Editor’s note: Learn about the laboratory’s birthday events, view a historical timeline and see photographs taken throughout the laboratory’s 50th year on the Fermilab 50th anniversary website.
Fermilab is turning 50! So how did it all start?
Fermilab — originally called the National Accelerator Laboratory — began operations in Illinois on June 15, 1967. The lab was built on 6,800 acres of land near the town of Batavia, Illinois, on a site that included the buildings of a small housing development named Weston. Fermilab’s first big machine, a particle accelerator about four miles in circumference called the Main Ring, paved the way to the construction of the world’s most powerful particle collider, the Tevatron. The original Main Ring was designed to collide particles at what was then a staggering 200 billion electronvolts of energy. The possibility of achieving that high energy was the driving reason for creating the National Accelerator Laboratory.
Today Fermilab is one of 17 national laboratories of the U.S. Department of Energy. It is America’s premier laboratory for particle physics research and houses seven particle accelerators that provide beam for numerous experiments and R&D projects. It is the future home of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, which will power the world’s biggest neutrino experiment, the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.
“While Fermilab and the field of high-energy physics have changed and evolved since its 1967 founding, the dedication and imagination of the staff and the user community in answering ever deeper and broader questions have remained as strong as ever,” said Adrienne Kolb, who served as Fermilab archivist and historian from 1983 to 2015.
On June 15, 1967, Robert Wilson and 17 other employees of NAL, AEC and DUSAF (the architectural and engineering firm responsible for much of the early construction at Fermilab) began their work in Illinois, the date that Wilson later considered to be laboratory’s birthday. While the Weston houses were prepared for hosting offices and work space for the new lab, Wilson and his team rented offices on the 10th floor of the Oak Brook Executive Plaza tower in Oak Brook, Illinois.
“The first year was very colored by that — that office building was the lab, the place that we went to every day to do what we were doing,” said Lincoln Read, a physicist who worked at the laboratory from 1967 to 2004.
The building was selected for its convenient location between Weston and O’Hare International Airport and gave these pioneers an unobstructed view of the Illinois farmland west of Oak Brook.
In January 1968, the NAL staff finished a new design report partially based on the Berkeley design study that laid out the plan for the laboratory. They moved to the Weston site during September 1968, and the lab broke ground for its first accelerator on Dec. 1, 1968.
“As a small but growing staff, together we all put together a concept design of the facilities and its accelerators,” Read said. “We knew the work we were doing was important, and that became part of the spirit of the place.”
In early 1971, Wilson told the laboratory’s Users’ Organization that “one of the first aims of experiments on the NAL accelerator system will be the detection of a neutrino. I feel that we then will be in business to do experiments on our accelerator.” Later that year experiment E-21, named “Neutrino Physics at Very High Energies” and run by a Caltech group, was the first to detect neutrinos at the new laboratory.
The centerpiece of the emerging accelerator complex was called the Main Ring. The machine reached scientists’ energy goal — 200-billion-electronvolt particle beams — in 1972, four years after completing the accelerator’s design. Thanks to several technological breakthroughs, the laboratory was able to make upgrades and continually increase the beam energy, achieving world record collision energies of nearly 2 trillion electronvolts, or TeV, in 1986. The TeV energy range gave the accelerator in the Main Ring tunnel its new name: the Tevatron.
Today, Fermilab is known for its world-leading accelerator-based neutrino research program, the development and construction of particle accelerators, its contributions to research at the Large Hadron Collider and its particle astrophysics program.
“The quest to understand the universe goes on and beckons us as Fermilab celebrates this 50th anniversary milestone,” Kolb said.
Fermilab now employs about 1,800 employees and represents the second-largest particle accelerator laboratory in the world. Approximately 4,000 scientists from 44 countries use Fermilab and its particle accelerators, detectors and computers for their research. They contribute to the lab’s numerous physics experiments, keeping the United States at the leading edge of the international field of particle physics.
On May 11, 1974, National Accelerator Laboratory was given a new name: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The eponym honors famed Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, whose accomplishments in both theoretical and experimental physics place him among the greatest scientists of the 20th century.
