I have been trained in the operations of a liquid argon time projection chamber, by being the ‘Run Coordinator’ of the MicroBooNE experiment for a six-month term, a position analogous to ‘chief operating officer’ in the corporate world. I was in charge of the operations of the MicroBooNE experiment, on call 24/7 for the regular shifters to contact if things broke down, and interfacing with the experts familiar in the various subsystems of the detector, to bring things back up again. This experience has led to me being trained in the operations of a LArTPC, fulfilling that objective of the project. In terms of the main physics goals, we publicised and disseminated (first at the ICHEP 2020 conference) our first result for the search for New Physics. We have searched for evidence of a dark sector scalar boson which mixes with the Higgs boson, where we would see its decays to electron-positron pairs inside the detector. We have ruled out this model as explaining an observation of neutral kaon decays occurring too fast, made by the independent KOTO experiment running in Japan. We have released this result as a publication, and disseminated it in talks to at least four conferences (ICHEP 2020, NeuTel 2021, APS-DPF 2021, EPS-HEP 2021) and a poster at a workshop (FermiLab users meeting 2020), with the result also being disseminated at other conferences and meetings by collaborators on the experiment but external this project (e.g. FermiLab PAC 2021). This result has also been reinterpreted by theorists to set limits on other new physics models, so is already impactful. We have begun to search for electron-positron pairs being produced by dark matter scattering off the argon nuclei, and expect to have first results of this search out within the next few years. Also we are supervising a new PhD student who will develop an analysis based on our work, to search for "millicharged" particles (dark matter candidates with a tiny fraction of the electronic charge). We have also begun construction of the DUNE (the next generation, large-scale neutrino LArTPC detector) components, setting up a factory at the Daresbury Laboratory in the UK.
