event for observation was detected so that we can make sure that the event is valid before we send it out for observation.  While I wasn't the scientist on duty for this purpose at the time, I received the text message a little after 1 AM Central time (I couldn't sleep).  This was only 8 minutes after the data was collected!

It was sent out for observation and the entire collaboration began to get very excited.  This looked just like what we would expect from a neutron star-black hole binary (pair) system orbiting into each other (to make a bigger resulting black hole).  But one of the things that every scientist needs to learn is not to get overexcited and declare this to be the first direct detection of gravitational waves without making sure that this isn't a false alarm.  There are 2 ways this could be a false alarm:  1:  There is something in the environment that just so happened to make a coincident signal in all of the detectors (LIGO in Louisiana, LIGO in Washington state and Virgo in Italy) or 2:  This could be a blind injection (test).  Until we knew for sure, no one was allowed to discuss this event outside of the collaboration.  I've had to keep my lips sealed for 6 months (just like the over 800 other scientists who are in the Collaboration)!

A blind injection is a test the higher-ups in LIGO can do to make sure that the data analysis methods are doing what they need to be doing.  Basically, a very small subset of people in the collaboration (think like 2 or 3 people) inject a fake signal into the detector and this injection is not recorded anywhere like the other injections we regularly do to test things like detector calibration, etc.  The fact that a blind injection exists is sealed away (in what we metaphorically call an envelope) until all due diligence is done and the collaboration is ready to declare that the signal is a detection unless it is a blind injection (that it, we prove that it is nothing in the environment or and nothing was wrong with the detectors detectors that caused the signal).

Yesterday (14 March 2011) at the LIGO-Virgo Meeting was the big day when we opened the envelope (which turned out to be a flash drive with a PowerPoint presentation on it).  If the envelope was empty or if whatever injections were in the envelope were not the "Big Dog", then that would mean we made a detection.  The envelope was opened and, indeed, the "Big Dog" was inside and not a real gravitational wave detection.

I was not surprised - there had not been a blind injection in the run before this and everyone expected that there would be at least one.  However, there was also a big part of me that was hoping against hope that this was real.  My entire career has been dedicated to the effort of directly detecting gravitational waves and the development of gravitational wave astronomy.  If the "Big Dog" had been real, this would have been a fulfillment of the first part of my goals and the opening of the door of the second part.

Regardless, all of the effort that was put into validating the "Big Dog" up until it was revealed to be a blind injection has been a priceless exercise for the collaboration.  We even have a paper that was ready to be submitted for publication if it had been real.  Since this is something that we have never done before, we have developed skills for when we do make the first detection with Advanced LIGO. 

Below is a picture (from my seat) of the title slide in the presentation opening the envelope.  This just goes to show that even if you think that scientists are smarter than you, it all depends on how you define smrt :)

7 April 2011 - UPDATE:  Read more detail on the "Big Dog" blind injection here!

What Have I Been Up To?

It has been a long time since I've updated and I don't feel good about that!

This time of year is always very busy in the LIGO community since one of our yearly meetings always takes place during the 3rd week of March (and it has been that way for at least a decade since I ALWAYS miss my little sister's birthday).  During the weeks leading up to the meeting, there is always a rush to get final results for whatever project a person is working on done and, when the meeting takes place during or after a science run, mature results on what we did or did not see.  That is exactly what I have been doing since my last post.

Well, that and seeing the inside of more doctors' offices than I care to think about.  I've been stuck more than a few times and had the wonderful experience of being covered in electrodes for three weeks on a heart monitor.  There's nothing to get worried about but since I had my minor kidney crisis over the summer, I have been working to resolve other issues I've previously shrugged off. 

I will be attending the LIGO-Virgo Meeting this week and will try to blog on a daily basis about what goes on at meetings like this.  It really is interesting watching how a large collaboration works towards the same goal.  Let me tell you, it is no easy feat; scientists are very opinionated and we have to all work together in order to be productive.  I can think of a few instances where this was more contentious than others but as a whole the LIGO and Virgo Collaborations have some of the nicest people I've ever met in them.  And they aren't paying me to say that :)

Oh, one more thing...  I got to give a tour of the LIGO Livingston facility to a visiting scientist friend who had never been to the site before.  This gave me the opportunity to take her into some of the clean (think dancing Intel guys in those shiny suits - but ours aren't shiny) areas where assembly of the new parts for Advanced LIGO are being put together.  I rarely get to do this since I am a data analyst who spends most of her day working on a computer, but I enlisted my engineer husband to give a the grand tour.  I got a picture of us together in the clean gear (there is more that needs to be worn when you will be touching the materials, but we weren't):

Can you tell I'm smiling?

I will write more from the meeting!

On Science Posters, Three Ways...

In my last post, I mentioned that I presented a poster at a recent physics workshop.  Today, I want to tell you more about the role that posters play in science.

I believe pretty much everyone is familiar with a poster.  Most people have had one hanging in their bedroom, office, etc. at some point in their life.  Posters are used to communicate in some way, be it a motto, a feeling, etc.  In science, posters are used to educate and I feature three levels of this education here.

THE BASIC INTRIGUING POSTER

PhysicsQuest Poster

This poster is meant to get the audience thinking about the world around them and the matter that they are made up of.  The audience is broad, but this particular poster is geared to get elementary and secondary students excited about science (thereby learning the answer to this teaser - which you can do by clicking on the link below the poster).  Note that this poster is mostly composed of graphics with minimal text.  The audience is hooked quickly.

THE EDUCATION POSTER

APS Education Posters

Yes, I am not beyond shameless self-promotion!  You have seen this poster before in a previous post.  I worked with the APS to create this poster that discusses what gravitational waves are, where they come from, how we plan on detecting them and why we are interested in them.  The audience for this poster is mostly high school and college students as well as anyone who is interested enough to read through the poster.  That is a hallmark difference between this poster and the basic intriguing poster - the amount of text (which will only get worse with the professional poster).  There are eye-catching graphics on this poster, but that is not the focal point.  This poster is also delineated into clear topical sections (where there was only a single message in the basic poster).  These delineations are made clear with the use of white space, background color and text grouping. 

THE PROFESSIONAL CONFERENCE POSTER

Poster in the LIGO Document Control Center

This poster is the most intensive of the three I talk about here.  When a scientist takes a poster to a conference, the poster is meant to present their research for them in place of them giving a talk.  Most meetings will have poster sessions where the attendees roam around a room displaying posters and discuss the work with the author that is usually standing nearby.  Posters can also stand for themselves during coffee breaks and other social times during the meeting.

Note that the text on the professional poster is the feature.  Graphics are also important, since they can often communicate complex concepts more efficiently than words, but these are used in support of the text.  If they are eye-catching, all the better!  The audience for these posters is obviously other professionals, but there can still be a broad range there.  For example, a poster I prepare to present at a LIGO centered conference can safely assume that the audience is familiar with the basics of the science and familiar with our jargon.  But at meeting where there are scientists from different fields, even different fields in physics, care needs to be made to make sure that jargon isn't used (which is difficult to do when you are so used to using these specialized terms).  Also, since there is so much being communicated, these posters can become quite large in size - I have one hanging in my office right now that is 3 feet by 4 feet!

SUMMARY

What poster a scientist creates depends on the goal of the poster.  The more general the audience, the less text, more graphics and judicious use of white space is needed.  The more professional, the narrower the audience and text becomes more important.  In the end, what is really important is to consider the motivation of the audience - the more they know about the subject being presented, the longer they will be willing to stand in front of it and read it!