I was actually involved with the experimental setup at SNO, however tiny in the grand scheme. Btw, my contribution was in the front end particle detectors, whe

I was actually involved with the experimental setup at SNO, however tiny in the grand scheme. Btw, my contribution was in the front end particle detectors, when I was an undergraduate student. This was 20 yrs ago so a bit fuzzy on he details. But basically, people on my team (University of Pennsylvania high energy physics dept) designed analog ASIC's that effectively connected directly to the SNO photomultiplier tube outputs to process the tiny electrical signals, IIRC often from only a few hundred or thousand electrons. There were two chips they designed. An integrator (SNOINT) which was like a preamp and identified how strong the signal was, and a discriminator (SNOD) which identified accurate timing information of the pulses. We required IIRC about 10,000 of these chips, and the fabrication process had a very low yield (about 30% had all functionality working). So my job entailed setting up an automated test station, simulating all functionality of the photomultiplier inputs, and interfacing with a computer to run the suite of tests and identify good/bad in about 30-60s. We had a good process and hired a bunch of part-time workers who would run through the tests to identify the good chips. I was quite jealous of some of my colleagues who worked with the actual production circuit boards, and got to travel to SNO itself and go down into the mine to set them up in production. Fun times though. We also built Fermilab and CERN detector electronics, and even for the cancelled superconducting supercollider. That job basically taught me electronics and data acquisition, and led to my next job as a joint hardware/software engineer.