Summer in Los Alamos

The lab was founded in 1943, mainly due to Einsten’s letter to Roosevelt expressing his worries about Germans constructing an atomic bomb. The original purpose of the laboratory was to develop the nuclear weapons faster than nazis. This started the infamous project Manhattan, with physicists like Feynman, von Neumann, Fermi, Oppenheimer and many others being involved.

As it happens from time to time, the good intent of stopping the world war ended in misuse of the weapons by the government in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. These events are an integral part of the laboratory history and cast a thick shade on the scientific successes of the lab.

I was interning in the Theory division (civil section of course) focusing on plasma physics and applied mathematics. Besides the fundamental research, the problems being solved in the division contribute to development of fusion power plants. These should provide a mean of overcoming the energy crisis in the near future. I find this very motivating.

As a second year BSc student, I did not have much means to contribute to the cutting-edge research. I tried very hard, however, completing 2 projects concerning the collisional transport in plasmas and one project done on my own, simulating a small cluster of a few thousands charged particles using GPU. The latter one drew much more attention than I expected, opening me a possibility of further research in this field next year. Although the outcomes of my work were not direct this summer, I am absolutely sure that spending 2.5 months working 10 hours a day on the projects (and thinking about them the rest of the time) moved me a lot further in my studies.

The Los Alamos/Santa Fe county experience was great as well. After a week of crash-landing in Santa Fe sikh community, I ended up living on an indian land. The place was located in a middle of a highway between Santa Fe and Los Alamos. It was a small pueblo in badlands, called Pojoaque. I was sharing a mobile home with a mexican guy, his wife and two children. Eric was just finishing his masters in economics at the New Mexico State, having a long term placement in the laboratory.

There were a few exciting things about “the butterfly springs”. Firstly, as banal as it may sound, there was a (small and not mall !) supermarket in a walking distance to the mobile home community. Quite unusual in this part of the states. Thanks to regular carpools with my housemate, this prevented me from depending on a car ownership. Secondly, there were beautiful mesas (flat top mountains) surrounding the town. There was also a nice museum of native culture, which I visited a few times. It appeared to be deserted all the time - so I felt a bit sorry for the guys taking care of it. As I learned later however, the museum was sponsored by an indian owned casino. Almost every surviving pueblo of the Tewa/Tiwa cultures had one, as these are illegal on the US land, so the indians have de facto a gambling monopole in New Mexico. The casinos support the pueblo administration, tribal police, museums, scholarships for young and so on. In fact, many Santa Fe cowboys were offering their salaries on day to day basis for the upkeep of the pueblo by these means. It was a shocking experience seeing all the grannies bending their backs in front of the slot machines covered in pink cat pictures.

I was really lucky to have such a great mentor, as well as to know Katka Falk (researcher in lasers) who in fact initiated my whole trip to LANL. I spent really enjoyable weekends with her and her husband on trips to various ruins of the original indian settlement or some other landmarks. These were always a great recharger after the week spent in the office.

I would really like to thank KFF for generously supporting this placement.