Press releases

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 R. Wilson, physicist, sculptor, environmentalist and pioneering particle accelerator builder, came home today to the laboratory he created on the Illinois prairie over 30 years ago.

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.

Astronomers have announced the discovery of a wall of distant galaxies crossing the Hubble Deep Field at a distance of some 4 billion light years from Earth.

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.

On Tuesday, July 20, 1999, scientists and officials of the U.S. Department of Energy, the State of Minnesota, DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Minnesota will break ground in a former iron mine, now a Minnesota state park.

The world’s newest particle accelerator officially began its life at the high-energy frontier today with the dedication of the Main Injector accelerator at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

Universities Research Association, Inc., which operates the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, has named Michael Witherell, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a distinguished career in experimental particle physics, to succeed Fermilab Director John Peoples, Jr., on July 1.

Scientists working at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have announced a significant advance in the understanding of the difference in the way matter and antimatter behave.

As summer winds down and the tell-tale colors of autumn emerge, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory once again invites its neighbors to help harvest prairie flower seeds as part of its 20-year effort to restore one of the few tallgrass landscapes remaining in all of Illinois.