Machinist has 4850 Level history
Machinist Russ Baumann brings a unique historical perspective to physics research at the 4,850-foot level of the Sanford Underground Research Facility (Sanford Lab).
Today, Baumann works for Adams ITC in Rapid City, S.D. He?s one of two machinists working in the Davis Campus?in world?s deepest clean-room machine shop?where he and colleague Randy Hughes are fashioning parts for the Majorana Demonstrator experiment. Majorana is the third physics experiment Bauman has worked on at Homestake. And no, he did not work on the famous solar-neutrino detector that would later win a share of a Nobel Prize for Ray Davis.
Bauman?s first contribution to physics here was about 30 years ago. Homestake was still a gold mine, and Bauman was still a student at Lead (S.D.) High School. Physicist Ken Lande of the University of Pennsylvania recruited Bauman and some of his fellow machine-shop students to remove plastic from dozens of photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) so the delicate devices could be recycled. The students did a great job Lande said. ?They only broke one.?
Lande worked with Davis for decades on the solar-neutrino detector. However, he had used the PMTs in an early proton-decay experiment, which he had installed in 1979 in the same cavern that housed the neutrino detector. The PMTs were positioned inside white plastic bags filled with clean water. The bags, in turn, were hung in the water that surrounded the large chlorine tank at the heart of the Davis experiment. It was the largest proton-day experiment up until that time, Lande said, and it collected valuable data on that very rare phenomenon.
A decade or so later, Lande designed an iodine-based neutrino detector he hoped to install at another location on the 4850 Level. Bauman, by then a welder working for a local contractor, helped assemble those tanks on the surface and underground. Unfortunately, that experiment was never completed.
Baumann, who lives near Spearfish, said he was happy to be working underground again, especially in the clean environment. ?Now it?s like working in an upscale office building,? he said. ?It?s nice to be back.?