Laboratory Manager Retires
William “Bill” Miller recently retired from his position as Laboratory Manager at the Ash River research facility in northern Minnesota. Miller began working for the School in 1987 His career at the School began with what was supposed to be a temporary 6-8 week job that lasted for 34 years. Miller was working in civil construction in Ely, Minnesota–building houses, roads and septic systems–when he was brought in to help inspect some work being done for Professor Marvin Marshak on the Soudan II neutrino experiment in an old iron mine near Tower, Minnesota.
Miller ended up staying on to help assemble the Soudan II detector, which consisted of a 1000 tons of steel plates and boxes. He hired a crew to put it together and install it at Soudan and then was responsible for keeping it running until it was decommissioned 11 years later. In the meantime, neutrino physics was in a boom phase. A large cross country neutrino beam was built in Switzerland and there was talk of building one at Fermilab in Illinois. The target for this latter beam was MINOS, a massive detector to be located in the Soudan mine. A new cavern was dug to house 5500 tons of primarily steel plates and scintillators. Miller hired a crew to do the installation of that detector, which started taking data in 2003. MINOS continued to collect data through 2016, bringing an end to 36 productive years at the Soudan Underground Research Laboratory.
After MINOS was up and running, Bill began overseeing construction of the largest neutrino experiment yet built in Minnesota–the NOvA far detector, which was housed in a massive new building two hours further north at a site called Ash River, near International Falls. While Soudan had an existing facility, with infrastructure such as access roads and power, none of that existed in the wilderness of the Ash River site. Miller oversaw the construction of the site, including the building itself and the assembly of the massive detector within. The building was completed in 2009, the experiment began taking data in 2012, and it will continue to run until ~2026 before it is decommissioned. At its peak there were 45 people working on NOvA, in two 10 hour shifts.
With NOvA in its data-taking phase, Miller became involved in the DUNE neutrino experiment, which is still in the design and early fabrication stage. Miller has overseen the assembly of prototypes of the detector at the Ash River facility, and he was invited to bring some of his crew to CERN in Switzerland to help assemble “proto-Dune” there. “They became international experts to assist the local technicians to put this prototype together,” Miller’s former boss, Marvin Marshak says. “They were experienced in implementing the fabrication requirements. Under Bill's leadership they went from working in a paper mill to being international experts in this specialized field. They wouldn’t have been able to predict that.”
Marshak tells a story about assembling the NOvA detector: “They were using this two part epoxy to hold it together. They had this mixing machine that would mix the two and spray it on on these plastic modules. They had 20 minutes to get it in place before it hardened. They had this big clock that started counting. They had to pick this thing up and lower it into place, get weights on it before the chime went off on the clock. With Bill’s leadership, they got it to under ten minutes. He hired 45 guys who had never done physics experiments and helped them get this all together.”
On the topic of being a boss, Miller says “People learn by example. There’s no task I would have someone do that I wouldn’t also be working on.” One of Miller's biggest challenges is to get workers to adjust to the meticulous record keeping of a nationally funded experiment. “In normal construction, you wouldn’t need that, but we are working so remotely that many of the scientists can’t even get to the lab, so we need to keep records, take photos, etc.” Miller says.
As time has gone on, the experiments have gotten more complex, the collaborations larger, and the record keeping and scrutiny are intense. “The early experiments had no bureaucracy or documentation,” Marshak commented. “Bill made that transition and adapted as he has done with everything else.”
“In the long run it works out” Miller says, “because we have a really excellent reputation for always getting the job done. Whether at Soudan, Ash River or CERN, we get all the health and safety approvals. It gets approved quite easily because we have a reputation for doing things right and not cutting corners.” Bureaucracy aside, building physics experiments isn’t that different from building houses for Miller “Building homes, my job was to see the vision someone had for their house or cabin, to give them what they wanted. With physicists they would tell me what they wanted, and my job was to safely and economically build the thing. Sometimes it wasn’t always what they thought they wanted in the beginning. I would make a suggestion and sometimes it would be ignored and often it came to be in a few years, they would get a great idea and it would be the same as what I wanted in the beginning.” Miller said it took a while to gain the physicists' trust partly because he lacked a college degree.
Although Miller is retired from managing the Ash River laboratory, he is far from idle. He is working as a part time consultant to CERN on protoDUNE. He is also looking forward to enjoying more time at his home in northern Minnesota. “I grew up in New Jersey, my father worked for the Presbyterian Church Headquarters. We spent August in our cabin on Snowbank Lake in Ely, since I was 5. I knew by the time I was 12 that I wanted to live in Ely.” Miller made that dream come true, working summers as a canoe guide, dropped out of college after one year (as a math major) when offered a carpentry job in Ely, that ultimately led to his career working with the University.