LBNL Engineering Division

Mike Barry, the Engineering Division’s Deputy of Operations, will be retiring after 29 years of service at Berkeley Lab. Read about Mike’s journey from the US Navy to playing an essential role in guiding and shaping Engineering at the Lab.

Read more: https://engineering.lbl.gov/2026/05/22/from-the-us-navy-to-engineering-division-deputy-of-operations-mike-barry-retires-after-29-years-of-service-at-berkeley-lab/

Technicians and engineers have achieved a major milestone, completing a 2-year project to wind the closed-loop coil for the MARS-D magnet. This magnet will help power the fourth-generation electron cyclotron resonance ion source (ECRIS) for the 88-Inch Cyclotron.

This project involved:
24 wire layers
6,000 meters of wire
27,648 bending corners

Find out how this incredibly challenging and technically difficult work was accomplished.
Read more: https://engineering.lbl.gov/2026/05/14/made-in-berkeley-lab-winding-a-novel-closed-loop-coil-magnet-structure/

More than 20 years ago, Berkeley Lab built the Pixel Support Tube for the ATLAS experiment at CERN. Today, the Engineering Division is finishing work on the Pixel Support Tube for the ATLAS HL-LHC Upgrade Project–with much of the same team!

“One value that a lot of national labs have, and Berkeley Lab in particular, is that because we have an Engineering Division, we have continuous staff for decades,” says Eric Anderssen, project engineer for the ATLAS inner tracker upgrade. “You often have a lot of churn through universities, but having a consistent staff at a national lab, both the scientists and the engineers, is really something that is invaluable.”

This has allowed Berkeley Lab to pool 20 years of collective experience and teamwork into building the cutting-edge infrastructure and instruments that help make the next generation of ATLAS possible.

First picture, taken in April 2026, from top left: Jon Wirth, Tom Johnson, mechanical engineering associate; Todd Claybaugh, mechanical engineer, Eric Anderssen; project engineer for the ATLAS Inner Tracker upgrade; and Neal Hartman, project engineer for ATLAS Inner Pixel Detector.

Second picture, taken in April 2005, from top left: Jon Wirth, Tom Johnson, Mario Cepeda, Alexis Smith, Eric Anderssen, and Neal Hartman.

The ATLAS experiment is one of the largest and most powerful particle detectors in the world. It was instrumental in the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.

Photos: Thor Swift, Berkeley Lab; Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab

Our electronics engineers are designing microchips for extreme environments. Learn about the prototype microchips we’re developing that will function immersed in vat of liquid argon at temperatures of around -300F.

See how the Engineering Division supports scientific discovery, designing and building instruments that help push the frontiers of knowledge.

Read about the microchip: https://engineering.lbl.gov/2026/03/26/super-cold-and-super-tiny-the-electronics-behind-the-legend-1000-physics-detector/

Engineering Division Machinist Mike Gronley inspects the thickness of a prototype fiber-positioning robot, which he fabricated on a wire EDM machine in the Lab’s machine shop. The piece required very tight tolerances, as well as thin features. The thin sections had to be between 0.175 mm and 0.225 mm—that’s about the thickness of two sheets of paper stacked together, plus or minus a couple of pieces of dust!

“The machine shop is the place to bring these kinds of projects,” Gronley says. “For instance, my background of nearly 20 years making medical devices makes me comfortable taking on tricky little parts like this. Between all of the machinists here, we have over 100 years of experience in vastly different industries. This allows us to tackle just about any part, process, and/or material. I take a lot of pride in my work on these projects, where my attention to detail and understanding of the parts' performance requirements can mean the difference between success and failure of the target experiment.”

These prototype fiber-positioning robots are being made for Spec-S5, a next-generation instrument that will map the universe using spectroscopy, continuing the work of the current DESI Survey.

Photo: Nick Wenner, Berkeley Lab

Work in the Engineering Division’s mechanical shops can be incredibly varied, from building ultra-advanced scientific instrumentation one day to partnering with staff across the Lab to solve a technical issue the next. Recently, the team reverse-engineered end bells for a server room chiller—helping keep the Lab's operations running smoothly.

Read the full story: https://engineering.lbl.gov/2026/03/13/made-in-berkeley-lab-reverse-engineering-discontinued-parts/