Maintaining the HPS SVT
The happy guy in this picture just finished with the successful installation of a small but astonishingly complex piece of technology called the Silicon Vertex Tracker. It's buried deep inside the vacuum chamber behind me, but trust me... it's there! All laid out on a table in the cleanroom at SLAC, it looks like the image below, featuring one of our graduate students, Sho Uemura.
Basically, the purpose of this device is to take snapshots every 24 billionths of a second of all of the particles that have passed through it, like a three dimensional photograph. This allows us to reconstruct what happened when the electrons in our beam hit the nuclei in our target with the hope that very rarely one of these interactions will produce a dark photon. Anyway, this jewel-like little detector was a labor of love for a handful of scientists, engineers, and students for a couple of years.
Still, nothing stays new forever, and it doesn't take long for the elation of having completed such a project to turn into vigilance against all of the things that can break or even simply wear out over time. Just like anything else; your computer, television, iPhone, etc.; nothing is perfect and nothing improves with use or time. So, this happy guy and his colleagues now sweat over every detail in ensuring that this detector performs as well as possible for as long as possible. Meanwhile, after getting some experience with the detector and the data it produces, we invariably think of something we could have done better, or some limit we could have pushed a little bit further, so even as we maintain the detector, we make plans to upgrade it to make it even more powerful. The march of progress never stops!