Question: Have you made any particularly interesting breakthroughs recently?

Kristian Harder answered on 8 Nov 2013:

Yeah, kind of, even though it’s more an engineering and project management breakthrough than actual science, strictly speaking.
I had spent the last two years or so leading a small group of students and engineers developing electronics that would allow us to test a new particle detector prototype. Other people (in Switzerland) had developed the detector (a silicon pixel detector similar to the CCDs used in digital cameras), and yet other people (from Germany, Taiwan, Austria and CERN) were in charge of setting up the test area, but our job was to develop electronics that essentially connects the detector to a computer that can then analyze the data and check that the new detector is doing what it is supposed to do. I had done similar things, but with less responsibility and less complex.
This particular project was quite rocky. The first version of our electronics didn’t work very well. Then we figured it out, were asked to build something much bigger (the electronics for the full system, not just the small prototype), but then our funding agency changed their mind and eliminated our project. However, we didn’t want to let our colleagues in Switzerland/Germany/Taiwan down, and so we continued to work on a new version of our system in our spare time. Because we didn’t really have money for this project, and couldn’t use that much staff on it, we barely finished everything in time for the crucial big test taking place in the USA last month. But we did it, and it looks like it all worked.
Of course enough other things went wrong during the test (water leaks, network problems, and so on, and so on) that even now we still don’t know whether the results are actually useful, but we’ll find out soon, and if we have to, we’ll do it all again. Never give up, never surrender! 🙂