A scientist at CERN removes a delicate half-disk of pixels from its custom-made box. The box was designed to fit snugly in an airplane seat. Photo courtesy of John Conway
John Conway knows the exact width of airplane aisles (15 inches). He also personally knows the Transportation Security Administration operations manager at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. That’s because Conway has spent the last decade transporting extremely sensitive detector equipment in commercial airline cabins.
“We have a long history of shipping particle detectors through commercial carriers and having them arrive broken,” said Conway, who is a physicist at the University of California, Davis. “So in 2007 we decided to start carrying them ourselves. Our equipment is our baby, so who better to transport it than the people whose work depends on it?”
Their instrument isn’t musical, but it’s just as fragile and irreplaceable as a vintage Italian cello, and it travels the same way. Members CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment collaboration tested different approaches for shipping the instrument by embedding accelerometers in the packages. Their best method for safety and cost-effectiveness? Reserving a seat on the plane for the delicate cargo.
This November Conway accompanied parts of the new CMS pixel detector from Fermilab in Chicago, Illinois, to CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The pixels are very thin silicon chips mounted inside a long cylindrical tube. This new part will sit in the heart of the CMS experiment and record data from the high-energy particle collisions generated by the Large Hadron Collider.
“It functions like the sensor inside a digital camera,” Conway said, “except it has 45 megapixels and takes 40 million pictures every second.”
Scientists and engineers assembled and tested these delicate silicon disks at Fermilab before Conway and two colleagues escorted them to Geneva. The development and construction of the component pieces took place at the Department of Energy’s Fermilab and universities around the United States.
Conway and his colleagues reserved each custom-made container its own economy seat and then accompanied these precious packages through check-in, security and all the way to their final destination at CERN. And although these packages did not leave Fermilab through the shipping department, each carried its own official paperwork.
“We’d get a lot of weird looks when rolling them onto the airplane,” Conway says. “One time the flight crew kept joking that we were transporting dinosaur eggs.”
After four trips by three people across the Atlantic, all 12 components of the U.S.-built pixel detectors are at CERN and ready for integration with their European counterparts. This winter the completed new pixel detector will replace its time-worn predecessor currently inside the CMS detector.
Welcome to 2017! As part of our year-long recognition of Fermilab’s 50th anniversary, we will feature a few important milestones in the laboratory’s history every month.
A walk down January lane takes us all the way to the first laboratory design report.
The cover of the report was designed by lab artist Angela Gonzales.
January 1968: NAL Design Report
The first task of the NAL employees was to design the accelerator and develop a plan for its construction and the operation of the lab that would run it. In January 1968, NAL employees completed the National Accelerator Laboratory Design Report. This report laid out the plans for the lab and its accelerator complex, which would accelerate protons to 200 GeV.
Standing near Master Substation are, from left, Aris Tsaparas, DUSAF; Robert Wilson; Bill Malm, United Power; E. Parke Rohrer and Bill Power, DUSAF.
Jan. 21, 1971: Master power substation turns on
At 1:45 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 21, 1971, the Master Power Substation, located about a quarter of a mile from the “footprint area” at the NAL main site, became operational. Director Robert Wilson turned the simple control switch in the substation, which closed the 345-kilovolt main oil circuit breaker in the substation yard and sent the first power through the first 40-megawatt power transformer. It was part of the premiere of the transmission of the heavy power load that would be required to operate NAL’s accelerator system at 500 GeV.
The CMS detector as seen in the surface hall at Cessy.
Jan. 22, 2008: Last piece of CMS detector lowered underground
Fermilab helped in the construction of CERN’s CMS detector, which operates in the Large Hadron Collider, a proton-proton collider designed to ultimately run with a collision energy of 14 TeV.
The DUNE neutrino beam will travel from Fermilab to Sanford Lab in South Dakota.
Jan. 22, 2015: DUNE collaboration forms
DUNE, the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, is an international experiment that will consist of two detectors placed in the world’s most intense neutrino beam, which will be generated by Fermilab’s planned Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility. One detector will record particle interactions near the source of the beam, and a larger second detector will be installed at the Sanford Underground Research Laboratory in Lead, South Dakota.
