What is a Synchrotron and what is it good for? (II)

In the last post, the subject question has not be answered. Yes, I wrote a 'to be continue', but it was many days a go. This week I want to answer this question in some deliveries.

Right now, the explained this is a general view of what is a synchrotron. But anything has not been said about what is a synchrotron good for. From the four machine parts explained in the last delivery, the fourth one, the beam line with the x-rays, is the one used for the experiments. That is to say, this is the one who create some results and over this one is where the wonders of this machine can be described. Externally, the synchrotron is the results extracted from theirs beam lines.

A synchrotron is a big machine to play with some wavelengths of light. Including the lengths of the visible light, a synchrotron can generate its special light against the hundred of thousands electronVolts. Iluminating objects with this light is how the experiments in a synchrotron does.

But this is not only the wavelength the parameter with the scientists works. More other parameters came to describe the matter from different points of view with the same light.

The brilliance of this light is the separator between the different generations that exist in this kind on machines.

We will come in deep, but in general lines, the synchrotron light sources are used in physics experimentation, in biology, in microelectronics and micro-mechanics, in pharmaceutical, and even in hairdressing and cosmetics industry.

What is a Synchrotron and what is it good for?

To describe a synchrotron in one sentence, this will be ``a big machine to see small things´´. Or in other words a supermicroscope.

The anatomy of a synchrotron is hard as you wish, and a simple as the picture shows. In the center, you can see a straight blue line, who becomes in the small ring with a blue beam. This blue beam represents accelerated electrons. The first stage is the 'Linac', that is a gun shooter of fast electrons. This eletrons goes to the booster ring (the small one) where this beam is 'energized' to the need speed to be injected to the third stage.

Here arrives the interesting place. In the ring with many machines represented in the image, we call storage ring, is here the synchrotron light is generated an it's used for the experiments. The main difference between the booster and the storage should be resumed saying the first is to accelerate and the second is to maintain.

After this three machine stages we arrives to the synchrotron light. When the electron beam is bended in the ring to be in the orbit trajectory, some X-ray turn up in the tangent. This x-ray receive the name 'synchrotron light' and this is the necessary thing to have experiments in one machine like this.

To be continue...

We soon see ourselves

On Friday, one work colleague comes back towards home. His original work place is in the esrf, a big ring constructed in the French alps, close to the Montblanc, in Grenoble. This is a paradisaic place, not far from Switzerland.

Why, today, I am writting something about this colleague? Easy, we is a Tango core writer and during the time that we have coincided here in alba, he has been a reference in development (he will continue being it, but we couldn't go every morning to the bar together). Usually, when I have a doubt on a tango-ds design, I ask Manu about what thinks about the design pattern that I am thinking to use. (And also, I write to one friend and university professor in the UdL; but now I am exalting the figure of Manu :P).

The current design pattern I am using on the tango's device development is the bridge pattern. Depending from many things, the distributed system agent will use one low level protocol or another, but the agent doesn't need to know which one is on use. The agent only needs to know the operations to do, and in the execution time will be solved which low level protocol will be used.

With the bridge pattern, the agent should knows an object that it is an abstraction about the allowed low operations. And is this abstraction the one how knows the internals of how the things are made.

In agreement to the development advance, I will be explaining the design details...

Broadening my intentions...

My intention is not to write every day, but always when you begins a project have this illusion then, today I want to write something. Like in the first post I said I will write about the machine here I am working, also the intention to write includes my other hobby: the cryptology.

A couple of years a go, I knew a research group in my university. Since my first year there, I meet interesting people with much knowledge in so many fields, not only on science (beyond the science). The result of this relation with the cryptology and graph group, at least was my research project. But after 3 years of this project publication, Ramiro and I continue with this development, picking up the satisfaction of the official recognition attaching out work in the main branch of GnuPG.

At the beginning of this month, one article about the cipher algorithm used in this elliptic curve implementation was accepted in a Spanish symposium. The article was written in Spanish, but the problem that is treated could be much more important and this article should be translated. Yes, I can and I will do, but contributions are always accepted.

Ok, summarizing. In this blog I will not only write about synchrotron machines, I will write something about cryptography. For this subject, the close season also is open...

Opening the close season...

This will be my first experience in blogging, but I could be a good moment for me to write something here. Maybe this is the moment.

The idea that I have to write about in this blog is something related with science and something of software engineering. Why? Because I am a worker in a synchrotron, I am a control software engineer in one of this light source machines.

For a long time, I have been searching a job that has some sense. I belive in free software, and I had the dream to pay me bills writing free software. When accidentally I knew there exist some machines in the works that creates their free control software, I thought this could be a good place to work.

Here I will want to explain the things that seems interesting to me about this machines and about my contribution in the control distributed system that governs the machine. "My" machine is under construction, then this could be more interesting because where will appear the full construction process. But not all is created from scratch! This is free software! We base our control system in the one that some other synchrotron use and we became contributors to it. My role is to develop agents to live in this distributed control system.

I will explain more...