It’s done! Friday night at 23:00 local time our experiment ended. If it was successful I can’t say yet, this depends on the outcome of the detector read out.
But I can provide some meaningless numbers:
In four days we had 37 hours of actual beam on target and had a total number of approx. 1.2E+11 particles distributed on four particle types. We irradiated 260 detectors and -so far- just broke four of them.
Here you see at least two hours of work. Not irradiating them, reading them out, or producing them, no, just putting this beastly little things in this holes, fixed with a piece of paper, without breaking them. This brings me to the point, that vinyl gloves, PMMA plates, a wool pullover and a cord trousers are not the perfectly combination for putting tiny paper pieces into place. Remember what happens after rubbing a cats skin on plastics stick and bringing this near some paper pieces?
Suitcase as it should be
The engineers at RADEF have been really helpful and I didn’t even had to use my secret weapon: Schnapps Helps always, even more if there is a monopoly on liquors.
Now the detectors are shipped to the collaborating working groups and read out. Until I get their results there is no way to tell, if the experiment was real successful. So, cross fingers …
Following some visual impressions from the last day:
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- Suitcase as it should be
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- Pellet holding plate.
