After much hard work by too many people to even possibly hope to
mention, MicroBooNE detector assembly has begun to roll out some of the
first tangible construction in this last month. I have had the good
fortune of getting to take part in a lot of the assembly activity and
detector construction in the last week and thought it would be fun to
share some of the work with the Quantum Diaries community. The first
thing I should say is that any of the work I am showing here is by no
means my own. I am only one of many hands getting to take part in the
plan to build the Liquid Argon neutrino detector known as MicroBooNE.
While I am trying my best to take on leadership roles in some of these
tasks (e.g. be a person that knows what is going on and can get yelled
at if things aren't going smoothly), there are many people who are
planning and leading the charge and I am just one of many helping hands.
- Wires being mounted on the electronics board
The
first of the tasks I got to do much earlier in the spring was to take
part in the fabrication of part of the wires that will be at the heart
of the MicroBooNE detector. From February till May of this year I aided
and helped lead the effort to complete the Y-plane wires that will
serve as the collection plane for the MicroBooNE detector. This was a
very interesting, yet incredibly tedious, task of using a special made
machine (made at Brookhaven Labs) to measure and wind > 3840
individual wires and place them on an electronics board (also designed
and fabricated at Brookhaven...see I told you I was only a small cog in
the wheel) before storing them and shipping them to Fermilab where they
await to be mounted in the detector. Along the way we performed
various strength and strain tests all in preparation for their final
use in the detector.
- All the Y-Plane wires awaiting transport to Fermilab
After
landing back at Fermilab in the early summer (with a brief layover in
Japan for Neutrino 2012 conference) I began to take part in the massive
efforts that were going on to sort / clean / and prep all the various
large and small parts that were starting to arrive from the various
machine shops and industrial companies that will eventually make up the
MicroBooNE detector. These efforts were being lead by Jen Raaf (a
Fermilab Scientist) along with an army of undergraduates, graduates,
and post-docs. An article was even written in Fermilab today (
see link here) highlighting some of the work.
However, don't let the fancy picture fool you...this was a lot of
hard work. From scrubbing massive pieces of steel to remove grime and
particles to cleaning and coating thousands of individual bolts, this
massive effort required MANY man hours and lots of dirty clothes and
long days. I, along with many other people, aided in a good part of the
cleaning efforts as well as some of the sorting and transporting, but a
lot of credit has to go to Thomas Strauss from Bern who really threw
himself into the task of getting these parts cleaned, labelled and
transported .
Finally, with a all the parts needed to begin the full scale
construction, MicroBooNE began to come together last week at large
scale. The first part of the detector that was to be assembled is what
is known as the "anode frame" and is one of the back parts of what makes
up the large rectangular TPC detector.
This too was no small undertaking and took the hard work of
technicians from Lab F at Fermilab, scientists from Brookhaven Labs,
graduate students and post-docs (myself included) and even the
spokespeople of the MicroBooNE collaboration in order to get all the
various parts to fit together and have any hope of being square and
parallel.
- Freshly cleaned large steel parts for the TPC
Like
most things in life, the judicious application of banging mallets,
pulling of chains, and the screwing of allen wrenches eventually got
the anode frame assembled and in place in the construction tent
currently living in the D0 collision hall at Fermilab.
While the construction work is far from being done, I thought it
would be fun to share a flavor of all the exciting things that are
taking place as I get the chance to share in my first large scale
construction of a particle detector. You can follow all the excitement,
thanks to Fermilab visual media services there is a live streaming
webcam of the construction tent which can be viewed here:
http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/live/MBWebcam.htm
- 1000's of bolts freshly cleaned and awaiting moly-coating
- All the people hard at work getting the frame together (when all else fails, swing the hammer harder!)
- The (nearly) completed anode frame
