• Question: How long have you spent on one experiment?

    Asked by seany12345 to Zachary, Venus, Tim, Kristian, Joel on 12 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Joel Goldstein

      Joel Goldstein answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      In particle physics we spend a lot of time working on one “experiment”, i.e. a particular apparatus at a particular accelerator. I have been working on the CMS experiment for about five years, but some of my collaborators have been on it since it was first proposed over 20 years ago!
      Of course, we don’t spend all that time just making one measurement! CMS produces hundreds of new results every year, so there’s plenty of opportunity to work on different things.

    • Photo: Kristian Harder

      Kristian Harder answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      My main experiment is called “life”, and I’ve been working on it for 40 years already, with varying degrees of success. 😉
      A full size particle physics experiment can actually take as long as than an entire career. 20 years to plan and build it, 20 years running it, and then another 10 years or so until the analysis of the data is over. But most scientists do not actually spend that entire time on a single experiment. I kind of goes with the job. During your PhD, you might work on one experiment. When you are done with your PhD, you look for postdoc job offers, and more often than not you get a job that is associated with a different experiment. Once that job is running out, your next job might be on yet something else. That kind of system gives you typically a few years on one experiment. I’ve worked with OPAL, TESLA, DZero, each for about 5 years (sometimes in parallel). Now I’ve been working with CMS for about five years, but I have funding for at least five more CMS years. Because I am not on a limited term contract anymore, I might change to another experiment when other experiments get more interesting, but it could also be that you find my fossilized remains next to the rusty leftovers of CMS in a cave in a few million years. 😉

    • Photo: Tim Hollowood

      Tim Hollowood answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      Nice and easy question for a theorist. Zip, nada, zero.

      Theorist don’t do experiments but they are very keen to see what our experimental colleagues can find because this tells us if our theories are any good. But often it works the other way. Some theorist like Peter Higgs comes up with some crackpot theory that predicts the existence of a particle, the Higgs boson. Then 50 years later experimentalists find it!

    • Photo: Zachary Williamson

      Zachary Williamson answered on 13 Nov 2013:

      Well, I’ve only worked on one experiment so far and its been over 3 years since I started. Particle physics experiments can be hugely expensive and tend to run for years, if not decades.

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