Steven Lund, Facility For Rare Isotope Beams at Michigan State University, has been chosen as the new director of the U.S. Particle Accelerator School.
Professor Steven Lund of Michigan State University has been named the new director of the U.S. Particle Accelerator School (USPAS). His four-year renewable term begins on Dec. 1. He will succeed Professor William Barletta of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has been director since 2006.
The USPAS is recognized as the nation’s premier training program in accelerator science and engineering. USPAS started in 1981 and convenes twice a year to offer a broad range of graduate-level accelerator science and engineering courses in an intensive-school format. Training and documentation produced by the sessions has been recognized for excellence and has had a profound positive impact on the field. All business and activities of the school are coordinated by the director and the USPAS office at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
“I am delighted about this appointment and eager to continue the outstanding work of the USPAS in educating current and future accelerator scientists and engineers,” Lund said. “It is a great honor to be selected, and I look forward to guiding the school to continued success.”
Lund has been a professor at MSU since 2014 and currently serves on both the Director’s Advisory Council and the Curriculum Committee for the USPAS, working with Director Barletta to coordinate school programs in the community interest. Lund’s position at MSU is at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), and his focus is theoretical accelerator physics, emphasizing analytic theory and numerical modeling. He also teaches graduate courses in accelerator physics and advises students.
“Over the past 35 years the USPAS has developed a program filling a critically important role in the training and education for the national laboratories that use accelerators as research tools,” said Rod Gerig of Argonne National Laboratory, chair of the USPAS Director’s Advisory Council. “Those of us who represent the national laboratory and university community want to thank the outgoing director, Dr. William Barletta, for his service to USPAS over the past 11 years. Also, we have enjoyed and benefited from working with Dr. Lund on the USPAS Director’s Advisory Council, and now look forward to working with him as the USPAS director as we move forward in carrying out this important mission.”
Accelerators are a key driver of discovery science and industry and are central to the discovery missions of the U.S. DOE Office of Science. The USPAS collaboration includes seven U.S. DOE Office of Science laboratories, one U.S. DOE National Nuclear Security Agency lab and two universities. (See full list below.)
“Over its 35-year history, the USPAS has welcomed students of all levels of expertise and in many cases introduced them to the science of particle accelerators,” said Jim Siegrist, associate director of the U.S. DOE Office of Science for the Office of High Energy Physics. “I look forward to Steven Lund continuing this great tradition.”
The USPAS offers a continually updated curriculum of courses ranging from fundamentals of accelerator science to advanced physics and engineering concepts. The school is intended not only to meet the needs of national laboratories, but also to educate people on the many uses of particle accelerators in other fields, including industrial and medical applications.
“Fermilab is proud of its work with USPAS and eager to continue that work with Steven Lund at the helm,” said Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer. “With thousands of particle accelerators in use around the world for dozens of different applications, teaching students the basics of accelerator technology is more important now than ever.”
MSU is developing its own world-class particle accelerator. FRIB will be a new scientific user facility for the Office of Nuclear Physics in DOE’s Office of Science. Under construction on campus and operated by MSU, the heart of FRIB is a high-power superconducting linear accelerator that will accelerate heavy ions to half the speed of light. FRIB will enable scientists to make discoveries about the properties of rare isotopes, supporting a community of currently 1,400 scientists.
FRIB is presently under construction—slated for completion by 2022—with first portions currently undergoing commissioning. Lund’s research aims to identify, understand and control processes that can degrade the quality of the particle beam.
“Steve is an outstanding researcher and a passionate educator, both of which will serve him well in his new position,” said Thomas Glasmacher, FRIB Laboratory director. “I am pleased he was selected and know he will excel in this new role.”
Before arriving at MSU in 2014 to work on FRIB, Lund held a joint appointment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory working on physics issues associated with the transport of beams with high charge intensity, design of accelerator and trap systems, large- and small-scale numerical simulations of accelerators, support of laboratory experiments, and design of electric and magnetic elements to focus and bend beams. Lund received his Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1992.
