Hey Fermilab, it’s a Monkee

After years of design and construction, the NAL Main Ring achieved its design energy of 200 GeV on March 1, 1972, ahead of schedule and under its authorized $250 million budget.

The NAL Accelerator Section had achieved a beam of 20 GeV on Jan. 22, 53 GeV on Feb. 4, and 100 GeV on Feb. 11, surpassing the 76-GeV machine at Serpukhov in the U.S.S.R. which, up until that point, had been the most powerful accelerator in the world. By the morning of March 1, the lab employees knew they were on the cusp of achieving the design energy they had been striving towards. By 11 a.m., they had a steady, stable beam. At 12:30 p.m., the beam reached a new record of 167 GeV, and people began gathering around the screen in the Control Room to watch the beam’s progress. At 1:08 p.m., the crowd cheered as the beam passed 200 GeV for the first time. The achievement was followed by a lively labwide celebration.

The lab quickly surpassed this 200-GeV energy goal, reaching 300 GeV on July 16, 1972, and 500 GeV on May 14, 1976.

You can read about the achievement of 200 GeV in the March 9, 1972, Village Crier. You can also read the Main Ring logbook entry from March 1, 1972, which includes signatures by many of the people present for the event.

Visit the history website for more photos of this day in Fermilab history.

Jim Jenkins likes to think big.

A sculptor by trade and by passion, he is best known for his grand-scale projects with local public libraries, including the enormous ring-like structure outside the new Aurora Public Library building and the glass collages inside the New Lenox Public Library that detail, in his words, the “evolution of knowledge.” Jenkins’ work is not only grand in scope, but finely detailed, its themes and secrets revealed only after repeated observation.

All of which makes this Geneva artist a perfect choice to partner with the country’s premier particle physics laboratory, where scientists construct gigantic experiments to uncover the mysteries of the universe’s smallest details. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has chosen Jenkins as its 2017 artist-in-residence, and over the next 10 months, he will meet with Fermilab researchers, learn more about their work and create new pieces of art to reflect it.

“I’m the luckiest person I know,” Jenkins said. “I’m just delighted about this.”

Jenkins sees plenty of overlap between his work and more scientific endeavors. His sculptures, he says, are “puzzles, for both me and the viewer,” and he embeds hidden themes and clever allusions within them. His work, he says, is “technical, philosophical, poetic, and it uses language and puns,” and he develops his multilayered concepts over time, writing each day as he works through ideas.

He brings a unique perspective to his work, informed by more than two decades in manufacturing.

“I was exposed to a lot of things during that time, including engineering,” he said. “My work has a lot of electrical and mechanical components to it because of that exposure.”

His sculptures are formed mostly with metals, but he uses many other mediums as well.

“Whatever I need to accomplish the piece,” he said.

“We were drawn to Jim’s playful yet sophisticated use of imagery and language,” said Georgia Schwender, curator of the Fermilab Art Gallery. “He has a history of using physics and physics references in his work, and his enthusiasm leapt off the page of his application.”

Jenkins is a graduate of the University of Iowa with a degree in fine arts, and he rents studio space at Water Street Studios in Batavia.

He also brings a decades-long fascination with Fermilab. The laboratory is known not only for its cutting-edge physics research but also for its physical beauty, an aesthetic that traces back to founding director Robert Wilson, who was a sculptor himself. Fermilab launched the artist-in-residence program in 2015 as a way of connecting the laboratory’s science with new audiences using the medium of art. Oak Brook textiles artist Lindsay Olson was the first artist-in-residence in 2015, and Chicago multimedia artist Ellen Sandor of (art)n held the position in 2016.

As artist-in-residence, Jenkins will produce new works inspired by Fermilab’s work, and he already has several ideas. As he usually does, he also plans to compile a book explaining his work and donate it to the Fermilab Art Gallery.

Learn more about Jim Jenkins at his website. Learn more about the Fermilab artist-in-residence program on the Fermilab website.

In March, Fermilab saw the installation of its final Tevatron magnet, the start of MINOS and Tevatron Run II operations, and the groundbreaking for the Main Injector. Read on for more March milestones.

Fifty years ago today, on Feb. 28, 1967, Robert R. Wilson became director of the National Accelerator Laboratory. At the time, Wilson was a professor of physics at Cornell University.

Wilson was born in 1914 and spent much of his childhood on his family’s Wyoming cattle ranch. He obtained his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1940, after which he became an instructor at Princeton University. In 1943, he left for Los Alamos, where he became the youngest group leader in the Manhattan Project. After the end of World War II, he became an associate professor at Harvard University. In 1947, he left Harvard to become a full professor at Cornell University, where he remained until he became director of the new National Accelerator Laboratory.

