Owl Shift

September 14, 2005

This morning is the last of 5 owl shifts that I just took for MINOS:  as I mentioned in my Day Shift entry, the experiment takes data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and this means that some poor souls get to watch over the experiment during the hours of midnight to 8AM.  I have taken owl shifts in my far distant past, and I remember liking it because the accelerator usually runs very smoothly, so you collect a lot of physics-quality data and you get to just watch it all stream in and feel very efficient.  I checked after each shift and sure enough there was a neutrino made at Fermilab interacting in the detector in Minnesota!  I am adding the pictures of these neutrinos on the left to show how different all these interactions can look. 

Taking owl shifts as a parent living at Fermilab is something else completely, though.  I feel like I'm part of a sleep experiment.  I figured I could take owl shifts without missing out on seeing my kids because I could just sleep during the day, see my kids in the evening, and then just work on shift from midnight to 8AM and get lots of shift work and even other work done.  Ha!

The problem is that I just couldn't fathom missing out on that much of my "day job"--we're in this super busy time on MINERvA doing all these internal reviews of every subsystem, and so I had meetings in the mornings that I wanted to attend.  Also, I had forgotten the minor detail that I wanted to see my kids during the day on Saturday and Sunday, not just the early evenings. 

So as a result I have been taking part in what feels like a sleep study:  instead of sleeping 8 hours in a row, I just sleep a few hours here and there, and if I add up all the naps over the course of the day it's not all that far from 8.  It's been working pretty well, although in a way I feel like a sleep junkie:  always wondering when my next nap will be, and always redoing the sums of the hours I've slept over any past 24 hour period. 

Part of this is possible because owl shift itself is very quiet and runs so smoothly:  if my day starts at midnight, then I sleep for about 3 hours while I'm on shift, then my partner sleeps another 3 hours.  Then I sleep for 2-3 hours in the middle of the day after the meetings of the day are over, then I sleep for two hours between when my kids go to bed (9:15PM) and when I have to wake up to get to shift again (11:15PM). 

I was describing this sleep schedule to a friend who is not in physics, and she said "boy that sounds like you have a newborn in the house:  you never sleep for more than three hours in a row, right?"  But actually taking owl shifts is much much easier than having a newborn in the house:  I understand how this experiment works far better than I understood either Isaac or Sonia as newborns, I don't ask my body to produce extra protons to put into the beamline to make neutrinos...and after 5 days of owl shift I just go back to a regular sleep schedule.  What parent can say their baby sleeps through the night at 5 days?