Jake Oxley

September 5, 2018

PHYS 485

This is a summary paper of my thoughts about Clarence Chang’s presentation on

superconducting detectors. Overall, I thought that Chang’s presentation was interesting, but he

tried to fit too many ideas, concepts, and experiences in the presentation time. He admitted this

himself, saying there was no way he was getting through his 120+ slides in an hour. Chang

started with some background about modern transition edge sensors, which he describes as “very

sensitive thermometers”, and went on to talk about how they are used in cosmology by Chang’s

team. After this came a large amount of graphs and diagrams that I didn’t really understand, not

helped by the short amount of time spent on each one. What seemed to be the focus though was

taking pictures of space, and using lensing and de-lensing effects to find out more about the

density and composition of different parts of the universe. During his studies, Chang’s team also

traveled to a research post on the South Pole, and he documented this visit during the

presentation. I thought this was very interesting, as not only did they travel to Antarctica,

somewhere I forgot that researchers ever visit, but they also installed their own part onto a

telescope there. Chang also talks about a form of beta decay where it seems that no neutrino

escapes, because it is absorbed by a nearby atom that is also undergoing beta decay. This is

interesting, but I had a hard time understanding what this had to do with the rest of the

presentation, other than the fact that they both are about neutrinos. Chang also related his use of

superconducting detectors to quantum computing, specifically about the physical makeup of

both, and how they use similar circuits and wafers. Although it seemed like it was added on a
whim by Chang and didn’t have a lot to do with the rest of the presentation, I still enjoyed it

because I love quantum computing. Overall, I thought Chang’s presentation was interesting, but

it went too quickly and he didn’t have time to satisfyingly speak on each idea he was presenting.