By all accounts, Fermilab founding director Robert Wilson was a charismatic individual. Here he’s seen leading the first NAL Meeting at Lab 3 in the Village. Photo: Fermilab
My first year at Fermilab was 1968. I was a maintenance man when I first started, and we did all kinds of things in the early days: digging holes for trees, planting trees, shoveling snow, plowing snow, hauling garbage. We took care of furnaces, toilets, windows, window shades. We exchanged water bottles for drinking water, moved furniture, ran errands.
I worked on Robert Wilson’s car at times, which I enjoyed. We also did a lot of yard work out at Site 29. Wilson liked it clear, and we spent at least a good summer clearing the brush in the front of the house. There were lots of hawthorn trees in the front yard. The thorns in them would fall out, and our lawn tractor would get flat tires — constantly. So we made some steel wheels for the front of the tractor.
Our crew worked closely with Wilson. He was very charismatic, very friendly and outgoing. If he met you once, he remembered you by name. We’d have hot dog cookouts in our shop on Fridays, and our boss, George (I got called little George for forever), would always invite the directorate. They came over and had hot dogs with us, and we chatted.
I appreciated Wilson’s attitude toward the lab’s trees and landscaping. I was told you needed his permission to cut a tree down or even cut a limb from a tree. According to one story, Wilson moved the beam target areas because there was a group of trees at the targets’ planned location.
Wilson didn’t like things that reminded him of the war years. He didn’t like barbed wire. One of the early jobs I did was going around cutting barbed wire off the fences. He didn’t like fences, period, but particularly didn’t like barbed wire. In one case, right across from our office was a water tower with a fence around it and some barbed wire on top. I had to go cut that off. He wanted no part of it. Eventually, he took the fence and everything down. He also didn’t like trailers or Quonset huts – anything that was military-related. Word was he was just intense about that kind of thing.
As a director, he was completely geared to building an accelerator — very hands-on in that respect.
I vaguely remember the speech he gave in front of the old director’s complex. We were all standing out in the street. He said something to the effect that we had just received a few million dollars, and we were going to spend it all in the next couple of days so we could build our machine. That was his attitude.
He was building a laboratory, and we were going to build an accelerator — today.
George Davidson is the head of transportation services at Fermilab.
Plans for a new accelerator laboratory began in April 1963. Subsequent Aprils brought the completion of the Central Laboratory Building, the installation of the final Main Ring magnet and other important milestones. Read on.
Atomic Energy Commission logo. Credit: Wikimedia
April 1963: Plans for a new lab
Physicists had discussed the need for a new accelerator laboratory in the United States for years before the Atomic Energy Commission (the predecessor to the Department of Energy) built the National Accelerator Laboratory, which would later be named Fermilab. These early discussions culminated in a report published in April 1963 by a panel of scientists led by Norman F. Ramsey. It recommended that the United States build an accelerator with an energy of 200 GeV. In a conference at Brookhaven National Laboratory in June of that year, Columbia physicist Leon M. Lederman suggested that the United States needed a “truly national laboratory” that would give all experiment proposals equal consideration rather than favoring those from any particular institution. These ideas laid the groundwork for the National Accelerator Laboratory.
The MINERvA detector saw first neutrinos in April 2009.
April 1, 2009: MINERvA detects first neutrinos
MINERvA is a neutrino scattering experiment that uses Fermilab’s NuMI beamline and seeks to measure low energy neutrino interactions. The detector, located in the MINOS near detector hall, observed its first neutrinos on April 1, 2009.
The Central Laboratory Building, later renamed Wilson Hall, was under construction in 1973.
April 5, 1973: Central Laboratory Building complete
The Central Laboratory Building, later named Wilson Hall, was designed by architect Alan H. Rider with significant input from lab director Robert R. Wilson, who was inspired, in part, by French cathedrals. Construction began in 1971, and on April 5, 1973, the lab held the topping out ceremony for the building. The ceremony signified that the last bucket of cement had been poured. Lab staff would move into the new building during 1973 and 1974.
The vast preserve that was the Fermilab site received a special designation in April 1989.
April 5, 1989: National Environmental Research Park designation
On this day, Fermilab was designated as one of the Department of Energy’s six National Environmental Research Parks. These parks serve as outdoor laboratories where environmental research is carried out.
Fermilab Director Robert R. Wilson and visitors watch as the last magnet is installed.
April 16, 1971: Last Main Ring magnet installed
Lab staff installed the final magnet in the Main Ring on April 16, 1971. Lab Director Robert R. Wilson, Atomic Energy Commission Chair Glenn Seaborg, Universities Research Association President Norman Ramsey, and the visiting chairman of the Soviet State Committee on Atomic Energy Andronik M. Petrosyants were present for the event.
The Tevatron was installed below the Main Ring.
April 28, 1984: Tevatron superconducting accelerator dedication
The superconducting accelerator that was installed below the Main Ring was dedicated on April 28, 1984.
