Our trip up to Hanford, Washington! Yeah for cool field trips!
Since the project I was working on this summer was research and development for the LIGO project, we were flown from LA to Eastern Washington for a few days to see one of the actual sites, where our summer work will someday be applied.
I thought that some of my friends would appreciate this picture...people from your home town were visiting the same place I was!
This is one of the precursors to the project I worked on this summer. I think this is the largest chunk of solid aluminum I have ever seen.
This gives a sense of scale of the vacuum tubes at the sites. They built a bridge over the tube so that cars could go back and forth.
You can see the two beam tubes going 4km out into the distance...There is literally no air inside of those tubes. They've called these tubes the largest hole in the atmosphere ever built, because the pressure on the inside is so incredibly low.
These are the 4 most important mirrors on the Hanford site. They are what let the light reflect back and forth in the interferometer. Cameras watch the mirrors constantly, and you can watch live movies of what the laser beam and the mirrors are doing.
We of course had to have a group picture on our field trip! Here we are at the sign indicating the driveway of the Hanford site. There were 4 of us working together in my particular lab: Dave (Blue Coke shirt), Darcy (Blue shirt, kind of in the background right next to the left of the sign), and Royal (Black shirt, leaning on the right side of the sign). Everyone was really cool though.
The morning that we left we went on a little cruise on the Columbia River. I liked this picture of some birds that I took while on the boat.