The committee for the H. Wade Patterson Student Award has yet to receive any applications. Surely, some of you have students presenting at the Health Physics Society (HPS) annual meeting in Washington!!!! Joe McDonald needs these names as soon as possible so that the award plaque can be completed in time for the meeting.
As you know, the Accelerator Section special session will be held from 8:15 until 11:45 AM on Tuesday, July 13, in the Washington 4 meeting room. Graham Stevenson, from the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), is the G. William Morgan Lecturer for 2004 and will begin the special session at 8:15 AM. Don't miss this exciting lecture.
I'd also like to take a moment to remind you that the annual business meeting will be held immediately following this special session at 11:45 AM. Business meetings are a vital and important function of continued section health. Please stay the extra few minutes and give us your ideas and suggestions.
If you can't wait until Tuesday, remember that there are five accelerator-related posters on Monday afternoon from 1:30 to 3:00 PM. I'm looking forward to seeing my colleagues in Washington.
Our Louisiana State University (LSU) health physics community is working hard to bring you a rewarding midyear meeting in New Orleans. There is still time to submit an abstract for the meeting to be held February 13-16, 2005, at the New Orleans Marriott: the deadline is July 30. To submit an abstract, go to the website. The topic is "Materials Security and Control: Risk Assessment, Handling, and Detection." Let us know how post 9/11 events have impacted how you conduct your operations at accelerator facilities. What changes have you implemented, what changes do you foresee for the future, and what impact does this have on your budgets? These are just some of the items that would be interesting to discuss, in addition to the traditional technical and scientific sessions. We are also interested in more accelerator-related professional enrichment programs (PEPs) as a potential training ground toward the accelerator section hosting a summer school.
Things at the Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices (CAMD) continue to be busy. We are trying to bring in a new wiggler beamline for x-ray tomography. This has been challenging, both from the perspective of Bremsstrahlung from beam clipping as well as synchrotron radiation. Things will proceed a little more slowly than originally anticipated. The beamline is equipped with two separate monochromators that can be switched out and that are connected via a thin bellows. This brings some interesting interlock challenges to prevent white light from entering the radiation hutch during manipulation from the channel-cut to the multilayer monochromator. There is also the translational movement of the multilayer which is extreme grazing angles that could let white light into the hutch.
If anyone has some lessons learned that they would be willing to share, I'd love to hear from you. For now, the days are long and the progress slow. Are there any laser safety officers (LSOs) out there dealing with pulsed, tunable dye lasers? Let us know how you are handling some of these problems. Certainly the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at Jefferson Lab has a lot of experience in laser safety. It would make a good topic for one of our newsletters. Many of us are having to expand our duties beyond strict accelerator-related health physics.