Stony Brook University, United States
I recently concluded my work on the single-phase ProtoDUNE detector, which was an amazing 1.5-year-long experience for me. Not only did I gain valuable experience and insight into what it takes to build a particle detector, but I got to work with some amazing people along the way. My favorite moment from this project was with many of those people: We had just come off a couple weeks filled with a lot of work and little sleep to try and get the high voltage system ready for operations, and we were finally ready to ramp up the voltage to its target value of 180,000 volts. The immense amount of work we put into the system and the desire to take as much data as we could before we lost our test beam made for a very tense atmosphere in the control room. However, all of the tension was released when we hit the voltage successfully. The control room was electric, if you’ll pardon the pun. The rest of the day was filled with Champagne, hugs, and stories about how far we had come in such a short amount of time.