“The U.S. Particle Accelerator School has educated next-generation accelerator physicists and engineers for decades and through that made sure that we can build ever better accelerators and develop new important technologies,” said Norbert Holtkamp of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, a member of the USPAS Institutional Board. “SLAC wants thank Bill Barletta for his strong leadership during his tenure and we look forward to seeing Steven Lund implement his compelling vision. We also thank MSU and FRIB for their strong continued support.“
The USPAS collaboration includes Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, all U.S. DOE Office of Science labs; Los Alamos National Laboratory, a U.S. DOE National Nuclear Security Agency lab; Cornell University and Michigan State University.
Michigan State University has been advancing the common good with uncommon will for more than 160 years. One of the top research universities in the world, MSU pushes the boundaries of discovery and forges enduring partnerships to solve the most pressing global challenges while providing life-changing opportunities to a diverse and inclusive academic community through more than 200 programs of study in 17 degree-granting colleges.
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.
The DOE 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.
This shows the Meson Building under construction in 1972. Photo: Fermilab
It was late 1972 and the Meson Lab was just working on its first beam transport. I was a new crew chief, having just joined the lab, and a man named John was my assistant. We were operating from the MS-2 service building with the roaring power supplies. It was about 8 p.m. The Main Ring had just gone down and the Main Control Room gave an estimate of one hour. (Everything only took one hour back then, until they gave the next updated estimate of one hour!)
As I sat and fiddled with the MAC-16 control computer to see what it would do, John sat with his feet propped up on a desk watching “The Honeymooners” TV show starring Jackie Gleason on a small black and white monitor. I looked up to see a gentleman walking towards me wearing a beret and wearing a top coat. He came over and asked what I was doing, and I said I was trying to learn all about the computer. Nowadays it would be called hacking!
I mentioned the ring was down for an hour. He thanked me, turned and walked back toward the door, glancing at John as he walked past. I asked John who the gentleman was, and John just shrugged. “No idea” he said.
When I came in for my shift the next day, my boss, Jim, called me in to his office. He looked at me with a terse smile and said, “Dr. Wilson was happy to see you trying to understand the control system, but for crying out loud, don’t let John watch “The Honeymooners” when the director is there!”
That event was my introduction to Dr. Robert R. Wilson, and I spoke with him numerous times after that.
Paul Czarapata is the deputy head of the Accelerator Division.
Editor’s note: Earlier today, the Nobel committee selected Rainer Weiss and the pair of Barry Barish and Kip Thorne for the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics for their contributions to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). Barish has a long history with Fermilab, having led the E-21A experiment in the 1970s, which studied neutrinos at very high energies. He has also been at the forefront of the International Linear Collider effort, which Fermilab has contributed to over the past decade. Rainer Weiss, a professor of physics at MIT, has been a collaborator on Fermilab’s Holometer experiment since its inception in 2009. The detection of gravitational waves in 2015 was a landmark discovery, and Fermilab congratulates the winners of the Nobel Prize and the entire LIGO collaboration.
After being passed up for the honor last year, three scientists who made essential contributions to the LIGO collaboration have been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Rainer Weiss will share the prize with Kip Thorne and Barry Barish for their roles in the discovery of gravitational waves, ripples in space-time predicted by Albert Einstein. Weiss and Thorne conceived of LIGO, and Barish is credited with reviving the struggling experiment and making it happen.
“I view this more as a thing that recognizes the work of about 1000 people,” Weiss said during a Q&A after the announcement this morning. “It’s really a dedicated effort that has been going on, I hate to tell you, for as long as 40 years, people trying to make a detection in the early days and then slowly but surely getting the technology together to do it.”
Another founder of LIGO, scientist Ronald Drever, died in March. Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously.
According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, powerful cosmic events release energy in the form of waves traveling through the fabric of existence at the speed of light. LIGO detects these disturbances when they disrupt the symmetry between the passages of identical laser beams traveling identical distances.
The setup for the LIGO experiment looks like a giant L, with each side stretching about 2.5 miles long. Scientists split a laser beam and shine the two halves down the two sides of the L. When each half of the beam reaches the end, it reflects off a mirror and heads back to the place where its journey began.
