Berlin and the Velocity of Light
A post by HZB summerstudent Urtzi Jauregi: Working in a particle accelerator is a dream for every physicist or engineer. You can imagine how excited I was when I came across one of the most scientific crossroads in the world. In this short blog, I’ll try to share my experience at HZB.
When I first visited the BESSY II accelerator, I was amazed by the effort needed to construct such a device. Electrons at the storage ring of BESSY II are accelerated to velocities close to the speed of light. One of the scientists of the street sign shown at the crossing stated that this speed with a numerical value of 300 000 000 m/s cannot be surpassed. To see how fast this is I will compare it with the S9 line, the S-Bahn that takes me to the city center from my neighborhood Altglienicke. The trains used for this S9 line are the DBAG Class 481 which can reach up to 100 km/h equal to 27.778 m/s. Doing some simple approximations, we can say that the speed of light is 10 800 000 times faster than the S9. However, this estimation is not always right. It is not surprising that the S9 gets canceled sometimes: for example, last month one of the trains hit a van and the S9 could not be used for a whole week. In this case the velocity is 0. We could then consider the S9 following quantum physics rules where its velocity is determined by the probability of an accident happening through the S9 railway.
Now, let’s imagine you got tickets for Neues Museum at 15:30. It’s 14:30, and you just left the HZB facilities at Adlershof and get into the S-Bahnhof, but to your surprise, not a single train line is working. Of course, you don’t want to miss your appointment! If you were an electron of BESSY II you could be relaxed as you would need irrelevant time to get into the Museumsinsel. But the average walking speed of humans is something about 1.42 m/s unless you are in a night club in Berlin, then you could almost reach the speed of light as well. Luckily for me, I could get into the Museum because the S9 was properly working. Talking about the nightclubs, I visited three so far, Tresor, Aeden, and Suicide. They were great for techno music lovers, but I would recommend everyone to visit a nightclub at least once, as the party nights are part of the Berliner culture.
Urtzi Jauregi on his project: In short, my work consisted of characterizing some electronic circuits (see working setup in the picture besides) to enable the cavities to accelerate the electrons properly. This way, we can set the intensities and energies of the electrons through the storage ring so that the radiation they emit can be used for further research projects.
