Team

Small, and deliberately mixed. The loop only closes if the person proposing hypotheses and the person building the thing that rejects them are in the same conversation — often the same person. We are not organising into a research group with an engineering group attached to it.

Experimentalists are not support staff. Someone who has run an instrument for years knows which measurements are cheap, which are slow, and which quietly do not mean what the paper says they mean. That knowledge decides what a search can even attempt, so it belongs at the start of the design, not the end.

Everyone publishes, including the failures. Authorship here covers the run that did not work. If that reads as a cost rather than a feature, this is probably not the right lab.