What does his job involve?

Richard DeMarco works inside the Advanced Light Source (ALS) as a survey and alignment technician. After physicists have thought of an idea, and engineers have designed an instrument or a component and produced a drawing with the location coordinates, Richard and his team place the component. He uses equipment ranging from portable spotlights adapted from police cruisers, to user-unfriendly computer programs, 30,000-dollar survey scopes called theodolites, and his own sense of spatial relations. When new beamlines are added, experiment setups are adjusted, or temperatures change, Richard works with the ALS survey and alignment crew to adjust the position of key components to within the width of two hairs of where they should be. He has to be so precise that he measures out to six decimal places in meters. His repetitive checking of measurements and meticulous calculations prevent misalignments that would waste energy and disturb experiments at the ALS.

What is he doing now?

Richard and his team are working on two stands for the new Beamline 5.0. These stands will support tubing and chambers for a new experiment setup, which will be used by researchers to explore the structure of large molecules, such as the new HIV protease inhibitors. After receiving the design plans from the engineers and the stands from the paint shop, they set up their equipment, which conveniently resides near Beamline 3.1. With teamwork and years of experience, Richard and his group survey the points and, after drilling, do the final alignment of the stands in just under four hours.

What are the highs and lows of his job?

According to Richard, the most challenging part of surveying and aligning is when there are major shifts in the ground. For instance last year, after one of California's earthquakes moved one of the 680-kilogram bend magnets (in the storage ring), the survey and alignment team heroically worked 10-hour days to resurvey and realign all the structures in the ALS storage ring (where the beam of electrons normally circulates).

The best part about surveying and aligning, says Richard, is starting from nothing but the ground and ending up with a functional structure.

What is a typical day at the ALS like for him?

Richard keeps a list of requests from scientists and researchers who are eager to set up new equipment. On an average day, he receives designs from engineers for elements varying from an optical mirror to an earthquake support for a 40-centimeter-thick lead and concrete wall. After the technicians have prepared a component, Richard and his survey team set it up.

One of the instruments they depend on is a high-tech angle-measuring device called a theodolite. This 30,000-dollar instrument resembles a miniature telescope equipped with cross-hairs. It measures angles between reference points in the floor, called monuments, and reference points on structures, called fiducial points. After the theodolite transfers the angle measurement data to a computer, a survey program combines it with distance information to generate three-dimensional coordinates for all the points in the survey.

After taking into account both the engineer's ideal coordinates and the correction data, Richard adjusts the component to its ideal position. He controls the precision through a "kinematic" mounting system, which is made up of six struts. Each strut is an adjustable connective bar used to control a single direction of motion: horizontal and vertical movement (translation); rotation about the longitudinal axis (roll); rotation about the horizontal axis (pitch); and rotation around the vertical axis (yaw).

When the ALS shuts down every Monday for maintenance, Richard and other members of the survey and alignment team go inside the storage ring (where the electron beam normally runs) to check that everything is properly aligned.