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 in 1963.
In 1938, Fermi won the Nobel Prize for work that eventually led to the first controlled release of nuclear energy. He and his family then left Italy and came to the United States, where he accepted a position at Columbia University. He later moved to the University of Chicago, where he built the first atomic pile in the squash court under the university’s Stagg Field. While there, he continued investigating the nature of particles that make up the nucleus. He was also active in the design of the school’s synchrocyclotron. At the time of its completion, it was one of the most powerful atom smashers in the world.
Fermi was also responsible for giving the neutrino its name.
So why was National Accelerator Laboratory named after Enrico Fermi? In announcing the eventual name change, Atomic Energy Commission Chair Glenn T. Seaborg cited Fermi’s contributions to the welfare of the United States, his singular achievements to nuclear physics and his scientific successes at the nearby University of Chicago.
It is particularly fitting that we honor Dr. Fermi in this manner, for in so doing we further acknowledge his many contributions to the progress of nuclear science, particularly his work on nuclear processes. Enrico Fermi was a physicist of great renown who contributed in a most significant way to the defense and welfare of his adopted land and to the enhancement of its intellectual well-being. His greatest achievement, the first sustained nuclear chain reaction, took place in a small laboratory in Chicago. It seems singularly appropriate, therefore, that the federal government recognize the memory of a man who was at the forefront of science in his day by naming in his honor a laboratory near Chicago — a laboratory which will have a major international impact on our understanding of the basic structure of matter.
You can read more about Fermi’s numerous and important contributions to science in the Fermilab History and Archives website. Several articles on the dedication of the lab as Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory can be found there as well.
Twinkle, twinkle, little supernova
Farah Fahim develops 3-D integrated circuits for particle detectors. Photo: Reidar Hahn
How long have you worked at Fermilab?
I’ve been here seven and a half years. I started in July 2009.
What do you do here at Fermilab?
I design application specific integrated circuits. Basically, I create electronics for detectors. You can’t just buy those electronics off the shelf. Most detector electronics need to survive in harsh environments. There could be radiation or extreme temperatures, and that means the electronics have to be tough enough to withstand it and still perform admirably often for the whole lifespan of an experiment. So we make them by harnessing technology being developed at a rapid pace for the consumer goods market – mainly mobile phones – and adapting them to our purpose.
How did you get into this kind of work?
I did my basic degree in telecommunication and my master’s in analog circuit design. At that point it seemed natural to go into the mobile phone industry, but most of the positions I interviewed for were mainly focused on setting up networks and using existing technology instead of developing it.
I wanted to develop and design analog integrated circuits. I got into that when I started as a graduate engineer at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK.
As I wanted to move to the U.S., I knew I wanted to go to Fermilab, because Fermilab was getting into this really novel technology: 3-D integrated circuit designs. That was a really intriguing area with a lot of scope and possibilities, because there were a lot of different ways to do this, and it was just being developed. Well, and now I am here and working on this and other technologies.
What does a typical workday look like for you?
Most of the day I sit in front of a computer. But what I do varies a great deal over the duration of our projects. Typically, a project tends to be one or two years long. So depending on the phase of the projects, I could be working with scientists to develop a solution or designing circuits, debugging them, testing them.
What would you consider the most exciting part of your job?
Everything – but if I need to pick one, I pick “coming up with the initial idea for a working solution for a new project.” Often there are many ways of solving a problem, but doing something new and coming up with a simple and easy solution to a critical problem is always fulfilling.
In our group we are encouraged and have the independence to suggest solutions and test our own ideas. It is just great to be creative. The exciting part is when the idea works and gets applied in a detector or an experiment.
What’s something people might not know about you?
I love traveling. I have traveled to all continents except Africa. In 2012 I made an expedition cruise around the Antarctica peninsula.
I also love gardening. But those two passions don’t mix well: One year, I got a plot at Fermilab, which I didn’t get around using because I was traveling a lot that summer. Now I have a small vegetable garden in my backyard, which makes taking care of it easier.