Bunker bonus!

[pheloniusfriar]

Remember how I said I spent my summer in 2014 chained to a radioactive block of concrete for three weeks? Well, I exaggerated... I wasn't actually physically chained... I spent every waking moment there of my own free volition (most of it really exited to be doing something so amazing) to help see that the project we were working on (PDF) gave us the data we needed. It was months of intensive preparation to get there, and what was supposed to have been a part-time consulting role for me turned into a key role with the data acquisition setup for the project. For all that it was certainly a highlight of my career so far as a physicist (and pretty much one of coolest things I have ever done in any capacity), I was seriously over-committed during that project and spent months afterward trying to get back into a groove (which never really happened). But... and here's a big but... I will soon have my name on an article in a peer-reviewed journal (Nuclear Instrument and Methods in Physics Research A) for the effort. I have been published in conference proceedings and have given presentations to some pretty amazing groups, which certainly gets some credit, but being published in a major journal is the full meal deal. Given my place in the grander scheme of things, this is a huge accomplishment for me, and hopefully presages wondrous things to come! A pre-press version of the paper was just released on arXiv.org if you want to take a look at how I spend my summer vacations these days (a PDF will open in a new tab):

Performance of a Full-Size Small-Strip Thin Gap Chamber Prototype for the ATLAS New Small Wheel Muon Upgrade

When it is formally published in NIM, I will definitely be having a major personal celebration!