Dr. Priscilla Cushman

But the helium dilution fridge, which gets us to that temperature, was actually invented back in the 1960s.

And it's used in a lot of experiments, especially condensed matter physics.

So getting down to tens of millike is not what's unique about our experiment.

It's that we've got a payload of 31 kilograms of detectors, along with hundreds of kilograms of associated tower hardware.

Even cables that have to snake their way out from millikelvin temperatures to 1K up to room temperature.

And we also have copper vacuum cans.

That's another five tons all nested inside each other at sequentially colder temperatures and cooled by conduction through a similarly nested cold stem cylinder to the dilution fridge stages.

So you need all this cryogenic infrastructure to hold those 24 detectors stably at their operating temperature.

So that we got it all to work together and we're now able to reliably see pulses in our detectors.

That's the milestone we are celebrating.

We are now in what's called the commissioning stage.

And this is because we now have operating detectors.

We are putting them through their paces.

We're calibrating them.

So we're now deciding which ones that we really want to concentrate on.

and get the best performance out of.

Well, we're collecting data, of course, now.

We have what are called data-taking shifts, where we have three to four people who, for a week, look at the data and try to see how to improve our resolution.

We expect what we call science data to happen near the end of the summer, most likely, sometime in the summer.

What happens is a...