Batavia (IL) -  TG Daily recently had an opportunity to visit the facilities of Fermilab, home of the Tevatron, currently the world's highest energy particle accelerator. Join us on a tour through a stunning world of machinery that accelerates protons close to the speed of light to help scientists research topics of matter, space and time.

Wilson Hall at Fermilab

Caught between deadlines, press conferences and travel schedules, we easily oversee interesting technology topics that are right in front of our door. The NCSA was such a case, which we covered a few weeks ago in detail; even closer to our modest headquarters in the Western suburbs of Chicago, there is another high-profile science institution, which I usually drive by several times a week, but never really thought of including in one of our stories.

It was one of those strange accidents of knowing someone who knew someone that opened the door for me to go on a fantastic multi-hour tour through Fermilab and see what the largest employer (2000 people work at Fermilab) in my hometown is actually up to. Ron Moore, in charge of the Tevatron at Fermilab, took some time out of his calendar to take me through some of Fermilab's facilities. Read on to get the detail of what is easily one of the most impressive research sites that exist in the U.S. today.


What is Fermilab?

Fermilab is operated by the Fermi Research Alliance (FRA). It is part of the Department of Energy (DoE) with a 2001 funding in the amount of $277 million, a good chunk of the department's total annual budget of about $3.18 billion back then. The DoE spent a total of about $726 million on high-energy physics in 2001.  

Located on the East side of Batavia, IL, the core research area at Fermilab is particle physics, which involves the very smallest building blocks of matter. Scientists investigate the foundations of matter to understand the forces that hold them together or force them apart.

On a 6800-acre site - just under 10 square miles - Fermilab operates a range of proton/anti-proton accelerators to enable various sub-atomic collisions. Using enormous amounts of energy, collisions can reveal exotic particles of matter, which are detected by special devices.

Location of Fermilab, visible through the ring structures of the accelerators.

These experiments have allowed scientists to discover several new particles over the years, including the top quark in 1995, the last undiscovered quark of the six predicted to exist by current scientific theory; Fermilab was also the site of the discovery of the bottom quark in 1977 and the site where direct evidence for the tau neutrino was discovered (2000). Most recently, you may have heard of discovery of the "triple scoop" baryon, which contains one quark from each generation of matter.  

Foremost, Fermilab serves as a service for students and international organizations to conduct their experiments. However, besides enabling research, which in some cases can last several years, Fermilab scientists also come up with what may appear to some of us as more practical solutions for our every day life: Fermilab contributes to finding new ways of working with electric currents and magnetism, new ways to treat cancer with particle beams, the staff develops superconducting magnets and acts as an early adopter for new technologies. Interestingly, particle physicists were also involved in the invention of the World Wide Web – or the Internet as we understand it today - which was originally developed at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.



Brief history of Fermilab

Before we look at the accelerators, let's have a look at the history of the site. Fermilab was built in 1967 with a total cost of $243 million. The site is dominated today by two major installations: The "Tevatron", a high-energy, 4-mile long underground tunnel that houses a beam pipe ring (surrounded by superconducting magnets) to accelerate protons and anti-protons. The Tevatron was completed in 1983; the price tag was $120 million. If you are traveling in Kane County, Fermilab can be identified from a few miles away trough its "Wilson Hall" 16-story high-rise, which eclipses any other building in its mostly rural vicinity.

The name "Fermilab" honors Enrico Fermi, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome and University of Chicago. The scientist was born in Pisa, Italy in 1901 and died in 1954 in the U.S. Among Fermi's accomplishments is the theory of beta decay (1933) as well as a Nobel Prize in 1938 for the discovery of new radioactive elements. In Chicago, Fermi supervised the design and assembly of what is claimed to have been the first nuclear reactor. A plaque is dedicated to this event at the site of the University's Stagg Field. It reads: "On December 2, 1942, man achieved here the first self-sustaining chain reaction and thereby initiated the controlled release of nuclear energy."

The University of Chicago's Institute for Nuclear Studies is named "The Enrico Fermi Institute" today.


Read on the next page: Fermilab's Accelerator Chain