Author Archive

An international collaboration of scientists at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will announce on July 21, 2000, the first direct evidence for the subatomic particle called the tau neutrino, the third kind of neutrino known to particle physicists.

Neutrinos can easily make their way through the earth and rock between Batavia and a half-mile-deep mineshaft in Soudan, Minnesota, but physicists in the NuMI (Neutrinos at the Main Injector) experiment need the help of a $30.5-million, 20-month excavation effort to create some 4,000 feet of tunnels and other underground experimental areas at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

Robert Rathbun Wilson, a Wyoming cowboy who built the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator laboratory with the eye of an artist, the shrewdness of a banker and the conscience of a human rights activist, died late Sunday night at a retirement home in Ithaca, New York, near Cornell University. He was 85.

Deep in a former iron mine in what is now a Minnesota state park, scientists and government officials today (July 20) wielded pickaxes to chip away, at least symbolically, at the mysteries surrounding the subatomic particles known as neutrinos.