Getting Started in the Lab: Lessons from My First Nuclear Physics Experiment Shift

by Rahul Jain

In December 2018, roughly a week before Christmas, in the middle of snowy Michigan winter, I stepped into the control room of a nuclear physics experiment for the very first time. I had just joined Michigan State University as a PhD student in August of that year, where the first semester was mostly spent taking classes and performing teaching assistant duties. My advisor encouraged me to participate in an experiment to get started with research and learn a few things. So I signed up for a couple of shifts. But I felt underprepared, underconfident, and honestly, even a little terrified when stepping into the control room that day.
  
As many of you might relate, being thrown into a high-stakes, ongoing experimental campaign can be exciting as well as unnerving at the same time. There’s no time for gentle hand-holding or foundational lectures when the beam is on and the data is coming in. Everyone around you is moving quickly, making decisions based on graphs that seem like hieroglyphics, communicating in a language of acronyms, shorthand, and intuition built from years of experience.

Your role as the new grad student? Keep your head down, watch a few key parameters, and log some values every hour. That is, of course, an important contribution to any experiment! However, I felt as if I was looking at some complex machinery that I would never be able to figure out completely. 

Although I had some undergraduate research experience, this was on a completely different level. I remember staring at a cluttered screen of diagnostics, afraid to do something wrong or break a working piece of code. I watched in awe as others interpreted plots I couldn’t make any sense of and took real-time decisions about detector voltages, beam steering, or data-taking strategies. I couldn't imagine ever being able to contribute meaningfully, and I walked away from that first shift feeling like I’d learned almost nothing.

Later, when I got back home, I gathered the courage to write to my mentor, who is a well-established scientist in our field. I poured out my insecurities, expecting a half-hearted generic reassurance. But their response was surprising! They told me they had felt exactly the same during their first experiments. Really? That overwhelming sensation of being completely lost is apparently, totally normal. And their advice was simple - find someone who knows more than you, and ask them basic, even ‘dumb’ questions.

So I started doing that. I reached out to the postdocs in our group, especially the ones who seemed patient and approachable. I’d corner them at coffee breaks, lunch breaks, and even before/after meetings and seminars, and ask basic things like, “What exactly does a PID plot show?” or “Why do we need calibration runs both before and after the experiment?” I found that they were always happy to answer, and their response mostly made sense. In scientific experiments, everything is usually done the way it is for very specific reasons. And as I uncovered those reasons one by one, I started to gain some much-needed confidence.

However, what really cemented my learning was getting hands-on. Once I began working on my own project in the lab where I was handling detectors, wiring up electronics, and troubleshooting data acquisition issues, I found that things finally started to stick. Concepts that had felt abstract during the experiment suddenly made sense when I physically encountered them. There’s no substitute for hands-on experience in experimental science. When you get your hands ‘dirty’ you build an intuitive understanding that no amount of documentation or lectures can ever provide.

By the time the next experiment rolled I had a different mindset. I started volunteering for simple tasks like powering up detectors or sorting online data. I made sure to read the ‘Run Plan’ - a document that outlines what we’re trying to do and how we’re going to do it ahead of time. I began attending the pre-experiment briefings more attentively. These usually include a presentation that walks through the motivation, the setup, and the expected outcomes. And I asked questions, lots of them, until I was satisfied with my understanding.

These incremental changes added up. Each experiment brought a new layer of understanding. Soon, I was able to contribute more meaningfully to discussions. I even started training others during their first shifts. This was something I never thought I’d be capable of looking back at that first winter in Michigan.
​
Experiments can be chaotic, messy, and emotionally taxing. But they are also where physics comes to life. Embracing the chaos, asking questions, and building relationships are the best ways to grow in this field. And one day, not too far from now, you’ll be the one explaining a PID plot to the next nervous newbie.

​Figure: The SuN (Left) and NERO (Right) Detector Setup at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University. The author used these detectors for their Ph.D. thesis experiments.