@dmckee Assembled with a couple other grad students (that are vastly more experienced than me) a "1%" prototype of the "millicharge" particle detector. I didn't realize gain variances between PMTs were so high.
OK, a silly question had me envisioning what has to be the silliest piece of NIM plug-boarding done in quite some time:
Now, you could DAC the data, smooth the output with an appropriately chosen analog filter, split the line, differentiate one half with an op-amp then perform an analog zero-crossing detection and use the output to latch the other signal (which has gone into an appropriate delay line) and finally ADC that to get your answer. I could even wire the analog part in NIM if I had a big enough cache of modules and couple of crates, but ... it would be silly. Really, quite silly. — dmckee ♦13 mins ago
@GPhys Yes, the gain matching step of any compound PMT-based detector is time consuming, picky, and very important.
our signal looks like single photoelectrons - test setup is going to be shipped to CERN with 12 cooled PMTs to be installed at an unused drainage tunnel near the CMS interaction point
I guess the idea is that after the setup is demonstrated working, then everybody involved can apply to fund the full experiment
@GPhys Prototypes are great fun because they are small enough to understand in toto, quick enough to follow through all stages of the project, but real enough to be relevant.
You'll learn all kinds of stuff on that kind of project.
Many a times, there are questions which are absolutely vague and have no meaning in them, like: If I fall from a great height, will I overcome the speed of light?
Now, these are off topic questions, but there are no proper flags for this. Generally I flag this as very low quality, but many times...
Steady state with respect to the rod being heated from one end is the state when the temperature of each section of the rod becomes constant.
Now, it's very similar to equilibrium but I wonder if it's possible to reach this state before equilibrium. If yes, how? Moreover, heat is always going t...
@JohnRennie If a ball thrown up is caught by the thrower after 4 seconds then the maximum height attained by the ball will be: what? I think it's 20 m.... Am I correct
It helps you see the importance of parameters like $g$ in your equations, and it means you could in principle use the equations on other planets where the gravity is different from Earth.
@RaviPrakash I'm afraid the usual science fiction descriptions of white holes are wildly inaccurate. A white hole is a theoretical object that is effectively a black hole but with time running backwards.
However a white hole, at least the simplest type of white hole, requires the universe to have existed for an infinite time, which obviously isn't the case since the Big Bang was only 14 billion years ago.
As a workaround while this request is pending, there exist several client-side workarounds that can be used to enable LaTeX rendering in chat, including:
ChatJax, a set of bookmarklets by robjohn to enable dynamic MathJax support in chat. Commonly used in the Mathematics chat room.
An altern...
If you put 'of the day' in front of anything, it makes it sound really important. Also, sometimes people make the assumption that you'll give more things 'of the day'.
For years, decades even, it's been annoying me that mouse mats always slide around a bit when you move the mouse. But this mat is big and heavy and the weight of the keyboard holds it in place.
So, finally, I have a mouse mat that DOESN'T MOVE!
I doubt it's possible to predict a collapse. You'd need to know the strengths of all the joints and the only way to measure those would be to stress it to the point where it fails, in which case the point is moot.
Work out the largest weight you're every likely to put on it, then load it to double that weight. If it survives you should be fine. If it fails you're down one bookcase but at least it didn't fail when you had something fragile and valuable on it.