Lab director Robert R. Wilson and others celebrate the accelerator achieving an energy of 200 GeV.
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.
The seventh page from the Main Ring logbook entry for March 1, 1972. Note the “Hip hip hooray!” on the pasted-in printout.
Geneva artist Jim Jenkins works on his sculpture “Deus Ex Machina,” installed outside the Aurora Public Library. Photo courtesy Jim Jenkins.
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.
“Read It Like a Book” by Jim Jenkins, on display at the St. Charles Public Library. Photo courtesy Jim Jenkins.
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.
“Deus Ex Machina” by Geneva artist Jim Jenkins, on display at the Aurora Public Library. Photo courtesy Jim Jenkins.
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.
Director Robert Wilson offers a toast to celebrate the milestone. Photo: Fermilab
March 1, 1972: Accelerator reaches design energy
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. It quickly surpassed that energy goal, reaching 300 GeV on July 16, 1972, and 500 GeV on May 14, 1976.
The CDF (above) and DZero (below) collaborations in 2011. Photo: Fermilab
March 1, 2001: Tevatron collider Run II begins
Tevatron Collider Run II began on March 1, 2001. This run began after the completion of upgrades to the accelerator complex that increased the energy of the particle collisions by 10 percent, ultimately reaching about 2 TeV, and the completion of the Main Injector, which greatly increased the number of collisions. This allowed CDF and DZero to observe 20 times the number of collisions they saw during Run I.
Fermilab’s Ramsey Auditorium is filled for the announcement of the discovery. Photo: Fermilab
March 2, 1995: Discovery of the top quark
On March 2, 1995, CDF and DZero scientists announced the discovery of the top quark, the last remaining quark predicted by the Standard Model. Finding this particle had been one of the primary goals of the Tevatron Run I.
MINOS detector hall in Minnesota. Photo: Fermilab
March 4, 2005: MINOS begins operation
MINOS, Fermilab’s first long-baseline neutrino experiment, officially began operating on March 4, 2005. It used the lab’s new NuMI beam and two detectors, one at Fermilab, near the source of the neutrinos, and another 450 miles away, in the Soudan Mine in northern Minnesota. In Fermilab’s tradition of blending art and science, the detector hall is decorated with a mural by artist Joseph Giannetti. MINOS completed its run on June 29, 2016.
Pierre Auger Observatory detector. Photo: Pierre Auger Observatory
March 17, 1999: Pierre Auger Observatory groundbreaking
The Pierre Auger Observatory, first conceived in 1992, is an international collaboration operating an array of detectors in Argentina for detecting cosmic rays. It broke ground in 1999 and began operating in 2003.
The last superconducting magnet for the Tevatron is installed. Photo: Fermilab
March 18, 1983: Last Tevatron magnet installed
As early at the summer of 1967, lab director Robert Wilson had talked about the possibility of one day upgrading the Main Ring with a more powerful superconducting accelerator and introducing a colliding beams program. The design effort for this “Energy Doubler” officially began in September 1972. The Department of Energy authorized the construction of this superconducting accelerator on July 5, 1979, and on March 18, 1983, the lab installed the final magnet in what would come to be known as the Tevatron.
Groundbreaking for the Main Injector. Left to right: Lab director John Peoples, Representative Dennis Hastert, Senator Carol Moseley Braun, Senator Paul Simon and Wilmot Hess of DOE break ground on the Main Injector. Photo: Fermilab
March 22, 1993: Main Injector groundbreaking
The lab broke ground for the Main Injector on March 22, 1993. This new accelerator would upgrade Fermilab’s accelerator complex by replacing the Main Ring, which up until that time was used to inject protons into the superconducting accelerator of the Tevatron
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.
A team of Fermilab scientists installs the PICO-60 dark matter detector at SNOLAB. Photo: Fermilab
“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.
Inside the PICO-60 detector, installed at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Ontario. Photo: SNOLAB
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
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
Among other tasks, Computing’s Keith Coiley has task-managed the installation of the tape robot system at the Feynman Computing Center. Photo: Reidar Hahn
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.