What Keeps Me Awake At Night

It was a cloudy morning three days past. I arrived at the Neutrino Hall (where we are taking data) with my belly full of bacon, . Here I was immediatly assulted with a load of errors that data aqusition system (DAQ) of the detector system was throwing at me. As I grudgetly realized this means I have to actually earn my pay by fixing this thing rather then lazily sitting by whatching the data flow.
For a little while I was totally mystified. Diving though the software I could find nothing to fix (not that I understand any of it). So I wondered off to check out the electronics crates. There is no really good way to express this mess of wires with words, so have some pictures:

The main logic for the near detector.


The main logic racks are in the back, the power supplies are the racks at the right ...


The thick cables go to/fro the PMTs in the 1kt tank. The panel in the back seems to have only one purpose in life: delaying a signal.

After crawling through that for a while and marveling at my ignorance of this system I emailed out a pitiful little plea for help. Help soon eventually arrived in the form of our polish collaborator on the scene (Asia is her name). Later I got more hlep (via email) from one of the guys back in Canada. Finally Mine-san a Japanese collaborator (currently down here from sunny California) arrived at the scene. After a while of screahcing our heads we called in even more help, in the form of one of the experts on the DAQ (Hayato-san his name would be). Hayato-san quickly found out that the DAQ is functioning, but there seems to be trouble with our system. The problem apparently was that our system was telling the DAQ to take more data then it possible could. Here is a picture of the system I am talking about:

You guessed it ... more electronics.

Anyway after some inspection (ie. going awal with an oscilloscope) we found that the problem is with our laser (which generates the light for our data):

Apparently it has gone past it's prime running contiuously for the last month-and a bit. Now my hope for salvation lies in a plasma cartridge which apprently needs exchanging. Well it's either that or I'm running away to Kyoto to visit Jeff.