Normally, the two halves of the beam return at the same time. When there’s a mismatch, scientists know something is going on. Gravitational waves compress space-time in one direction and stretch it in another, giving one half of the beam a shortcut and sending the other on a longer trip. LIGO is sensitive enough to notice a difference between the arms as small as 1000th the diameter of an atomic nucleus.
Scientists on LIGO and their partner collaboration, called Virgo, reported the first detection of gravitational waves in February 2016. The waves were generated in the collision of two black holes with 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun 1.3 billion years ago. They reached the LIGO experiment as scientists were conducting an engineering test.
“It took us a long time, something like two months, to convince ourselves that we had seen something from outside that was truly a gravitational wave,” Weiss said.
LIGO, which stands for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, consists of two of these pieces of equipment, one located in Louisiana and another in Washington state.
The experiment is operated jointly by Weiss’s home institution, MIT, and Barish and Thorne’s home institution, Caltech. The experiment has collaborators from more than 80 institutions from more than 20 countries. A third interferometer, operated by the Virgo collaboration, recently joined LIGO to make the first joint observation of gravitational waves.
Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in Symmetry.
Fermilab directors receive formal recognition for their pioneering science, an important groundbreaking takes place, and a new education program takes off in October. What else in Fermilab’s history happened in October?
Leon Lederman teaching a Saturday Morning Physics course in 1980.
New lab director Leon Lederman was passionate about science education. He started Saturday Morning Physics, a program in which Fermilab scientists teach a series of physics classes to local high school students. The first course was held in October 1980.
Robert R. Wilson holds a worm he has found while breaking ground for the Main Ring.
The Main Ring was the final and largest component of the lab’s accelerator system. This underground ring, which was about four miles around, used magnets to accelerate protons to very high speeds. These protons, and other beams derived from them, were then used in the four experimental areas. The Oct. 3, 1969, groundbreaking marked the beginning of the construction of the tunnel that would hold the ring.
Robert Wilson received the National Medal of Science from President Richard Nixon on Oct. 10, 1973.
On Oct. 3, 1973, President Richard Nixon announced that lab director Robert R. Wilson would be awarded the National Medal of Science for “unusual ingenuity in designing experiments to explore the fundamental particles of matter and in designing and constructing the machines to produce the particles, culminating in the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.”
CDF was Fermilab’s first collider detector.
The Tevatron proton-antiproton collider was dedicated on Oct. 11, 1985.
This event display shows a proton-antiproton collision in October 1985.
CDF, the Collider Detector at Fermilab, was designed to study the proton-antiproton collisions created by the Tevatron. The design of CDF began in January 1978 with the formation of the Colliding Detector Facility, headed by Alvin Tollestrup. Construction of CDF began on July 1, 1982, and on Oct. 13, 1985, it detected its first particle collisions. CDF, an international collaboration between institutions in the United States, Japan, and Italy, would become one of Fermilab’s flagship experiments and at its height would have more than 600 participants.
Leon Lederman receives the Nobel Prize in physics from King Carl XVI Gustaf, Dec. 10, 1988.
On the morning of Oct. 19, 1988, lab director Leon Lederman received a call informing him that he and his colleagues Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger had won the 1988 Nobel Prize in physics for their 1962 discovery of the muon neutrino at the Brookhaven National Laboratory AGS accelerator.
The LHC Remote Operations Center was dedicated in 2007.
The LHC Remote Operations Center in Fermilab’s Wilson Hall was dedicated on Oct. 22, 2007, further cementing the partnership between Fermilab and CERN, Europe’s particle physics laboratory. About 600 U.S. scientists work on CERN’s CMS experiment, and the center allows them to work on the experiment remotely.
Derek Plant demonstrates his award-winning Ghost Train Generator at the National Innovation Summit in May. In the background are Fermilab’s Aaron Sauers (left) and Charles Thangaraj. Photo courtesy of Cherri Schmidt
The damsel in distress, tied up and left on the railroad tracks, is one of the oldest and most clichéd cinema tropes.
Browsing YouTube late at night, Fermilab Technical Specialist Derek Plant found that this clichéd crime has connections to real, contemporary accidents that happen far more than they should. The videos all begin the same way: a large vehicle — a bus, semi or other low-clearance vehicle — is stuck on a railroad crossing. In the end, the train crashes into the stuck vehicle, destroying it and sometimes even derailing the train. According to the Federal Railroad Administration, every year hundreds of vehicles meet this grisly fate by trains, which can take over a mile to stop.
