Excellent progress right from day 1. The experiment relies heavily on timing; there are 3 things (laser, electron beam, plasma) that have to be synchronized with picosecond accuracy in order to interfere the way we want, and right from today that happened. More preparation setup tomorrow.
It is interesting to compare how the people here work as compared to the people in the slac experiment at Stanford. In slac there are exactly two people that know everything that is going on, and then the rest of them sort of help to get the work done. Here in BNL there is a very specific delegation of responsibilities: there is one person working on one item at a time. You have a question regarding that item, you go to that guy.
Also people here don't care about all he results; they just keep the ones that are good. In slac everything is recorded and later they run correlations and analysis on everything.
Katsouleas is leaving tomorrow in a flight where he is going to surprise his dad who is coming from Greece and will be on the flight. Vitaly is leaving too, so we have a lot of work to do ourselves.