Wilson learned on Jan. 15, 1967 that the Universities Research Association Board of Trustees intended to offer him the position of director of the new National Accelerator Laboratory, and he received an official offer on January 30, 1967. He told them he would need a month to make the decision. On February 28, 1967, Wilson wrote a letter to Atomic Energy Commission Chair Glenn Seaborg accepting the position. He sent another acceptance letter to Universities Research Association President Norman Ramsey the next day.

Wilson would have a profound influence on the course of the lab’s history and the development of its unique character. His daring vision guided the design and construction of the accelerator, bringing it to completion ahead of schedule and under budget. A passionate outdoorsman, Wilson helped lead the lab’s efforts to restore the native prairie and brought the first bison to the lab. He was also a skilled sculptor, and his concern for aesthetics is evident throughout the lab site.

Wilson stepped down from the Fermilab directorship in February 1978 and died in January 2000.

You can read the URA press release announcing the selection of Wilson as the lab’s director. You can also read some of Wilson’s reasons for accepting the lab’s directorship in a selection from his drafts for his memoirs. These memoirs were never completed, but the drafts are available in the Fermilab Archives.

Editor’s note: The PICO-60 detector was originally called “COUPP-60,” with COUPP standing for “Chicagoland Observatory for Underground Particle Physics.” It was designed and built by Fermilab in collaboration with the University of Chicago and Indiana University, South Bend. Work began at Fermilab in 2005, and, after extensive testing, the detector was moved to SNOLAB in 2012.  

“We’ve been working on this for a long time,” said Fermilab’s project manager Andrew Sonnenschein of the below result. “This is by far our most satisfying result yet, because the techniques we used to reject background events from sources other than dark matter worked flawlessly. Bubble chambers are finally living up to their full potential as dark matter detectors. Now the dark matter just needs to show up.”

Read the original SNOLAB press release on the SNOLAB website. 

The PICO Collaboration is excited to announce that the PICO-60 dark matter bubble chamber experiment has produced a new dark matter limit after analysis of data from the most recent run. This new result is a factor of 17 improvement in the limit for spin-dependent WIMP-proton cross-section over the already world-leading limits from PICO-2L run-2 and PICO-60 CF₃I run-1 in 2016.

The PICO-60 experiment is currently the world’s largest bubble chamber in operation; it is filled with 45 Liters of C₃F₈ (octafluoropropane) and is taking data in the ladder lab area of SNOLAB. The detector uses the target fluid in a superheated state such that a dark matter particle interaction with a fluorine nucleus causes the fluid to boil and creates a tell tale bubble in the chamber.

The PICO experiment uses digital cameras to see the bubbles and acoustic pickups to improve the ability to distinguish between dark matter particles and other sources when analysing the data.

The superheated detector technology has been at the forefront of spin-dependent (SD) searches, using various refrigerant targets including CF₃I, C₄F₁₀ and C₂ClF₅, and two primary types of detectors: bubble chambers and droplet detectors. PICO is the leading experiment in the direct detection of dark matter for spin-dependent couplings and is developing a much larger version of the experiment with up to 500 kg of active mass.

This work was supported by the the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grants PHY-1242637, PHY-0919526, PHY-1205987 and PHY-1506377, and in part by the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago through grant PHY-1125897, and an endowment from the Kavli Foundation and its founder Fred Kavli. The PICO Collaboration would also like to acknowledge the support of the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) for funding.

About PICO

17 participating institutions: University of Alberta; University of Chicago; Czech Technical University; Fermilab; Indiana University South Bend; Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics; Laurentian University; Université de Montréal; Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU); Northwestern University; Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Queen’s University at Kingston; Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, India; SNOLAB; Universitat Politecnica de Valencia; Virginia Tech.

The PICO Collaboration (formed from the merger of two existing groups, PICASSO and COUPP) uses bubble chambers and superheated fluid to search for dark matter. The PICO-60 detector consists of a fused-silica jar sealed to flexible, stainless steel bellows, all immersed in a pressure vessel filled with hydraulic fluid.  Eight lead zirconate (PZT) piezoelectric acoustic transducers mounted to the exterior of the bell jar record the acoustic emissions from bubble nucleation and four 2-megapixel resolution fast CMOS cameras are used to photograph the chamber. The PICO-60 detector was built at Fermilab in Batavia, IL and installed underground at SNOLAB in 2012.

The PICO bubble chambers are made insensitive to electromagnetic interactions by tuning the operating temperatures of the experiment, while the alpha decays are discriminated from dark matter interactions by their sound signal, making these detectors very powerful tools in the search for dark matter.

PICO is operating two detectors deep underground at SNOLAB: PICO-60, a bubble chamber with 52 kg of C₃F₈ and PICO-2L, another bubble chamber with 2.9 kg of C₃F₈.

