Star Wars in Berkeley:
Curses, Foiled Again
by Jamie Jobb
Sheldon Cooper, Leonard Hofstadter, Howard Wolowitz and Rajesh Koothrappali would hang here if they weren’t fictional nerds from the hit sit-com “Big Bang Theory” (see S8, E19). Old Blues still lovingly call the place The Rad Lab. But installations within it also have been known as The Cyclotron, The Bevatron, The Synchrotron and currently The Advanced Light Source. Each time the contents of the original domed structure have been reconfigured for deeper scientific studies.
This high cathedral of physics officially known as Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory commands a magnificent landscape from its natural amphitheater above University of California in the hills overlooking San Francisco. The folks who built the place in the 1940s had the foresight to install a clerestory ring around the dome, so shafts of sunlight stream into the facility during the day, inspiring meticulous hubbub within the huge structure, which in diameter measures the length of a football field.
The Lab’s beamline is a tightly-focused hairline stream of high-energy electrons coaxed by magnets around a circular path racing almost at the speed of light. It’s been turned off for the holiday, so we’re allowed to venture into parts of the structure that would otherwise be unsafe for us if the beam were streaming its powerful x-rays a billion times brighter than the sun.
When the beam is running, the Lab gets hopping with scores of scientists and technicians sharing the beamline in forty different end station experiments. Here before us are the literal nuts and bolts of high science; along with the valves, tubes, hoses, wires, dials, prisms, switches, circuits, servers and appurtenant tidbits of common hardware necessary to assemble these odd scientific devices which look a lot like pumped-up but frozen R2-D2s with pipe and wire run amok …
Not to mention all the aluminum foil!!! Most of the instruments are wrapped in it, creating another unexpected source of photographic inspiration. Although crinkled aluminum does dazzle in the streaming clerestory light ... “It’s the worst job in The Lab,” according to our tour guide. So nobody likes doing it, but it’s everywhere we look. The Lab calculates it consumes 20,928 square feet of the stuff a year.
That much aluminum foil is needed to maintain stable microclimates for the experiments. The Lab’s instruments calculate extremely minute measurements and the slightest variations in microclimate can throw off their accuracy. Initially instruments are wrapped in Reynolds Wrap to “bake out” (oxidize) the stainless steel and to help create the necessary ultra high vacuum around the devices. More foil may be added to insulate them against further variations in humidity and temperature. Or as our guide puts it in common terms: “The aluminum foil does exactly what it does for the Thanksgiving turkey. It holds the heat in, and makes it uniform.”
Here’s a complete explanation from the U.S. Department of Energy on the topic of aluminum foil’s versatility in a busy scientific research lab:
All photographs by Jamie Jobb
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