From left: Brazilian Center for Research in Physics Director Ron Shellard, Fermilab user Mateus Carneiro of Oregon State University, Fermilab user Mônica Nunes of the University of Campinas in Brazil and FAPESP Advisor Roberto Marcondes Cesar chat at a recent LBNF/DUNE Resources Review Board meeting. Photo: Reidar Hahn
A longstanding partnership between the Brazilian scientific community and Fermilab is getting even stronger, thanks in part to programs funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation. The foundation, whose Portuguese acronym is FAPESP, provides funding to experts from universities and companies in the state of São Paulo to engage in a broad spectrum of research both at home and abroad, from the study of Shakespeare to the simulation of particles in neutrino detectors.
“We’ve been funding many initiatives regarding international collaboration, such as telescopes in Chile, the CMS and ALICE experiments at the LHC, and researchers at Fermilab,” said Advisor Roberto Marcondes Cesar, whose portfolio at FAPESP includes particle physics research projects such as the Fermilab-hosted Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. “FAPESP is funding some important projects in São Paulo that are related to DUNE. This is nice because it’s an area that attracts a lot of the attention of young people. And part of our mission is to attract young people to the different fields of research in São Paulo.”
Professors, postdoctoral researchers and students funded by FAPESP are currently engaged in a range of activities connected to Fermilab neutrino experiments. Theoretical physicists collaborate with Fermilab, Northwestern University and other institutions to refine predictions and develop more accurate interpretations of experimental data. Scientists and students work on neutrino experiments including DUNE, NOvA and the R&D project LArIAT.
“Neutrinos will probably be part of the most important discoveries in physics for the next 10 or 20 years,” Cesar said. “We are speaking about the most basic and important questions regarding matter and the universe.”
One of the largest efforts by São Paulo researchers on DUNE is the light-detection system known as ARAPUCA. This innovative device, developed by three Brazilian universities and Fermilab and named for the Guaraní word for bird trap, will collect very low light signals coming from the DUNE detectors. This will help scientists get more information out of the massive detectors being built to record the interactions of neutrinos.
Ernesto Kemp is a professor at the University of Campinas. Photo: Reidar Hahn
“FAPESP support is a key element to insert Brazil in a proactive way into DUNE,” said Ernesto Kemp, professor at the University of Campinas. “Most of our work has always been in data analysis, and we have gradually begun to provide parts and calibration systems for detectors. But now we are starting to take on more important responsibilities to build whole systems for the big detectors like DUNE. FAPESP is an important funding agency because it is providing long-term support.”
Kemp and his students have been the recipient of several FAPESP grants and scholarships, including one that enabled him to spend a 2017 year-long sabbatical at Fermilab working on R&D for ARAPUCA. During his sabbatical he conducted experiments in Fermilab facilities and coordinated the construction of two ARAPUCA models for the ProtoDUNE detectors about to begin operating at CERN.
One of Kemp’s colleagues at the University of Campinas, Ettore Segreto, is funded by the FAPESP Young Investigators program for his work on DUNE. The Young Investigators program is designed to attract early-career scientists from around the world to São Paulo institutions.
“Talent is rare, and we have to compete to bring the best researchers to São Paulo,” Cesar said. “We want to bring people from abroad to do research here. We also want our researchers to make connections abroad to that they can cooperate, exchange students and participate in international collaborations.”
The Young Investigators program provides research funding to highly qualified early-career researchers who intend to create new research groups in emerging institutions or new research areas in traditional institutions. The program has been in place since the 1980s and accepts applications year-round for research in many areas, including particle physics in collaboration with Fermilab.
For more on the relationship between FAPESP and DUNE view this video interview with Roberto Marcondes Cesar.
For more on the current state and history of Brazilian scientific collaboration with Fermilab, read the articles “Mobilizing Brazilian scientists for DUNE” and “Brazil in Batavia: How a timely invitation sparked 30 years of partnership.”
Summer means hot days, pool parties and Fermilab’s annual accelerator shutdown, when crews of technicians enter the tunnels to upgrade and maintain the complex machines.
For many months Fermilab’s accelerator complex has been delivering quality beam to experiments, with record up times and delivery of protons. This means more data for Fermilab’s hungry physics experiments. The proton beam delivered by the accelerator complex first reached a milestone of 700 kilowatts in 2016 and has been regularly running at this impressive power since around Christmas.
“It’s been a very good year for beam delivery,” said Fermilab’s Duane Newhart, deputy head of accelerator operations. “We’ve broken just about every record every machine has set this past year.”
The last two shutdowns were focused on upgrades to improve the accelerator complex, part of the Proton Improvement Plan.
“This shutdown is more maintenance-driven,” said Fermilab physicist Cons Gattuso, who coordinates the installation and maintenance activities during the shutdown. “While we have some of the best particle accelerators in the world, some of the equipment we operate is 40 years old. And we ask it to do more and more.”
The accelerator performance should see some gains when the machines come back online around mid-September. And there are still major projects in the works.
