in my hand right now i'm carrying what's called a dosimeter and it's a tool for
measuring radiation why do i need a dosimeter well
although there shouldn't be any significant radiation where we're about
to go there could be because we're here at
triumph the particle acceleration laboratory here in british columbia
canada that houses the world's largest cyclotron and
soon the world's most powerful linear electron accelerator of its kind
and what do they do here oh just casual
things you know like advancing the fields of physics medicine material
science and much much more so
without further ado let's head inside and talk about how
they accelerate particles to about 75
of the speed of light and also why the heck you would want to do that
in the first place storyblocks video offers you studio
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when you think particle accelerator the first thing that probably comes to your
mind is cern they are famous for digging
this great big tunnel that allows them to accelerate two beams of particles to
near the speed of light then smash those two beams together and see what happens
well triumph is a little bit different they
are more about directing a single beam
of super fast particles at an object
like say a piece of uranium by doing this they can achieve a couple
of things one they can create isotopes
or forms of elements and compounds that
generally don't exist naturally fluorodeoxyglucose for example is used
for brain research in the nearby university of british columbia or to
to actually produce elements that either
wouldn't naturally occur or that would be
very difficult to study inside the neutron star merger you'd have to travel
to in order to find them before we get into that though let's go
all the way to the beginning with this
rather unassuming bottle of compressed hydrogen so the hydrogen gets sucked up
through this tube right here all the way
up to this spot right here and then this chamber this whole thing
is kept under a vacuum so that takes care of the pumping
then it comes down into this plasma bucket which is right here where a 2
degree celsius tantalum filament ignites
the plasma strips the electrons from the
atoms and then the hydrogen anions so
these are the hydrogen atoms that pick up extra electrons are fired out through
here and like really fast because our 12 000 volts
here is not compared to ground but rather to
the entire source room that we're inside
which is kept at 300 000 volts compared to ground when
the accelerator is running it's a good thing it's not on
now we're on the outside so directly above me is where our hydrogen anions
leave the source room so from this room
to the wall here are a bunch of linear resistors so the potential then goes
smoothly from the room up to 300 000
volts at the wall and when the particles leave here they'll be traveling at
roughly 1 40th the speed of light to put
that in context that's about 160 000
times faster than the top speed of my car
now dealing with a huge electric potential like this isn't easy
while our power supply here isn't actually working as hard as you'd think
it only uses about one milliamp once charged to maintain that potential
if given the chance it will gladly create a literal bolt of lightning
between the room here and the wall
so to prevent this they've had to do a couple of things first of all this
entire room is a faraday cage and no
wires can go between it and the wall or
it'll be spark city in here so all of the data and the control signals are
sent over fiber optic cables which
is pretty standard but then what about power you can't do
fiber optic power well that is where
this comes in so rather than just running a wire
remember we can't do that or they ran this
non-conductive shaft with a 30 horsepower motor on the other side of
the wall that allows them to convert mechanical energy here into electrical
energy just like a bog standard generator pretty clever
now we're above the particle accelerator
where our wicked fast anions are coming
shooting down this too but we have a problem since they don't just
come out in a nice orderly fashion like a laser but rather tend to scatter like
a flashlight the main goal here is just getting the
particles down there which requires some real you know
particle wrangling and all along this line is triumph's sort of
h minus particle prod of choice
basically they're precision manufactured electrostatic plates called quadrupoles
that act kind of like lenses for the charged particles to keep
them in line and the same technique gets used right here where the particle beam
actually gets turned before being sent one floor down into the real meat of the
particle accelerator the 520 mega
electron volt cyclotron the largest in
the world so before we go inside there's a few
things that we've got to do any contamination on the surfaces inside
the cyclotron will need to be cleaned after we leave so they've asked us to
wear lab coats so we don't shed any unnecessary dust and also to
wear booties and not like kneel down on the floor or anything like that just to
create as little extra work as possible
for all the techs that keep this place running smoothly
this is a very high technology contamination control barrier here
i like it okay now
we are getting into where the magic happens the cyclotron and sorry getting
a nasty look here ah sorry not magic science
magic isn't real science is anyway at
this point our h minus particles are
entering the circular track at 1 40th
the speed of light where large rf resonators provide the acceleration and
massive deionized water-cooled coils of aluminum hold the particle on orbit now
there are two coils both with 15 turns
positioned around the cyclotron and each one carries 18
000 amps but that incredible power doesn't mean
that the researchers here don't also have a fair degree of control over the
speed of our particles so as they whip
around the loop the h minus particles will go faster and faster
it actually takes about 1600 laps before
they'll reach full speed that's about three quarters of the speed of light
but what they'll also do is a kind of
spiral outward taking a wider path
around the accelerator kind of like how in your car if you're going faster it's
hard to take a tight turn that means that when it's time to apply
the last step using a thin piece of
carbon foil to strip the electrons off
so that we're left with just bare protons the energy of our protons can be
fine-tuned according to where the carbon is positioned on the inside of the
cyclotron gives us slower lower energy
particles or right out that the edge of the cyclotron gives us the full
520 mega electron volt experience once
the electrons are stripped our coils will no longer keep the stream going
around the track so we're left with a straight stream of positively charged
particles that'll turn whatever poor sample is on the other side into matter
soup of course you can't have those particles
smashing into anything unintentionally like
air so the entire cyclotron needs to be held
at a vacuum of point zero zero zero zero
zero zero zero zero zero one bar
to accomplish this they use sounds so cool turbo molecular pumps
that spin at 40 000 RPM basically like
smacking the air molecules out and not allowing them back in
now this does create the small problem