Since it began taking data in 2009, the MINERvA collaboration has published roughly 20 papers on neutrino-nucleus interactions. It’s a strong, promising start for the experiment, and scientist Laura Fields, who started her new two-year term as MINERvA co-spokesperson on March 17, intends to keep up the momentum.
Fields offers kudos to current MINERvA co-spokesperson, Fermilab scientist Debbie Harris, and her predecessor, University of Rochester scientist Kevin McFarland, for the experiment’s success.
“The previous spokespeople put the experiment on a really good path,” Fields said, half-joking that “my first goal is not to break all the good things they’ve done.”
In addition to continuing the push to publish, Fields will work to help finish MINERvA’s current data-taking run, which uses the medium-energy NuMI beam at Fermilab to produce neutrino interactions in the detector. In previous years, MINERvA used a low-energy NuMI beam.
“It’s really a boon for MINERvA,” Fields said. With a higher-energy beam, scientists get more neutrino interactions. “We can get a lot of good stuff out of that data.”
Fields received her Ph.D. from Cornell University under the supervision of Ritchie Patterson and, in 2010, went on to complete a Northwestern University postdoc under professor Heidi Schellman (now at Oregon State University) conducting research for MINERvA and DUNE. Fields led the team that published the experiment’s first two papers in 2013. In 2015, she joined Fermilab as an associate scientist in the Scientific Computing Division.
“Laura has been crucial to MINERvA’s physics program since she joined the experiment as a postdoc,” McFarland said. “She has been an effective mentor to so many of MINERvA’s students.”
Indeed, as co-spokesperson, Fields will work to actively support MINERvA’s early-career researchers by making sure their work is showcased in experiment publications.
“I’m looking forward to interacting more with the students and postdocs of MINERvA and to helping them get all we can out of our data,” she said. “I’m also going to work to be a good role model for the women in our collaboration.”
With Fields’ election as MINERvA’s co-spokesperson, both of Fermilab’s operating short-baseline neutrino experiments are now led by women. The MINERvA experiment is led by Fields and Harris, and the MicroBooNE experiment is led by Yale University-Fermilab scientist Bonnie Fleming and Fermilab scientist Sam Zeller.
“I am looking forward to the day when it will not be a big deal for there to be two women spokespersons of an experiment,” Harris said. “In the meantime I am enjoying the buzz about this and grateful to Kevin for deciding to step down in order to let a new person with new ideas lead the collaboration.”
McFarland said he feels the same way about his successor.
“As one of my hometown’s heroes famously said, ‘Failure is impossible.’ Susan B. Anthony said this not as a statement of optimism, but because she knew with certainty that all factors pointed to the eventual success of her cause,” McFarland said. “With MINERvA’s rich data set and Laura leading us, I feel the same way about the success of MINERvA’s physics program.”
Sometimes big questions require big tools. That’s why a global community of scientists designed and built gigantic detectors to monitor the high-energy particle collisions generated by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. From these collisions, scientists can retrace the footsteps of the Big Bang and search for new properties of nature.
The CMS experiment is one such detector. In 2012, it co-discovered the elusive Higgs boson with its sister experiment, ATLAS. Now, CMS scientists want to push beyond the known laws of physics and search for new phenomena that could help answer fundamental questions about our universe. But to do this, the CMS detector needed an upgrade.
“Just like any other electronic device, over time parts of our detector wear down,” said Steve Nahn, a researcher in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab and the U.S. project manager for the CMS detector upgrades. “We’ve been planning and designing this upgrade since shortly after our experiment first started collecting data in 2010.”
A completed forward pixel disk is installed in its service cylinder, where it will eventually be connected to electronics and cooling. Each of the 672 silicon sensors is connected to electronics boards via thin flexible cables (seen dangling below the disk). The map (seen on the table) is important for routing all the cables and making the right connections inside the service cylinder.
From left: Stephanie Timpone, Greg Derylo, Otto Alvarez, all of Fermilab. Photo: Maximilien Brice, CERN
The CMS detector is built like a giant onion. It contains layers of instruments that track the trajectory, energy and momentum of particles produced in the LHC’s collisions. The vast majority of the sensors in the massive detector are packed into its center, within what is called the pixel detector. The CMS pixel detector uses sensors like those inside digital cameras but with a lightning fast shutter speed: In three dimensions, they take 40 million pictures every second.
For the last several years, scientists and engineers at Fermilab and 21 U.S. universities have been assembling and testing a new pixel detector to replace the current one as part of the CMS upgrade, with funding provided by the Department of Energy Office of Science and National Science Foundation.
The pixel detector consists of three sections: the innermost barrel section and two end caps called the forward pixel detectors. The tiered and can-like structure gives scientists a near-complete sphere of coverage around the collision point. Because the three pixel detectors fit on the beam pipe like three bulky bracelets, engineers designed each component as two half-moons, which latch together to form a ring around the beam pipe during the insertion process.