Technicians will finish the second half of an upgrade to the linear accelerator, or Linac. The required components, called Marx modulators, provide high voltage for the amplifiers and were designed and built at Fermilab. As modern replacements for old vacuum tubes that are hard to repair or replace, the new pieces of tech will improve the Linac’s reliability. One particular kind of vacuum tube is known as the 1123.
“There are about 90 left in the world, and Fermilab owns all of them,” Newhart said.
The Fermilab Linac will undergo upgrades to improve its reliability during the accelerator shutdown. Photo: Reidar Hahn
Other work includes changing out a component known as a target, which helps produce particles for study — in this case, neutrinos. Accelerator teams will also add components to improve beamline diagnostics, modify vacuum systems, and replace and repair magnets. One particular magnet in the Main Injector accelerator will need some attention.
“We haven’t had to change out a Lambertson magnet in the Main Injector accelerator since things were installed, some 25 years ago,” said Gattuso, referring to the lab’s flagship accelerator. “This is a testament to the quality and resilience of the components.”
The Muon g-2 experiment takes advantage of the lab’s powerful accelerator complex. Fermilab scientists have already collected twice the amount of total data gathered over its four years at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where the experiment ran prior to coming to Fermilab. Photo: Reidar Hahn
This will be the first shutdown since Fermilab’s Muon Campus came online last year. Technicians will work on the vacuum system for the upcoming muon-to-electron conversion experiment, known as Mu2e, completing about half the beamline that connects the experiment to the Muon Campus Delivery Ring by the end of the shutdown. They’ll also add devices that help reduce the spread of the particle beam for the Muon g-2 experiment.
Muon g-2 reuses a giant, 50-foot-diameter particle storage ring from a similar experiment that studied properties of muons at Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1997 to 2001. The ring was transported to Fermilab in 2013 to take advantage of the lab’s powerful accelerator complex and officially started up in 2018. Scientists have already collected twice the amount of total data gathered over four years at Brookhaven.
“We have a plan in place to double the muon flux this summer with a number of upgrades,” said Fermilab scientist and Muon g-2 co-spokesperson Chris Polly. “Hopefully we emerge from the shutdown taking the equivalent of one full Brookhaven data set every month.”
The Fermilab Booster has been bringing some serious beam.
As one of the accelerators in the accelerator chain at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Booster feeds particle beams to all the lab’s accelerator-based physics experiments. As a general rule, the more beam an accelerator can provide, the better.
Following significant upgrades to the accelerator complex, over the last year the Booster has been hitting record highs in beam delivery, meeting or exceeding the increased needs of all of the lab’s beam-based experiments. This year it has already delivered 1 billion trillion protons, smashing previous yearly proton delivery records.
Impressively, the lab’s accelerator team has also doubled the beam intensity — the number of particles packed into the beam.
“It’s outstanding,” said Fermilab engineer Bill Pellico, manager of the Fermilab Proton Improvement Plan, or PIP, a program for upgrading the lab accelerator complex. “Before the upgrades, we could feed only one of our three beamlines at a time at its full, requested intensity. Now we can supply all of them simultaneously at their design levels.”
The beamlines feed the Fermilab NOvA, MicroBooNE and MINERvA neutrino experiments and the Muon g-2 experiment. Researchers have been happy to have more particles coming their way.
“The science we do depends heavily on beam performance and the operators who keep the beam running day and night,” said William & Mary physicist Tricia Vahle, co-spokesperson for the NOvA neutrino experiment. “This year NOvA saw the strongest evidence yet for a subtle phenomenon, a type of antineutrino oscillation. Without the spectacular, intense stream of particles coming from the lab complex, we wouldn’t have been able to detect it without running the experiment much longer.”
The Fermilab Booster accelerator delivers beam to all of the lab’s accelerator-based experiments. Photo: Marty Murphy
That’s intense
Just as you can assess the quality of a diamond by its carat, clarity and color, you can size up a particle beam according to a few criteria — reliability, efficiency and intensity.
Intensity is key. With every additional proton you squeeze into a beam, you create another opportunity for scientists to study the workings of the subatomic world. That’s critical for physicists studying rare phenomena who need as many particles as they can get.
At Fermilab, the proton beam smashes into a bit of material called a target, producing other particles that scientists then study. Two of these other particles are of keen interest at Fermilab: neutrinos and muons. They clue us in to the nature of the vacuum that pervades space-time and how the universe evolved.
But scientists need lots of them to get to the bottom of these mysteries. And that means lots of protons.
Earlier this year, after undergoing a major overhaul, the Fermilab Booster set an intensity record. It produced 240 million billion protons on target per hour. This record proton flux (the number of particles that pass a given point over a period of time) was more than two times what it was previously.
“It’s all about flux,” Pellico said. “How much beam can you get? How many protons can we hit the target with? It’s been a complete change in how we approach beam, going from the high energies of the previous lab era — the Tevatron era — to high intensities.”
