Japanese researchers have been with Fermilab from the beginning. This picture was taken on Feb. 11, 1972, when Fermilab’s Main Ring accelerator achieved 100 billion electronvolts. (Eighteen days later, its energy would double to 200 billion eV.) From left: Jim Griffin, Bob Wilson, Dave Sutter, Ned Goldwasser, Tom Collins, Shigeki Mori, Ed Hubbard, Ernie Malamud. Photo: Ryuji Yamada
It was 1971, and Fermilab was unexpectedly in a crisis: The magnets in the newly constructed Main Ring were shorting out daily. Engineers repaired the magnets during the day, allowing physicists to attempt tuning the beam at night. After many weeks of diligent work, the team achieved a circulating beam.
But they ran into another second stumbling block: While they could accelerate the beam easily up to 10 billion electronvolts, they hit a wall at higher energies, setting off another couple weeks’ worth of nose-to-the-grindstone work. The cause of the rampant failures had proved mystifying.
Ryuji Yamada accompanied a welder to a malfunctioning magnet. “I just watched the repair process,” recalled Fermilab’s first Japanese researcher. The welder cut through the vacuum pipes between the magnets. Yamada noticed stainless steel slivers falling to the floor. He collected the slivers and examined them back at his office. They turned out to be stainless slivers with greatly increased magnetic permeability.
“Although welders cleaned the inside the vacuum pipe, they could not do a perfect job,” he said. “At low field, the slivers were lying down inside the pipe, but when the magnetic field increased they were sucked inside the magnet gap and stood up and stopped the beam.”
One cleaning regimen overhaul later, the Main Ring was restored to full operation, achieving the goal of a 200 billion-electronvolt beam within five years, as originally planned by founding Director Robert Wilson. Over the following years, the beam met, then exceeded, the goals. And so did the influence and impact of physicists from Japan.
Ryuji Yamada is one of the scientists who, in 1972, helped the Main Ring accelerator achieve 100 and up to 200 billion electronvolts. In this picture, 100 billion electronvolts is indicated in the meter just above the controls. Photo: Fermilab
Throughout the 1970s, Yamada continued his critical contributions to Fermilab’s high-energy physics program. Director Wilson had begun a project for developing superconducting magnets for the Energy Doubler, which was later assigned a more ambitious beam energy goal of 1 trillion electronvolts and renamed the Tevatron. So Yamada got to work, starting a new superconducting magnet testing group for Tevatron magnets. Masayoshi Wake, a scientist at the Japanese high-energy physics laboratory KEK, also contributed substantially to the project. Together, they forged inroads for a collaboration that would soon be formalized.
In 1978, Japan hosted the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Tokyo. Leon Lederman, who would take over as Fermilab director the following year, talked with KEK Director Tetsuji Nishikawa on future collaboration, including the Tevatron Collider project.
DOE signed a formal collaboration with Japan on November 11, 1979. The deal was an opportunity for Japan to grow its high-energy physics experimentalist community, with an end goal of investing more homegrown talent into expanding KEK. In an effort led by scientist Kuni Kondo, Japan formed the initial CDF collaboration with Italy and the United States and remained heavily involved in the Tevatron collider throughout its 30-year run, as well as the CDF detector, from constructing detector components, to analyzing jets, and taking leading roles in the top quark and Bc meson discoveries. Scientist Shigeki Mori, who helped the Main Ring reach an energy of 200 billion electronvolts, was one of the early contributors to this effort.
Scientists from the University of Tsukuba and KEK stand in front of the CDF detector in 1984 at Fermilab. From left: Shoji Mikamo, Yoshio Hayashide, Akihiro Yamashita, Hitoshi Miyata, Kiyoshi Yasuoka, Taku Yamanaka (KTeV experiment), Shinhong Kim, Kuni Kondo, Yoshinobu Takaiwa. Photo courtesy of Shinhong Kim
One member of this cohort was Taiji Yamanouchi, who served as an assistant director and head of the Fermilab program planning office. Before the U.S.-Japan collaboration began, he was part of a group led by Lederman that discovered the Upsilon particle in 1977 using the Main Ring beam. (The Upsilon particle is made of a bottom and antibottom quark.)
About 20 other Japanese researchers were on site at any given time, creating a prominent community in Wilson Hall, where they had lunch together frequently. One of these other researchers was Shinhong Kim, who joined CDF in 1980 and became the CDF Japanese group leader in 2000.
“Japanese researchers contributed to the construction of the detectors and the physics analysis in each U.S.-Japan project, such as CDF, E704, E782, KTeV, DONUT, SciBooNE and so on,” said Kim, a professor at the University of Tsukuba. “They brought in unique detector technology and new analysis methods into the collaboration. In these projects, we saw that the diversity made the collaboration more fruitful.”
