Saif Ali Email & Phone Number

I have spent the last three years working as a Graduate Research Assistant in Experimental Nuclear Physicist. My work involved Research and Development on a new $75 million particle detector, sPHENIX, being built at Brookhaven National Lab in New York. I made contributions to both the hardware and software development of the detector. The detector is comprised of approximately 14,000 detecting tiles that were tested at Georgia State for individual performance characterization. The biggest challenge here was accomplishing this task in the midst of the pandemic where the project's timeline was put into question. Vital to that timeline was testing these tiles so they can be sent to and assembled in New York. While rallying a team of undergraduate students, I was able to keep the timeline in order, and all the tiles were sent to Brookhaven National Lab ahead of time, ensuring the timeline remained intact. In the meantime, I made weekly updates to our internal research team and the collaboration at large with up-to-the-day numbers showing our progress and showing how the many problems we ran into were resolved. I developed a piece of online monitoring software (in C++) that is able to analyze the on-board LED lights of the detector. The LED pulses are used as a wellness check on the detector's components to ensure that from the beginning to end of its data run, no changes were seen in the components that affected how data was taken. When the detector is running, whoever is on-sight for the run duration will use this software to run this wellness check. The software will report any degradation in the performance of the detector components, and calibrations will be made based off the analysis of the software. This software is going to be used as the basis of other monitoring softwares written for the various components of the detector.