The paper is available on the arXiv.

About SNOLAB

SNOLAB is Canada’s leading edge astroparticle physics research facility located 2 km (6800 ft) underground in the Vale Creighton Mine. The SNOLAB facility was created by an expansion of the underground research areas next to the highly successful Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) experiment. The entire laboratory is operated as an ultra-clean space to limit local radioactivity. With greater depth and cleanliness than any other international laboratory, it has the lowest background from cosmic rays providing an ideal location for measurements of rare processes that would be otherwise unobservable.

Learn more

PICO website

SNOLAB

Quotes:

“PICO bubble chambers provide the best discrimination against backgrounds of any dark matter detector technology. This pretty much guarantees a continued improvement of sensitivity in upcoming chamber designs. We are still very far from reaching the limits of this technique.”

Juan I. Collar
U.S. spokesperson
Department of Physics
Enrico Fermi Institute
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics

“We are extremely excited about these results. Not only have we established a new world-leading limit for dark matter interactions, but we have also demonstrated that with sufficient controls the bubble chamber technology can be run free of backgrounds that could mimic the signal. This bodes very well for the future, as the collaboration is poised to launch a new tonne scale detector based on this technology. This new detector, dubbed PICO 500, will have an order of magnitude greater physics capability and will explore a vast swathe of the parameter space predicted by dark matter theories.”

Tony Noble
Canadian spokesperson
Department of Physics
Queen’s University 

For more information, please contact:
Samantha Kuula
Communications officer, SNOLAB
Phone: 705-692-7000 ext. 2222
Email: Samantha.Kuula@snolab.ca
Website: www.snolab.ca

French language contact:
Guillaume Giroux
Postdoctoral fellow, Queen’s University
Email: ggiroux@owl.phy.queensu.ca
Phone: 613-533-6000 ext. 79203

U.S. contact:
Andrew Sonnenschein
Project manager, PICO-60
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Email: sonnensn@fnal.gov
Phone: 630-840-2883

 

How long have you been at Fermilab?
I started as a part-time employee the summer of 1969 on my 17th birthday. You had to be 17 to work out here at the time. It was the end of my junior year of high school.

I worked here again the following summer and then found out there were openings at receiving. So I went to work in that department full-time. That was May 1971, and I’ve been here ever since.

What do you do as a data center specialist in computing?
I’m kind of a one-stop shop where computing folks can call with whatever need they have. It’s a pretty broad range: tape robot system installation, fire suppression systems, deliveries, small construction jobs.

I also organize staff moves that are tied to the computing sector. All someone has to do is pack their stuff, and I have everything else taken care of: set up where they’re going, move phones, take care of furniture needs. I’m a people person, and I try to bring a calming effect to different folks who are stressed by having to move offices. I’m here to make this as easy as possible for them.

When do you use your people skills?
One time Lisa Carrigan [who works in Wilson Hall building management] told me they were going to get rid a lot of their steel case panels on the 12th floor. Well, on the eighth floor, which was staffed with computing folks, all we had were cabinets that separated the offices. I took those panels and made arrangements to have everything in a nice cubicle setup.

One hitch: The day we were going to do the install, the Italian prime minister was coming to the lab. There was no way we were going to be able to use the elevators. Brian Niesman [who works in transportation] said, “I think I have way we can take care of this.” He had a couple of guys stay that night to get all these panels to the eighth floor, so we were able to get it done.

That’s what I mean about having relationships with other areas outside our divisions. We help each other.

What do you enjoy about working at Fermilab?
When I first came out here, I had no idea what the lab was going to be. It was a job. But Fermilab became such an education. It was like working at a little UN in the middle of nowhere. To meet people from all over the world, learn about different cultures, make friendships — it’s been really amazing.

What do you do outside the lab?
I fish. Some of the best fishing around is out here at the lab.

I spend a lot of my time with my grandkids — three of them, and one on the way. My youngest one was a Gerber baby.

What’s something that people may not know about you?

The second summer I worked here, my plan was to just make some money and go to New York for the theater. And as you can see, 46 years later, I’m still here. I have fun acting in my church’s theater group. The plays are really some very nice productions.

Two years ago, my wife took a business trip to Zurich, and I tagged along. We found our way to the LHC and saw the CMS detector, thanks to [Fermilab CIO] Rob Roser. That was great to see.

The neutrino, it would seem, has global appeal.

The mysteries surrounding the renegade particle are attracting a worldwide science community to the future DUNE experiment. DUNE — the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment — is a multinational effort to address the biggest questions in neutrino physics. More than 950 researchers from 30 countries have joined the DUNE collaboration, and both numbers are trending upward: Back in 2015, the collaboration comprised about 560 scientists and engineers from 23 countries.

