LIGO gravitational wave detector corrosion failure

Tom's consulting trip to Livingston, Louisiana the previous day. Used as opening anecdote (§1) and developed in §6 as the prototype "billion-dollar facility jeopardized by a tiny failure at a joint" — mice nested on stainless steel insulation, urine and feces caused chloride corrosion, leak in 4-km ultra-high-vacuum beam tube.

So I'm Tom Eagar and you already met Simone Belmonte. I apologize I wasn't here for the first day of class. I had to go to Livingston, Louisiana. There's not a lot in Livingston, Louisiana, but there is this half-billion-dollar facility which is the National Science Foundation's largest scientific project ever, where they're trying to measure gravity waves from space to prove Einstein's general theory of relativity. They have another half-billion-dollar facility out in the state of Washington, and the two together are called the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Observatory [LIGO]. I actually got to see the detector, which is a clean room building about the size of a football field, full of stainless steel high vacuum equipment. It was more fun than coming to class, I'm sorry.