Make Plotting Easier to Access

One of the purpose of my project is also to make the simulation codes easy to access and understand. So in the past two weeks, Dr. Bellis and I have been working on how to make plotting curve codes easier to change (make it more general).

Here are two pictures of the plotting simulations that I have made. On the left, there are two curves (on sine and one cosine) that is moving and. On the left, one can see a exponential curve that is moving to the left as each frame goes by.

Dr. Bellis and I changed the plots so that the coordinate system and the equations that we want to plot is in one tab (called simple_plot), and the code for start plotting and the amplitude and period changes are on the other tab (called plotting_tools).

From the picture above, all the complicated codes are put in one tab, and the one that one may want to manipulate (period, frequency, etc.) are on the plotting_tools tab. To make one simulation, we just have to call up simple_plot in the codes that is under the plotting_tools tab.

Due to spring break, I will not be going to Siena for internship for two weeks. After two week, I hope I can start to make graphs that can show the amount of dark matter captured on earth! :)

Dark Matter News

Two days after we left AAAS conference, Samuel Ting, a really accomplished particle physicist who did whatever he could to send make US send a AMS (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer) to International Space Station to detect anti-Helium that is coming from space to Earth (it was the next to last space shuttle that US sent to the ISS), made announcement at AAAS saying that the AMS had found something. Many rumors say that the 'something' that the AMS found maybe Dark Matter. However, Ting says that they will be ready to announce the results after two or three weeks.

Link to the news:
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/dark-matter-search-from-the-space-station-continues-to-tease.html

The first time I learned about Samuel Ting was actually quite recent. Dr. Bellis was teaching me about the history of particle physics and the discovery of different quarks. Samuel Ting, who was working at MIT lab, and the SLAC lab at Stanford found a new quark called "Charm"on 1974 (this event is also called the November Revolution). According to Dr. Bellis, Ting, as a person with strong opinions, and the SLAC lab had conflict over to name the new meson cc (quark+anti-qark), so at the end the name of the meson became the combination of the symbol that each of them wants: J/ψ (J/Psi) meson. 
I googled Samuel Ting and found out that he is a American-Taiwanese who studied at the same high school that my father went to! However, His capability was unfortunately not recognized when he was in Taiwan (he flunked a class during college at Taiwan), so he continued his graduate education in the United States. 

Samuel Ting

To Progress is Human

In the past two weeks, I worked more on my Dark Matter simulation. I added the Earth, which is orbiting around the sun. Furthermore, I was able to track the path the sun and the Earth makes around the center of the universe by putting a button on the simulation that can make the background disappear. When I looked at the path at the first time, I thought I had done something wrong, because the path of the earth is creating a shape that I never seen before. Dr. Bellis laughed at my reaction and say that it is correct, I had created a simulation that shows the epicycles (the circular orbits of an object that orbits around another orbiting object) without knowing what epicycles are.

Epicycles

Below are the paths of the Sun and Earth that is shown on my simulation
Blue- Earth's path, Orange- Sun's path
High--> low velocity

We then spend some time at Dr. Cummings', who is also a professor at the Particle physics department, office. Dr. Bellis excitingly shared what I made with Dr. Cummings and they both got really excited and say that they are going to use them in the Astronomy class at Siena. In this office of excitement, I suddenly saw a group of Chinese girls went by. I stared and found out that they were Sherry, Claire, Irene, Etheal, etc and were there for the AMC test. After that incident, Dr. Bellis, Dr. Cummings, and I continued to discuss about our simulation. Dr. Cummings gave us some advice on how to make a graph that will track the amount of dark matter detected on Earth over time change. This is a challenge, because Processing is a program that is mostly used for art and animations rather than science, so Dr. Bellis and I could not find example of how to make a graph on Processing. We realized that we will have to write codes that will draw tiny line segments to create line or curved line graph. 

To practice drawing a graph on Processing, Dr. Bellis showed me how to create a sine curve. He gave me this code that will repeatedly do things over a number of times. Using this code I was able to create a coordinate system on the simulation. Firstly, I drew the x and y axis. Secondly, I drew the tick marks that have numbers on its side by using the code which adds a certain distance to the position of each line segment as "i" (like 'n' in a sequence/series formula) increases. Thirdly, I drew a new sine graph, also using the new codes, with starting point on the end of my x-axis. 

Sine curve on a coordinate system (not to scale)

 It looks very simple but the progress of figuring out how to do it just by looking at sample is actually really difficult. The next thing I did was to draw exponential curves on the coordinate system I created (just copy and past the codes for the ticks and axis to a new file :P and figure out how to make the codes repeatedly draw line segments of the exponential curve). 

The simulations and codes are on the website: http://www.sos.siena.edu/~mbellis/ew_processing/spring_2013.html

Feel free to play with the orbits by using the buttons that changes the speed of the orbiting objects! :)