I bet you never thought reading this blog would be educational, eh? A synchrotron in general is one of those big particle accelerator rings that you sometimes hear about in the news.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/synchrotron
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been prevalent in the popular news during the past year or so, and it is a synchrotron of a little different flavor than the one I'm using. The one I'm using is called BESSY in acronym form.
This stands for Die Berliner Elektronen-Speicherring Gesellschaft für Synchrotronstrahlung. Doesn't really matter, it just goes by BESSY. I feel like they may have taken a few liberties with the acronym, but this appears to be a pretty common practice. There's another facility affiliated with my department here that goes by the acronym SMART. One time I saw the word expansion of what that acronym stands for, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how they got those letters out of it. They'd have to ignore words and invent silent ones etc. to get it to work out, it seemed. I think they must have just started out with the acronym they wanted, and then tried to come up with words spelled out something similar. And they didn't even have to do a good job, because no one bothers to go back and check on these things. They just always call it by the short name SMART. Then, they can say hilarious things such as "we are the SMART guys" and "so-and-so used to be a SMART guy, before he moved to a different department" etc. The people who work on this project seem to have quite a lot of endurance for finding the humor in this. Mine ran out after perhaps the first 1/2 time I heard it, but maybe it's just me. Perhaps no one else cares about this. And I appear to have digressed a bit...
In any case, so we use this BESSY thing in order to get out light. Like we have in the lab. Except super-intense and tunable to (most) any energy. For this extra advantage, the BESSY II facility (there used to be a BESSY I before) was built here a few years ago at a cost of about 100 million Euros (maybe $130 million depending upon the current exchange rate). As a scientist, I am supposed not to be cynical about this. We are doing very important work here that is yielding great benefits for the future of humankind. Depends upon the day that you ask me....
So, this is what necessitated my working the night shift for a while. A typical shift might run from 7 pm to 9 am for me. It takes about an hour for me to get out where the facility is on the train, so this makes for a pretty long day/night. And not particularly fun, to tell the truth. No time for Christmas shopping or anything else, so it's good that I finished that stuff early. What is amazing though is how quickly my body was able to adjust to the time difference The first 24-36 hours were quite difficult, but afterwards, it seemed just about normal. Somewhat similar to my normal work, but during the night. Of course, I found the smoothness of this transition a little disconcerting as well. The fact that I could live the inverse life of a normal human without anyone really noticing reminded me of the difficulties I've had getting to know Germans so far. I haven't really had many positive interactions with Germans that immediately come to mind. I've never been to a German person's apartment (unless you count the friend I visited in Dresden). And most German people don't seem particularly interested in talking with me. This also makes language development all the more difficult as I've described before. I guess that's something to work on in the New Year. I've heard that Germans have gooey, chocolatey centers, if I stick with it long enough to penetrate the outer shell. We shall see. In any case, I seem to have digressed again. Ok, on to some pictures so I can end this blog post, before I get off topic again.
Here is a photo of the outside of BESSY. It is about the size and shape of a professional basketball arena.
The following two pictures look one way, and then the other from the balcony inside so you can see some of the complicated business that goes on around the ring.
In general, people bring in their own equipment and then set it up like a little campsite on the periphery of the ring to tap into the stuff I described above. This makes for a bit of a challenge to bring all of the pieces and get it set up correctly, so that everything works. You aren't in your laboratory, so there are always problems with pieces not reaching far enough or not aligning the way you thought etc. The following picture is of the equipment we brought and set up. Then, afterwards, we had to quickly disassemble and transport it back to the institute in pieces. A little bit of the bottom part of the equipment does permanently stay there, but most of it goes.
Then, one last thing. I saw this little emergency exit around the outside of the ring and it gave me the giggles. As you can see, the architect of this building decided to make a ring of windows along the floor. This would be a convenient location if we had eyes on the tops of our feet. On more than one occasion, I had to get down on the floor to see how the weather was outside, and determine if I needed an umbrella, for instance. Then, I'm guessing that the fire marshall (or German equivalent) inspected the building after construction and decided that it needed an additional exit. Instead of interruping the window, or making a door with a widowed bottom, they went with this. Doesn't seem like it would be very easy for someone with a disability to use. But the image of people lining up in an orderly fashion to walk the plank on this thing in the event of an emergency seems quite ridiculous to me.
