Session E7: The Scales of Collaboration - Physics as a Cooperative Effort

The Axion Dark Matter Experiment: Big Science with a (relatively) Small Team.

The idea of the solitary physicist tinkering alone in a lab was my image of how science was done growing up (mostly influenced by popular culture). Of course this is not generally how experimental physics is done now days with examples of experiments at the LHC now involving thousands of scientists. In this talk I will describe my experience in a relatively modest project, the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment (ADMX), which involves only a few dozen scientists at various universities and national labs. I will outline ADMX’s humble beginnings at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), where it began in the mid-1990s, and describe how the collaboration has evolved and grown throughout the years, as we pursue our elusive quarry: the dark-matter axion.   

Collaboration at the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization

Ground-based optical and infrared astronomy is poised to make another leap in scale, moving from 10-m mirrors to 25- to 39-m mirrors. The Giant Magellan Telescope is poised to be the first of three new telescopes to begin operations, in 2022, with a subset of its seven 8.4-m mirror segments. These massive new telescopes push the limits of technology and financing. International collaborations are necessary to support the more than $1B projects, providing both challenges and opportunities.