Minerva Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Physics: Schellman Research Group

Brandon Walker graduated from Northwestern in 2010 with Bachelor’s degrees in Physics and Astronomy and in Mathematics. He did his honors thesis in the Schellman group on `An Algorithm for Particle Tracking and Analysis of Muons in the Main Injector Experiment v-A (MINERvA).”

He is currently a doctoral student in Medical Physics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Brandon Walker (center) helps assemble the MINERvA detector 300 feet below Fermilab

For his PhD, he’s designing and building a modular multi-source electron beam scanner for high speed computed tomography and 3D printing applications. The system would enable ultra-fast CT scans for improved image quality in cardiac imaging and could be a game changer for 3D printing. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) has filed two patents for the project, one in 2014 and another in 2015 (patents pending).

He has also co-founded 2 startup companies. Formula Database, GelCombs and has his own consulting company that does quality assurance for radiation and diagnostic imaging products.

Chris Marshall, a graduate student finishing his thesis at Rochester, was on the day shift today and contributed this screenshot from the Original UROC at Rochester.

A mosaic of the Rochester ROC – this was the Original ROC!

Emily Maher, a Physics Professor at MCLA, who was doing the night shift, has kindly documented the official setup in the Fermilab control room. This is on the MINERvA shift wiki but that makes it hard to post pictures so I’m reposting here.

Top 1: MINOS DCS status and MINOS Run Control

Top 2: Run Control and MINOS DAQ summary

The MINERvA experiment at Fermilab is currently running 24×7 in the NuMI neutrino beam.

We have set up a Remote Operations Center (UROC) at Oregon State where we can run remote shifts monitoring data acquisition and controlling data taking. This frees up the experts at Fermilab for emergency repairs.

The screen on the far left shows neutrino interactions as they are logged at Fermilab.

This is a picture of an anti-neutrino interaction in the MINERvA detector. The invisible neutrino entered from the left, hit a nucleus and produced a muon particle which exits to the right. The color scale of the far right shows the amount of energy deposited in each pixel of the detector. The detector is about 10 m long and 2 m across.

I found out at shift turnover that Chris M. at Rochester had diagnosed a problem using a screen I didn’t know about. So we agreed to document our displays to see if we’re looking at all the displays we need to look at.

Here is my general layout: