My thesis experiment was performed at the Bevalac, a facility located at (then) Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (now Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory). For more on how this experiment came to be, see my notes regarding my Ph.D. mentor Professor Kenneth Crowe. 
The actual apparatus looked about like what you would expect of an experiment designed by a graduate student built on essentially zero budget and a lot of scrounging at a facility where the experimental “halls” were actually referred to as “caves”. 
But it did work, and allowed us to perform the first “modern” analysis of two-pion correlations in relativistic heavy ion collisions.
The results in my thesis were eventually (delays due to me) published in Physical Review C as Two-Pion Correlations in Heavy Ion Collisions, W.A. Zajc et al., Physical Review C29, 2173 (1984).