of making the vacuum chamber which is above us want to collapse in on itself
however to combat that we're actually currently below the cyclotron do you see
all these poles here well you might actually think that these are these are
supporting the cyclotron like struts or something but they're actually pulling
down really hard to make sure the whole thing doesn't just flatten itself so
that was pretty sweet but just like you guys will occasionally get the itch to
upgrade a graphics card even if you don't really need to but you just want
the latest and greatest well after 45 years of operation eventually
the thrill of shooting protons at three
quarters the speed of light around the cyclotron started to wear off a little
and the researchers at triumph needed a new way to smack stuff together at super
high speeds and continue to push the frontiers of understanding so
they built the world's most powerful electron linear accelerator or elenac so
when it reaches full power in 2025 the
elinac here will be able to propel a hundred kilowatts of electrons at a
blistering 99.99 percent the speed of light
so to accomplish this they first need yet another 300 kilovolt power supply in
a faraday cage over what is it with these guys in their 300 000 volt power
supplies and faraday cages it's like a nice nice round number or something
anyway that gives the electrons a pretty nice
kick in the butt to roughly 77 the speed
of light but that's that's just too slow
that's like peasant stuff where they really start cooking are in these radio
frequency wave chambers so the insides of these are cooled down to just 2
kelvin using liquid helium surrounded by
a liquid nitrogen cooled heat shield i guess that's why they call it the super
thermis and in there the electrons are
accelerated by the radio frequency field in here oscillating rapidly 1.3 billion
times per second with these oscillations synchronized to the speed of the
electron going through it so what that means effectively is that the electron
is always being pushed along to the next segment kind of like a rail gun
now one of these accelerators would get our electrons up to 10 mega electron
volts but that wasn't enough for them so they got
three three in a row gives it a total of 30
mega electron volts of particle smashing power
so all in all this accelerator consumes 1
million watts
watts or about enough power for a thousand homes
all right so we've had a lot of talk so far about particles going at obscene
speeds but now it's time to transfer all
of that momentum into something useful now
depending on the experiment what happens
next can vary a lot but normally it
consists of getting the beam to a point where it smashes into samples of
materials called targets where the particles have enough energy to split
the nucleus of the atoms this can create all kinds of fun things neutrons muons
or rare isotopes via nuclear fission or
spellation and it also creates a big old
pile of matter garbage so
at risk of sounding like a broken record here this
is where things get tricky because you might not have a lot of time to grab the
important bits some of the rare isotopes that they want to study might only last
for a few milliseconds before decaying
so nano materials are designed and brought
to temperatures white hot around 2000
degrees celsius to release the isotopes super fast then depending on what
exactly is smacked together some of the longer lived isotopes might
get collected locally while other particles would need to go through
several switching stations some of which are below us here or for further
acceleration to arrive at an experimental detector
the one behind me here called the titan ion trap
accurately measures an isotope's mass
using its cyclotron frequency so basically there's a combination of
magnetic and electrical fields that trap
the particle in a confined space and then you can calculate how fast the
particle moves around a track and from there calculate its mass
alternately your isotope might get switched off of the main line over there
and end up in something like griffin which is kind of like a microscope
that's looking for nuclei so griffin is actually the world's most
powerful tool for the decay spectroscopy
of rare isotopes and it provides triumph
scientists with an unparalleled view of
the interplay of forces that create nuclear structure here on the other side
the isotope atoms are delivered into the black ball that
it was showing when we were here for b-roll so we can show it to you but i can't point at it now and then they're
deposited on a tape reel and as they decay gamma rays are emitted and then
are measured by these detectors that go
completely around the sample giving a
full 360 degrees of detection
after the measurement is performed the tape reel gets spun some of which have
decayed into daughter nuclei that create unwanted gamma-ray background noise come
out through the lead wall on the other side which shields the detectors from
the daughters more isotopes can then be deposited on
the tape and it's good for another go these isotopes are used to help us
understand fundamental physics but there are also lots of other applications
isotopes created here at triumph have been used for things like tracking the
movement of plankton detecting brain disease or cancer treating cancer
characterizing candidate materials for superconductors understanding how metal
ions make proteins and enzymes in our body do what they do and you know what
honestly if i were to list it all in this video we'd go on for another 10 or
20 minutes but the lightest i'm sure you've been
screaming at the screen for the last 10 minutes or so when are you getting to
the cool computers okay okay now so behind these doors is a
tier one data center that analyzes experiment data from the atlas particle
detector at the large hadron collider it has a 100 gigabit fiber pipe capacity
that connects to the lhc over at syrian switzerland and other sites around the
world so that they can share the ridiculous amount of computing and
storage needed to analyze and store the
massive amounts of data that atlas produces so in there they've got 12
500 CPU cores 12 petabytes of disk
storage and 31 petabytes of tape storage
oh it does open but i'm ha ha i thought it was going to be locked unfortunately
we're not actually allowed to go in there something something currently holding
the record for tier 1 computing uptime something something me getting close to
it i don't know i don't really know i don't really know what the issue was so this was really
cool and it's the end of our tour but it's hardly the end for the work being
done here at triumph they're actually expanding like crazy along with ramping
up the elinac they're going to be tripling their rare isotope production
capabilities in the next couple of years adding another building and continuing
to employ around 100 co-op students
every year to teach them about particle acceleration
so maybe then we'll have to come back when they've got another big update to show
us uh maybe we can get behind those data center doors next time yeah but in the
meantime i just want to give a huge shout out to stu for coordinating our
tour and to the legion of experts that showed us around it was a lot of fun to
get to spend a day with who are what are probably some of the
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