One factor that increased the flux was a higher repetition rate. Before, the Booster fired beam about eight times a second. Now it’s nearly double that, at 15.
“If we hadn’t increased our rep rate, we’d be able to supply just one of the beamlines and no other,” said Duane Newhart of Fermilab accelerator operations. “It’s all about having enough beam to spread around.”
One of the Booster’s beneficiaries is the Muon g-2 experiment, which aims to measure a particular property of muons to high precision.
“High-intensity beams are crucial for us — for all the rare-physics experiments,” said Fermilab scientist Chris Polly, Muon g-2 co-spokesperson. “It’s a tall order to send beams to multiple experiments, especially when they’re all hungry for particles.”
The average Booster beam intensity has climbed steadily year after year, thanks to upgrades to the lab’s accelerator complex. The brown data points are from 2018; the pink from 2017, and the black from 2016. Image courtesy of Paul Derwent
Such high efficiency!
As particles travel through an accelerator, some wander from the pack and become lost to the surrounding equipment. An ongoing challenge for accelerator experts is to reduce this loss by drawing on every trick in the book of accelerator science.
The Booster team set out to crank up the intensity while keeping losses in check.
Multiple improvements to the accelerator chain, including the installation of a new instrument called a laser notcher, kept losses under control.
“We doubled the intensity, but the losses haven’t increased one bit,” Pellico said.
“We did so many things to make it happen, and saying one was the key component would be a mistake,” Newhart said. “It all worked together. And now we are pushing more protons through than we ever have.”
Rely on it
A powerful proton beam is an incredible tool for discovery — when it’s on. The greater the accelerator’s so-called up time — the fraction of time an accelerator spends in operation mode — the more beam experiments get.
The upgraded Booster’s up time is at a record 92 percent, compared to 89 percent before upgrades.
“It’s become even more reliable, and it’s one of the oldest machines in the complex,” Pellico said. “We keep improving it. We want the machine to be viable and reliable for at least the next 15 years.”
Fermilab experiments take beam around the clock, and when particles interact only once in a blue moon — neutrinos are famously reluctant to react — beam availability matters.
“Neutrino experiments notoriously need a lot of beam in order to be able to carry out their science objectives. The Fermilab complex consistently delivers beam with high reliability. Fermilab is the place to do neutrino physics,” said Fermilab physicist Sam Zeller, co-spokesperson for the MicroBooNE neutrino experiment, which recently produced its first collection of physics results. “We are extremely thankful to Fermilab’s incredible team of accelerator physicists and operators.”
Beam me up, Booster
The Booster records are the outcome of six years of Proton Improvement Plan upgrades, a hard-earned achievement by the Fermilab accelerator teams.
“The first part of this year, we just kept pushing that Booster record up and up and up,” Newhart said.
The team plans to go up and up to higher intensities still. Under the next accelerator upgrade phase, called Proton Improvement Plan II, accelerator experts will improve parts of the complex, including the installation of new linear accelerator, to provide even more powerful proton beams.
The megawatt-scale protons — 60 percent more powerful than what is currently available — will be sent to future experiments coming online within the next few years: the Short-Baseline Neutrino Program and the Mu2e muon experiment.
The higher-power beams will also be sent to the international Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility and Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, scheduled to come online in the late 2020s. The Fermilab-hosted LBNF/DUNE will be the largest neutrino oscillation experiment ever built, sending particles 800 miles from Fermilab, in Illinois, to a giant detector one mile underground in South Dakota.
“This whole time we’ve gotten to understand the Booster a little better, the beam physics a little better. Last year’s work really paved the way for our future work under PIP-II,” Pellico said. “Soon it will be time to break some more records.”
And we can always use a little more beam.
Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC, a joint partnership between the University of Chicago and the Universities Research Association Inc. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter at @Fermilab.
DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.
UPDATE: July 9, 2018, 6:05 p.m.
Acid leak contained, clean-up begins
Fire department hazardous-material personnel successfully contained a pinhole-sized leak of sulfuric acid from a 400-gallon tank used for water treatment in a building on the Fermilab site and stopped the leak. A hazardous-material contractor is now on site to remove the acid remaining in the tank and clean up the area where the leak occurred.
There was no environmental impact.
POSTED July 9, 4:02 p.m.
What happened?
A 400-gallon tank with sulfuric acid for water treatment at Fermilab sprang a leak Monday afternoon, July 9, 2018, around 2:30 p.m., and is slowly leaking acid.
Who was involved?
Employee responsible for the system noticed the leak and informed Fermilab Fire Department. No people injured.
Where?
Tank located in Fermilab Central Utility Building.
What is the response?
Fermilab has requested support from local fire departments to contain leak and monitor situation. Fermilab fire department and local fire departments are at site of incident.
Background:
Sulfuric acid is a common chemical used in many processes. It is corrosive.
How will we provide further updates?
Fermilab will provide more updates when available. Reporters should check the Fermilab website at www.fnal.gov or call 630-840-3351.