Life on board ESS

Karinh Eurenius is a post-doc at the University of Tokyo. She went there with her husband Jonas a year and a half ago. Before going to Tokyo, Karinh did her doctorate at Chalmers University in Gothenburg as a member of the neutron scattering groups there. She was a regular attendee at the Swedish Neutron Scattering Society meetings and had a strong interest in ESS. Mats Lindroos and I spent an evening with them in Tokyo last year and enjoyed an unusual meal together with Kirin beer to wash it all down.

We thank her and her husband for their ready willingness to share their very affecting story of their experience of the earthquake, and we wish these two brave young people all the best as they pick up their lives again in Tokyo:

It all started on the 11th of March. We got up really early and walked together to the metro, which we never do; I like to walk to Tokyo University, which is north from Tsukiji where we live and since my husband Jonas works in a suit it tends to get way too hot, so he's always taking the underground. That Friday, it felt like we had to be together a bit extra, since we were expecting a visit from a good friend from Sweden in our tiny apartment.

I went to my boss straight away when I got to work, since he's normally in early in the morning. I had received declaration papers which needed to be ready and signed by the 15th, so it was important to get it done as soon as possible. Since we’ve been here for a while I know that papers + Japan always = a whole lot of hassle and time. I was advised to go back down to my ward office and sort it out directly: I was therefore contemplating taking my computer with me and work from home during the day. Due to prior plans I decided it'd be more practical to go back to university and finally pick up our visitor from Ueno at the end of the day, which is just next to Hongo campus. That was frankly bloody lucky.

All went perfectly fine and I just said goodbye to my lunch date Margareta and made it around the corner, when the ground started shaking/rocking back and forth; it was like being on a ferry when there's a storm. I was just underneath a set of electricity wires and the poles were moving almost 40 cm from side to side. The cars looked like they were in an RnB video, where pressurized air is let in and out, while this was swaying them from side to side. All of a sudden I was swiftly dragged into a small parking lot by an old couple, who of course had seen me standing there completely frozen under the wires. They probably decided they'd better save the stupid foreigner, who didn't understand it wasn’t entirely brilliant to stand there. The lady quickly dragged me down on my knees and showed me I had to put my handbag on my head and hold on to her and her husband, who in their turn held on to their neighbour. Alarms, which sounded like the flight alarms you'd hear in a movie, started going off and many of us, still on our hands and knees, lost balance.

Comment (0) Read More...

The 17th talk in the ESS/Lund university seminar series took place on Friday 25th February. Cameron Neylon from ISIS was the speaker and his topic was "Neutron Scattering and Reflection: The tools you need for the structural biology problems you can't solve". He gave a rather unusual and well-received talk, using as his device the jigsaw puzzle which sent the message that solving the complexities of tricky biological problems requires piecing together the evidence from whichever source you can find, neutron scattering being one crucial input.

What was revealing about this talk was the audience it attracted since it was held in the Oncology Department of the university hospital. Around 50 people turned up, and the discussion wax rather extensive, which shows that there really is an untapped scientific community wanting to know what neutron scattering can do for their research topics.

Pictured here back in the ESS offices are three members of the ESS science team, Pascale Deen, Sofie Botegård and Hanna Wacklin who are introducing Cameron to the Swedish tradition of fika. More about fika, and other Swedish traditions, in a later blog...

Comment (0)

ESS were invited to host the final volleyball match of the season in the Swedish Elite league between Lund and Vingåker which involved us choosing the best player on either side. It was a bit of a needle match which brought a really competitive edge to the game. Lund emerged as winners by 3 sets to 1. The best player on the Lund side, as judged by the eight ESS supporters there, was Patrik Ossowski. Patrik (and his collaborators) were awarded two days beamtime on the new ESS high intensity Reflectometer for their research on colloidal suspensions in food products. As the instrument will not be delivering beam until 2019 he was given a sports bag as consolation.

There was still time to head off to the local hostelry to catch the second half of the rugby match between England and France. I won't say who won. But I will say that there was much more action at the volleyball match.

Comment (0)

I'm flying from Stockholm to Copenhagen, back home after a day in the lovely capital city. A day of sunshine with the city and surrounding fields covered in fresh clean new snow. As we flew south the cloud cover began to increase and there was a rather spectacular wave pattern of the clouds. Almost perfect straight separated by clear sky of seemingly equal width. Why do the cloud align like this ? What are the forces that cause this coherence ? We see such patterns in sand and the same wave patterns exist in crystals, invisible to the naked eye of course. But clearly visible to neutrons which are able to observe such coherence in the atoms which make up the ordered crystals. They are called phonons since these waves have velocities similar to sound waves. There are also waves of magnetism in magnetic materials and these waves are called magnons. Again neutrons can observe them. But we are comparing waves in crystals which repeat every few Ångströms (one hundred millionth of a centimetre) with waves in sand of perhaps ten centimetres, and waves in the clouds of perhaps one kilometre. The underlying physics must be the same, but the forces are not. A ten trillion range in length scale ! These kind of phenomena are all around us. Must switch off, we're about to land.

Comment (0)

Tomorrow is the friendly race around Lund called Lundaloppet. For the non-Swedes, this word has the same root as "Loppa" or "Loppis" meaning a flea market (fleas also jump around the place).  A number of healthy superfit athletes from the ESS Secretariat at Stora Algatan will be wearing the ESS colours at Lundaloppet. I myself have decided, this year, not to compete. If you wish to cheer for these worthy people tomorrow we will gather at the LU tent on the sports field behind Bollhuset (Trollebergsvägen 26) at about 14:00. Then we will warm up together and start our run at 15:00! Please show solidarity with our team by bringing umbrellas (and bananas). Come in your hundreds to cheer!

Comment (0)