I was able to tour the synchotron radiation facility, SPring-8, and it was pretty neat! It was also very very crowded--they only open the facility to visitors for a very short window, and on the day I went they were expecting crowds of over 5,000 people! The facility was gigantic, especially the ring which launches electrons to (almost) the speed of light; as far as appearance goes, though, it was mostly just lots of heavy machinery, and really didn't look that much different from laboratories in the US.
The facility itself was pretty neat though, and despite my limited knowledge of applied physics I was able to get the gist of how most of the machines worked in this particular lab. It's reminiscent of an electron collider (like the ones that lead to the discovery of the Higgs Boson recently), except that they don't smash the atoms, they only speed them up to extreme speeds. The electrons move on a curved circuit--aka, a ring--and the curves are important as this allows the radiation generated by the moving electrons to be measured and collected by instruments stationed along the curved corners.
From what I can understand, they use the radiation in several ways, but the most interesting to me (as someone who's flirted with being a biologist for a few years) was the super cool microscopes powered by the radiation. Now, I've seen electron microscopes, and those are super cool too, but this microscope was cooler: it was an x-ray microscope; not only can it look at really really small things, but unlike electron microscopes, it can see inside of those really really small things. As a display, they had an x-ray model of a coral cell. It was really cool!
And then this is where things got a bit more confusing for me, but here is what I was able to understand of these two massive spectrometers that were in the SPring-8 facility. After the synchotron radiation is collected and used to power the x-ray microscope, the radiation bounces off the examined objects in interesting ways that are also worth studying: hence, the spectrometers. One of the spectrometers can be used to examine the crystalline structures of objects in really fine detail, to the point where it can pinpoint the locations of individual atoms within the crystal. The other even more massive spectrometer focuses on examining the bouncing radiation itself, because the energy of the electrons changes in different ways depending on what the radiation rebounds off of.
And that, I think, is the gist of this particular facility. A lot of scientists from around the world and from different disciplines do various kinds of research here, since the radiation allows for the study of more than just physics.
Outside of SPring-8's main buildings were some tulip gardens that were very beautiful! Unfortunately, we came a bit late into the tulip season, and most of the flowers were beginning to wilt; add in the high gusting winds, and it was mostly a garden of headless tulips. It was still very beautiful, though!
The weather has been warming up outside these days, and there are ducklings and butterflies everywhere! And other bugs are starting to creep about too, which makes me almost miss the winter chill. The scaffolding on the castle is really starting to come down fast; it seems like every day, a new piece of the castle is revealed! I can't wait to see the castle in its full glory!
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