“I was just surprised at the number of these that I found,” Plant said. “For every accident that’s videotaped, there are probably many more.”
Inspired by a workplace safety class that preached a principle of minimizing the impact of accidents, Derek set about looking for solutions to the problem of trains hitting stuck vehicles. Railroad tracks are elevated for proper drainage, and the humped profile of many crossings can cause a vehicle to bottom out.
“Theoretically, we could lower all the crossings so that they’re no longer a hump. But there are 200,000 crossings in the United States,” Plant said. “Railroads and local governments are trying hard to minimize the number of these crossings by creating overpasses, or elevating roadways. That’s cost-prohibitive, and it’s not going to happen soon.”
Other solutions, such as re-engineering the suspension on vehicles likely to get stuck, seemed equally improbable.
After studying how railroad signaling systems work, Plant came up with an idea: to fake the presence of a train. His invention was developed in his spare time using techniques and principles he learned over his almost two decades at Fermilab. It is currently in the patent application process and being written and filed by Fermilab’s Office of Technology Transfer.
“If you cross over a railroad track and you look down the tracks, you’ll see red or yellow or green lights,” he said. “Trains have traffic signals too.”
These signals are tied to signal blocks — segments of the tracks that range from a mile to several miles in length. When a train is on the tracks, its metal wheels and axle connect both rails, forming an electric circuit through the tracks to trigger the signals. These signals inform other trains not to proceed while one train occupies a block, avoiding pileups.
Plant thought, “What if other vehicles could trigger the same signal in an emergency?” By faking the presence of a train, a vehicle stuck on the tracks could give advanced warning for oncoming trains to stop and stall for time. Hence the name of Plant’s invention: the Ghost Train Generator.
To replicate the train’s presence, Plant knew he had to create a very strong electric current between the rails. The most straightforward way to do this is with massive amounts of metal, as a train does. But for the Ghost Train Generator to be useful in a pinch, it needs to be small, portable and easily applied. The answer to achieving these features lies in strong magnets and special wire.
“Put one magnet on one rail and one magnet on the other and the device itself mimics — electrically — what a train would look like to the signaling system,” he said. “In theory, this could be carried in vehicles that are at high risk for getting stuck on a crossing: semis, tour buses and first-response vehicles,” Plant said. “Keep it just like you would a fire extinguisher — just behind the seat or in an emergency compartment.”
Once the device is deployed, the train would receive the signal that the tracks were obstructed and stop. Then the driver of the stuck vehicle could call for emergency help using the hotline posted on all crossings.
Plant compares the invention to a seatbelt.
“Is it going to save your life 100 percent of the time? Nope, but smart people wear them,” he said. “It’s designed to prevent a collision when a train is more than two minutes from the crossing.”
And like a seatbelt, part of what makes Plant’s invention so appealing is its simplicity.
“The first thing I thought was that this is a clever invention,” said Aaron Sauers from Fermilab’s technology transfer office, who works with lab staff to develop new technologies for market. “It’s an elegant solution to an existing problem. I thought, ‘This technology could have legs.’”
The organizers of the National Innovation Summit seem to agree. In May, Fermilab received an Innovation Award from TechConnect for the Ghost Train Generator. The invention will also be featured as a showcase technology in the upcoming Defense Innovation Summit in October.
The Ghost Train Generator is currently in the pipeline to receive a patent with help from Fermilab, and its prospects are promising, according to Sauers. It is a nonprovisional patent, which has specific claims and can be licensed. After that, if the generator passes muster and is granted a patent, Plant will receive a portion of the royalties that it generates for Fermilab.
Fermilab encourages a culture of scientific innovation and exploration beyond the field of particle physics, according to Sauers, who noted that Plant’s invention is just one of a number of technology transfer initiatives at the lab.
Plant agrees — Fermilab’s environment help motivate his efforts to find a solution for railroad crossing accidents.
“It’s just a general problem-solving state of mind,” he said. “That’s the philosophy we have here at the lab.”