At the Liquid-Argon Test Facility groundbreaking were, from left: Fermilab Deputy Director Young-Kee Kim; Gina Rameika, Particle Physics Division; Kevin Bomstad and Jason Whittaker, Whittaker Construction and Excavation; Dixon Bogert, Fermilab; Mike Weis, DOE; Fermilab Director Pier Oddone; Erik Gottschalk, Particle Physics Division.
Jan. 23, 2012: Lab breaks ground on Liquid-Argon Test Facility
Despite the biting cold and snow, scientists and Fermilab personnel gathered outside to break ground for Fermilab’s new Liquid-Argon Test Facility in January 2012. Liquid-argon technology would be used for Fermilab’s neutrino experiments, including DUNE, MicroBooNE and other short-baseline neutrino programs.
A truck carrying the first Linac accelerating tank maneuvers its way through the Linac tunnel.
Jan. 30, 1970: Workers move the first linear accelerator tank into the tunnel
It all started with a tank. Proton beam would eventually travel through this linear-accelerator structure, and then several more, in successive stages to achieve higher and higher, record-breaking energies.
Ned Goldwasser in 1967 at the National Accelerator Laboratory Oak Brook office
Edwin L. Goldwasser, deputy director of Fermilab at its founding in 1967, died on Dec. 14. He was 97.
“He was a great, kind, and generous man,” said Fermilab Scientist Emeritus Dick Carrigan, who was also one of Goldwasser’s thesis students at the University of Illinois. “Was Ned an outside or an inside man? Ned was both. He was very interested in integrating the users, but he was also involved in all facets of creating and managing the laboratory.”
Goldwasser served as the laboratory’s deputy director from 1967 to 1978, taking an extended leave of absence from the University of Illinois to serve at the new facility in Batavia, Illinois.
“When Ned took leave from the University of Illinois to help create Fermilab from green fields, the project took on new dimensions: a truly effective concern for the variety of people to build it, and a dedication to make it both fruitful for its users and attractive for the professional development of its staff,” said University of Illinois Professor Emeritus Ralph Simmons. “All this was combined with contagious yet critical enthusiasm for the discoveries made possible.”
Goldwasser oversaw the construction of National Accelerator Laboratory — completing it on time and under budget — scheduled its experimental program, managed its Program Advisory Committee and implemented its groundbreaking equal employment program. Together with Director Robert Wilson, he authored the laboratory’s original “Policy on Human Rights,” issued in 1968.
“Among many things I think of when I remember Goldwasser’s contribution was his impact on the experimental areas, the bubble chamber program, neutrino physics and the development of the theory group,” Carrigan said.
“He gave the laboratory a place for the users, which was not the case in the other laboratories,” said former Fermilab Director John Peoples, who notes that Goldwasser also created room and budget for lab scientists to allow them to go to conferences and bring equipment to the experiments they worked on.
After setting Fermilab firmly on its feet, Goldwasser returned to the University of Illinois in 1978 as vice chancellor for research and dean of the Graduate College. In 1986, he took another extended leave to join the Central Design Group of the proposed Superconducting Super Collider accelerator facility, where he served as associate director until 1988. In 1990, following his retirement from the university, he was appointed a Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology to work on the LIGO project.
“Ned was a natural leader, who was instrumental in making Fermilab a place where both physics and physicists thrived,” said Barry Barish, professor emeritus of physics at Caltech and the first director of LIGO. “I will personally miss his wisdom and guidance. In every way, Ned was a class act.”
Goldwasser did his undergraduate work at Harvard University. Following service as a physicist with the United States Navy, he received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, then served a year on the faculty there before going to the University of Illinois in 1951.
Read Goldwasser’s obituary on the University of Illinois Physics Department memorials website.
Goldwasser’s farewell to Fermilab and his contributions to the lab are available on the Fermilab History website. You can also read Goldwasser’s own writing: “Breaking New Ground in Human Relations” and “Vignettes of Fermilab History: Remarks Made at the Robert R. Wilson Celebration.”