The Lab buildings, especially the older ones, lend themselves to creaking doors and mysterious groans that some might say are a building settling in for the night. But others know that something more mischievous might be at play.  It’s lab goblins who delight in spoiling research results.

Recently, three Lab researchers from the Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics Division, Arun Persaud, senior scientist in fusion energy sciences/ion beam technologies program, Jeroen van Tilborg, senior scientist, deputy of experiments at BELLA Center, and Curtis Berger, graduate student at BELLA Center, discussed their experience with lab goblins and mysterious results. 

Jeroen: You can find yourself in the lab sometimes, cut off from outside light and other human interactions for hours. It’s getting dark outside, your colleagues have already gone home, and you suddenly realize that if lab goblins did exist and did come out from a corner in the lab for a sneak attack, or worse, in an accelerator cave with its concrete walls; really no one would hear you scream or come to help you. 

Curtis: Lab goblins cause chaos. Several of us will check all the electrical cable connections multiple times before running an experiment. Then we find out later it doesn’t work the way we expected. We go back and look at our instrumentation, and sure enough, a cable is disconnected or missing.  Who else could it have been but a lab goblin?

Arun: Not only that but based on the images we’ve obtained, lab goblins do not follow safety procedures or WPCs. They often don’t wear closed-toe shoes or long pants, but most of them now seem to wear goggles when they are around the lasers. They also appear to take on different forms, depending on the research and the researcher’s point of view. To our knowledge, no one has yet built a lab goblin detector. 

Jeroen: And when it is built, we’d have to see if it was an allowable expense.

Arun: I agree with Curtis and Jeroen. We run into more than lab goblins in physics.

Jeroen:  Sometimes, when you do an experiment for the first time, you keep staring at a detector like a noisy camera image or voltage trace on an oscilloscope, and you set up these long scans where you change many parameters. Then you start staring at your detector, hoping and waiting for that background noisy signal to suddenly jump up for that Nobel-prize-winning new effect. You stare and stare, and sometimes you feel that the noise is trying to tell you something. Sometimes, you even believe that little blip was a real signal, just to find out it does not return in repeated scans. It does feel like you are having a battle with supernatural forces on who is the more patient one, the more resilient one. 

Arun: I think that is true for many of the experiments we do. It can take years to set up, and during that time, you have lots of failures and things you can’t explain. It plays with your mind. But we don’t give up.