Fermilab features

As we enter the second month of Fermilab’s 50th year, we look back on Robert Wilson assuming the lab’s first directorship and revisit the lab’s first experiment, along with other memorable milestones.

Since its inception in 1980 by then-Fermilab Director Leon Lederman, Saturday Morning Physics has been one of the most popular outreach initiatives at Fermilab.

Years of work upgrading the accelerator have made it possible to achieve the high beam power needed to produce neutrinos — the most elusive of nature’s known particles — by the truckload.

Fermilab’s beginnings can be traced to a 1963 report by a panel of U.S. scientists led by Norman Ramsey. In the 50 years since, Fermilab has grown to a laboratory of 1,800 employees, and scientists from 44 countries come to Fermilab to participate in its forefront particle physics programs.

Many visitors to Fermilab reasonably conclude from its name that Enrico Fermi worked at the laboratory, but he never did. In fact, he died in 1954, years before scientists even officially recommended the construction of a U.S. accelerator laboratory.

You can’t buy electronics for particle detectors off the shelf. Farah Fahim is one of the engineers who designs them.

U.S.-CERN partnership takes on the mystery of neutrinos.

Sometimes being a physicist means giving detector parts the window seat.

As part of our year-long recognition of Fermilab’s 50th anniversary, we will feature a few important milestones in the laboratory’s history every month.

Edwin L. Goldwasser, deputy director of Fermilab at its founding in 1967, died on Dec. 14. He was 97.