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LCLS does everything it can to make the most of The Laser (and it's associated tools of characterization) available available for public use. But , but there is a rigorous and competitive selection process that takes detailed technical proposals and months (often years) of planning + prep. And scientists from all over the world come to run experiments at LCLS and the actual use of the laser will come down to a few days with long, strange hours (LCLS runs 24 hours a day). Use of LCLS is free to the selected applicants (called users), but it costs thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of dollars an hour to operate.
Working hard to keep LCLS instruments running is the experimental operations division. And that's where you come in. Welcome to tech support. We in the Experimental Technical Support Group keep things moving forward by installing, maintaining, and fixing. But Plus there's more to it than that. And that's what you're here to learn in the coming weeks and months.
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