This shows the outermost section of the forward pixel detector. Each green wedge is a pixel module. “Pixel modules are complex electronic sandwiches,” Marco Verzocchi said. The silicon sensor is in the middle, the readout chips are on the bottom, and the green printed circuit is on top. The 66,650 pixels and 16 readout chips per module are all interconnected through delicate wiring and electronics.
The flexible copper cables emanating from the pixel modules bring the data collected by the silicon sensors to the readout electronics (which are hidden behind the yellow covers.) The silvery object in the middle of the photograph is the beam pipe with its support wire below. Photo: Satoshi Hasegawa, Fermilab
Over time, scientists have increased the rate of particle collisions at the LHC. In 2016 alone, the LHC produced about as many collisions as it had in the three years of its first run. To be able to differentiate between dozens of simultaneous collisions, CMS needed a brand new pixel detector.
The upgrade packs even more sensors into the heart of the CMS detector. It’s as if CMS graduated from a 66-megapixel camera to a 124-megapixel camera.
Each of the two forward pixel detectors is a mosaic of 672 silicon sensors, robust electronics and bundles of cables and optical fibers that feed electricity and instructions in and carry raw data out, according to Marco Verzocchi, a Fermilab researcher on the CMS experiment.
The multipart, 6.5-meter-long pixel detector is as delicate as raw spaghetti. Installing the new components into a gap the size of a manhole required more than just finesse. It required months of planning and extreme coordination.
“We practiced this installation on mock-ups of our detector many times,” said Greg Derylo, an engineer at Fermilab. “By the time we got to the actual installation, we knew exactly how we needed to slide this new component into the heart of CMS.”
The CMS detector is currently open so that scientists can install the pixel detector into the very center of the experiment (around the beam pipe). A crane lowered the six pieces of the pixel detector through a 100-meter-deep pit onto the CMS cavern. A second crane then placed it on the yellow platform which was set up specially for this installation. Photo: Maximilien Brice, CERN
The most difficult part was maneuvering the delicate components around the pre-existing structures inside the CMS experiment.
“In total, the full three-part pixel detector consists of six separate segments, which fit together like a three-dimensional cylindrical puzzle around the beam pipe,” said Stephanie Timpone, a Fermilab engineer. “Inserting the pieces in the right positions and right order without touching any of the pre-existing supports and protections was a well-choreographed dance.”
Fermilab members of the CMS collaboration traveled to CERN to help install the pixel detector into the CMS detector. From left: Greg Derylo, Marco Verzocchi, Steve Nahn, Stephanie Timpone, Stefan Gruenendahl. Photo: Max Chertok, University of California, Davis
For engineers like Timpone and Derylo, installing the pixel detector was the last step of a six-year process. But for the scientists working on the CMS experiment, it was just the beginning.
“Now we have to make it work,” said Stefanos Leontsinis, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “We’ll spend the next several weeks testing the components and preparing for the LHC restart.”
View a photo gallery of the pixel detector installation in symmetry magazine.
Lidija Kokoska is currently working on tests of the Mu2e transport production solenoid in the Heavy Assembly Building. Photo: Al Johnson
How long have you worked at Fermilab?
It will be five years this summer. I started in 2012. Before that I had been working in private industry for about five years. It was a small company, about 30 or 40 people, and we were basically suppliers for places like Fermilab. Now I get to be the end user for these products, which is kind of nice.
What do you do as a lab mechanical engineer?
I work in the Technical Division Test and Instrumentation Department, mostly testing magnets. Right now, I’m working on the relocation of a test stand that was at the Central Helium Liquefier building. Now it’s going to HAB, the Heavy Assembly Building. We’re modifying the test stand to test the Mu2e transport solenoid production magnets.
What’s a typical day for you?
It varies day to day, depending on what state we’re in. Usually I’ll come into work, meet with technicians about modifications over at HAB, figure out the day’s work. Then I’ll work on design work, analysis or engineering notes. Later I’ll meet with the techs again to see if there are any issues or problems.
What do you like about working at Fermilab?
I like meeting people who come from all over the world, the variety of people. I also appreciate the overall concentration of intellect at Fermilab. It’s a unique opportunity to be working among so many different smart people and on so many different things outside my expertise.
You recently finished a term on the Engineering Advisory Committee. What was that like?
I was working with Paul Czarapata and Chris Mossey as part of the EAC. Various engineers got together to discuss different engineering-related issues with the director. I really liked that because it gave you an opportunity to look at engineering at the lab with a higher, 30,000-foot view. It was a good experience, because it takes you out of your bubble and lets you see how other people work and what kinds of issues they run into.
What do you do outside of work?
I play guitar in a band, the Blue Freedom Band. It’s a cover band that I play in with friends. We perform mostly in bars in the southwest suburbs or festivals. A lot of the people I play with grew up in that area, so they’ll book gigs different places around there.
Lately I’ve been taking improv classes in Chicago. It’s so much fun. My sister and I take classes together. We wanted something for us to be able to do together since we live far away from each other. We did some classes at Second City, and now we’re trying to do classes at iO.