From Symmetry, 23 July 2013
Twice a year, Todd Johnson drives 400 miles from the Fermilab campus in Illinois to a commercial polymer crosslinking facility in Ohio, which is generally used to prepare plastic tubing for uses like heating systems in houses. Johnson is there for its linear accelerator, something with which he is quite familiar, given his day job working in Fermilab’s Accelerator Division.
But on these two days a year, Johnson is not using the accelerator for science—although there is a lot of science involved. Johnson is making Lichtenberg figures, fractal patterns that result from the lightning-bolt-like movements of excited electrons. The hobby is a popular one among accelerator scientists, but Johnson says he and the friends he works with are working to explore the limits of the process.
“The end purpose is to do it as art,” Johnson says. “But we also do a lot of experiments to push it further. It’s a technical challenge involving physics and a little mad science, if you’ll pardon the expression. And you have art when you’re done.” Read more >>
