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Fermilab — Excursions Into Matter, Space and Time
An anonymous reader writes "Fermilab is one of the great physics research facilities in the U.S. It is mainly known for its Tevatron proton/anti-proton accelerator to help physicists understand how materials interact with each other. TG Daily has a extensive article detailing Fermilab's accelerator chain and the work that is being done there. It's an interesting read, especially since many of us won't have a chance to visit Fermilab and the fact that the Tevatron accelerator is scheduled to be shut down next year."
All we have to know about mater-space-time is in the series documental Star-Trek.
One thing that the article leaves out, unfortunately, is another unique property of Fermilab - that it owns a herd of American Bison. Having "signature" animals at National Labs isn't unique to Fermi - for example, Argonne National Labs, also in Illinois, has a large population of the cream-colored Dama Dama "White Deer." However, while Argonne merely allows the deer to roam freely on its land, Fermilab Bison are actively cultivated by the lab, creating some really fine breeding studs, and acting as a sustainable way of preserving one aspect of the natural "Prairie" that is part of North American history.
They're working on getting the International Linear Collider to be based between them and Argonne National Laboratory, a few miles away. Of course, that will probably just be a really deep, really long tunnel, unless you're into the engineering of these things.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The bison are indeed mentioned in the article.
Some things it doesn't mention though, that I recall from my brief summer there 20+ years back:
* the radioactive groundhogs. Every national lab I've been to seemed to have a colony of groundhogs, I guess they like the security.... At Fermilab, there was a burrow in the middle of a mile-long berm of dirt that acted as a beam dump to generate neutrinos (only neutrinos make it through that much matter without being stopped).
* Wilson's artworks - I assume they're still around. Robert Wilson was the instigator of the lab, and got it built on time and under budget. He was also a bit of a sculptor, and a number of his artworks were on the grounds around the administration building. In fact I think he designed the rather unique admin building too.
* the annual "race around the ring" - actually, maybe that's gone away since Leon Lederman's no longer the lab director. It was quite a challenge when I was there though; you can imagine a bunch of desk physicists and engineers trying to make it around the 3+ miles of the ring road in a reasonable amount of time...
Energy: time to change the picture.
The company I work for is involved with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England just outside of Abingdon. They also have a synchotron facility and gave us a demonstration on how they accelerate particles within a beam by bending it with magnets to form a giant ring (I think the one in RAL is about 3 miles in circumference). They use very complex sensors to study the "scattering" of particles colliding with various materials to determine various characteristics and properties.
It was a very neat and interesting presentation... Unfortunately, having some of the finer details explained by scientists who live and breath the stuff put it just ever so slightly above my level of understanding (I was lost in the first 30 seconds)... At one point, I could've sworn they just broke out some random Star Trek technobabble just to get a laugh out of me later =P.
I agree with the author, the article is indeed a very interesting read. And yes, while Tevatron is shutting down, US still leads the world in similar facilities, including one not too far from Fermilab at Argonne.
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
From TFM:
"Most recently, you may have heard of discovery of the "triple scoop" baryon, which contains one quark from each generation of matter."
That's really all there is about "the work being done there". This is really just a sort of know your neighbors piece for the local pholks who drive by every day.
So, Captain, where do they keep the Death Ray?
And let me guess... they named the first calf a "Higgs Bison"? <grin>
Actually, the Higgs Bison would be the ones grazing in the Higgs Field.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
This is really cool to read and compare to the NY Times profile of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The feature popped up on Slashdot a few months back.
While the LHC is much bigger and has more advanced detectors, the basic ideas are similar. Both take free protons, then send them through multiple accellerators, finally delivering them to the big circular accellerators for the collisions.
The LHC is 17 miles around, while the Tevatron is only about 4 miles. The LHC will cause collisions at 14 TeV compared to Tevatron's 2 TeV. The LHC is completely underground, while the Tevatron is visible on the surface.
Once the Tevatron is decommissioned, there will still be the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York doing high energy particle physics in the US, and I understand Fermilab and other American institutes will be involved in processing the deluge of data produced by LHC.
I work at Fermilab and life here only looks good on outside. Last dozen years the lab has been really struggling with deciding what to do after the Tevatron shutdown. The lab's managemen are bunch of bureaucrats who, in my opinion, lack passion for physics and have no great (or even good) ideas for the future. The lab also struggles with finding the new and capable people. There are large number of people at the lab who have been around for so long that at some point they just got tired of doing physics. For example, the guy who was in charged of designing the magnets for LHC (which famously exploded earlier this year) has been promoted within the lab to a management position (but before they exploded). Somehow, some people are promoted within the lab without the regard to the real performance. There are many many problems with this ageing facility and it is not clear that the organization has talent and will to move into the future.
"A random blogger regurgitates PR stuff, drools over PR stuff, and can't be bothered to Google, spellcheck, or edit his writings". Would be an apt description of TFA.
I long for the day when Slashdot linked to substantial material, rather than fanboi crap.
My college roommate's older brother was a physicist who worked at Fermilab. We got a tour of the place while it was at the top of its game. (He later moved to CERN; it was a bit far to visit but he had interesting stories to make up for it. On a related note, my sister married a guy who worked at Argonne National Laboratory, so I got a VIP tour there, as well.)
Much later, during the dot-com collapse, I found myself on a job interview at Fermilab. They built a lot of custom Linux boxes and wrote a lot of software to run on them. It looked like an environment similar to Google today, with all the processing power you could imagine to throw at personal projects. At the time, you could easily download just about everything they wrote, but a lot of that disappeared after 9/11. A few people whom I trust warned that taking a government job would be a career killer for me, but the job I wound up taking paid even less. (Of course, my current job pays much better, so I guess that things even out.) Ultimately, I decided against moving my family 300 miles, but I still sometimes wish I'd taken the job.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?