It’s currently the largest particle physics project being undertaken anywhere in the world since the Large Hadron Collider at the European laboratory CERN. Modeled after CERN’s ATLAS and CMS experiments, the DUNE collaboration is an international organization. The experiment will be hosted in the United States by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

The latest countries to join DUNE include Chile and Peru. The most recent new institutes to join DUNE come from Colombia, the UK and the US.

“It’s the excitement that’s being generated by the science,” said DUNE spokesperson Mark Thomson, a professor of physics at the University of Cambridge in the UK. “Everybody recognizes the DUNE program as strong, and the technology is interesting as well.”

Collaborators are developing new technologies for DUNE’s two particle detectors, giant instruments that will help capture the experiment’s notoriously elusive quarry, the neutrino. With DUNE, which is expected to be up and running in the mid-2020s, scientists plan to get a better grip on the neutrino’s subtleties to settle the question of, for instance, why there’s more matter than antimatter in our universe — in other words, how the stars planets and life as we know it were able to form. Also on the DUNE agenda are studies that could bolster certain theories of the unification of all fundamental forces and, with the help of neutrinos born in supernovae, provide a look into the birth of a black hole.

It’s a tall order that will take a global village to fill, and researchers worldwide are currently building or signing up to build the experiment, taking advantage of DUNE’s broad scientific and geographic scope.

“We’re a country that does a lot of theoretical physics but not a lot of experimental physics, because it’s not so cheap to have a particle physics experiment here,” said Brazilian DUNE collaborator Ana Amelia Machado, a collaborating scientist at the University of Campinas and a professor at the Federal University of ABC in the ABC region of Brazil. “So we participate in big collaborations like DUNE, which is attractive because it brings together theorists and experimentalists.”

Machado is currently working on a device named Arapuca, which she describes as a photon catcher that could detect particle phenomena that DUNE is interested in, such as supernova neutrino interactions. She’s also working to connect more Latin American universities with DUNE, such as the University Antonio Nariño.

On the opposite side of the world, scientists and engineers from India are working on upgrading the high-intensity proton accelerator at Fermilab, which will provide the world’s most intense neutrino beam to the DUNE experiment. Building on the past collaborations with other Fermilab experiments, the Indian scientists are also proposing to build the near detector for the DUNE experiment. Not only are India’s contributions important for DUNE’s success, they’re also potential seeds for India’s own future particle physics programs.

“It’s exciting because it’s something that India’s doing for the first time. India has never built a full detector for any particle physics experiment in the world,” said Bipul Bhuyan, a DUNE collaborator at the Indian Institution of Technology Guwahati. “Building a particle detector for an international science experiment like DUNE will bring considerable visibility to Indian institutions and better industry-academia partnership in developing advanced detector technology. It will help us to build our own future experimental facility in India as well.”

DUNE’s two particle detectors will be separated by 800 miles: a two-story detector on the Fermilab site in northern Illinois and a far larger detector to be situated nearly a mile underground in South Dakota at the Sanford Underground Research Facility. Fermilab particle accelerators, part of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility for DUNE, will create an intense beam of neutrinos that will pass first through the near detector and then continue straight through Earth to the far detector.

Scientists will compare measurements from the two detectors to examine how the neutrinos morphed from one of three types into another over their interstate journey. The far detector will contain 70,000 tons of cryogenic liquid argon to capture a tiny fraction of the neutrinos that pass through it. DUNE scientists are currently working on ways to improve liquid-argon detection techniques.

The near detector, which is close to the neutrino beam source and so sees the beam where it is most intense, will be packed with all kinds of components so that scientists can get as many readings as they can on the tricky particles: their energy, their momentum, the likelihood that they’ll interact with the detector material.

“This is an opportunity for new collaborators, where new international groups can get involved in a big way,” said Colorado State University professor Bob Wilson, chair of the DUNE Institutional Board. “There’s a broad scope of physics topics that will come out of the near detector.”

As the collaboration expands, so too does the breadth of DUNE physics topics, and the more research opportunities there are, the more other institutions are likely to join the project.

“There aren’t that many new, big experiments out there,” Thomson said. “We have 950 collaborators now, and we’re likely to hit 1,000 in the coming months.”

That will be a notable milestone for the collaboration, one that follows another sign of its international strength: Late last month, for the first time, DUNE held its collaboration meeting away from its home base of Fermilab. CERN served as the meeting host.

DUNE is supported by funding agencies from many countries, including the Department of Energy Office of Science in the United States.

“We have people from different countries that haven’t been that involved in neutrino physics before and who bring different perspectives,” Wilson said. “It’s all driven by the interest in the science, and the breadth of interest has been tremendous.”