Approximately 50 Japanese researchers earned Ph.D.s through their work at Fermilab, and many of them, as originally planned, have used their expertise to build other international research endeavors.
Kim, for example, now collaborates with Fermilab as leader of the Japanese-led cosmic background neutrino decay (COBAND) experiment. COBAND hopes to see far into our universe’s past by finding neutrinos formed shortly after the Big Bang, similar to studies on the cosmic microwave background radiation. Under Kim’s guidance, the project is currently developing superconducting far-infrared photon detectors.
About half of the 55 current members of the Japanese users community at Fermilab work from their own institutions like Kim. Those on site are not concentrated in one area of the lab as they once were at CDF. Rather, they now participate in 11 different projects or experiments.
The future for U.S.-Japan partnership remains bright. The 1979 agreement is renewed annually when representatives gather to discuss project updates, future funding and new ideas.
The 30th Anniversary Symposium of the U.S.-Japan Collaboration in High Energy Physics was held in Hawaii on Oct. 20-21, 2010. The proceedings of the symposium show further details of the collaboration.
Who goes there?
It was in the late 1960s and we were working at Fermilab. There were a number of us British expatriates there. It was called the “brain drain” because many large government-funded projects needed help from Europe. The space program, high-energy physics research and various nuclear power undertakings competed with each other for the inadequate number of qualified American technologists needed, and aid from abroad was welcomed.
My English friend Roy Billinge had been given a sizeable responsibility involving the construction of the main components of a particle accelerator on a 10-square-mile site on the prairie, 40 miles from Chicago. The budget allotted by Congress was adequate, but the time scale was tight. The success of the project hinged on each needed item being available on time. A delay with a critical component could slow the project down or even cause it to fail.
Roy, a manager who could be relied upon to take ingenious original decisions, decided to import some talent from England. He found a worker at a laboratory near Oxford who was known for his entrepreneurial skills. His name was Bob Sheldon. He would join the project as a fixer, and his specific responsibility was to look out for items with a long delivery delay and try to find alternative sources. At the same time he was to keep an eye open for possible shortcuts and money-saving ideas. A process like that, competently pursued, could easily save enough money and time for his salary to be insignificant.
It worked! Bob brought his wife from England, and the two of them were a wonderful addition to the social life at the lab too. Bob was an affable North-countryman with an expansive personality and got on well with people. Any engineer or physicist in the team who was placing an order for raw materials, machines or high-tech instrumentation would first consult Bob, who made some inquiries and often found a solution that saved time or cost less.
Felicia investigates the opening in a vacuum pipe in the Meson Lab with the help of Wally Pelczarski, designer in the Main Ring Section. Photo: Tim Fielding
The accelerator was completed on schedule and well within budget. They tried to get it working, but the particles consistently failed to circulate in the miles-long stainless steel tube. The tube was a little larger than the diameter of a tennis ball and was normally pumped out to extract all the air so that the particles could circulate unimpeded. Was there a blockage? Had a workman left an object in the tube? How to find an obstruction in all those miles of tubing? Ask Bob, of course.
As predicted, Bob had a solution. In his part of Yorkshire, hunters used ferrets. Ferrets are weasel-like mammals who enjoy going down tunnels and flushing out rabbits. A ferret would not hesitate to run down the inside of the stainless steel tube, even if that involved a long journey into the unknown. Furthermore, it would be a sort of green solution to a technical problem, and everybody liked the idea of that. Bob was delegated to find and purchase a ferret and get instructions on its care and upkeep. It formed a talking point in the interval before its arrival. Suppose the ferret, instead of finding an obstruction, caused one by leaving droppings in the tube? Give it an aperient beforehand, perhaps?
The ferret arrived in a cage. They called her Felicia, and she soon won everyone over. The potential problem of the droppings was avoided by supplying Felicia with a diaper. Felicia was introduced to the stainless steel tube and went down it without hesitation. Hours later she emerged, looking a little tired and bemused but otherwise quite healthy. There was no obstruction.
The mathematicians found out why the particles had failed to circulate. It was something to do with the stability of the orbit, and the particles were crashing into the wall of the tube long before they completed their circular journey. They even found a solution, and they were able to pension off Felicia and relegate her to the position of laboratory pet and mascot. Bob escaped from the situation with his reputation intact. After all, he had furnished a solution to the problem as it had been put to him.
I wonder whether Felicia is still remembered at Fermilab?
Frank Beck is a retired CERN staff member living in England. He spent two years at the Fermilab as head of research services when the Energy Saver was being commissioned.
Editor’s note: For more about the pipe-cleaning ferret, have a look at various local newspaper accounts of Felicia recorded on the History and Archives Project website. Also check out a 1971 issue of The Village Crier. The Village Crier published an obituary of Felicia a year later.