By all accounts, Fermilab founding director Robert Wilson was a charismatic individual. Here he’s seen leading the first NAL Meeting at Lab 3 in the Village. Photo: Fermilab
My first year at Fermilab was 1968. I was a maintenance man when I first started, and we did all kinds of things in the early days: digging holes for trees, planting trees, shoveling snow, plowing snow, hauling garbage. We took care of furnaces, toilets, windows, window shades. We exchanged water bottles for drinking water, moved furniture, ran errands.
I worked on Robert Wilson’s car at times, which I enjoyed. We also did a lot of yard work out at Site 29. Wilson liked it clear, and we spent at least a good summer clearing the brush in the front of the house. There were lots of hawthorn trees in the front yard. The thorns in them would fall out, and our lawn tractor would get flat tires — constantly. So we made some steel wheels for the front of the tractor.
Our crew worked closely with Wilson. He was very charismatic, very friendly and outgoing. If he met you once, he remembered you by name. We’d have hot dog cookouts in our shop on Fridays, and our boss, George (I got called little George for forever), would always invite the directorate. They came over and had hot dogs with us, and we chatted.
I appreciated Wilson’s attitude toward the lab’s trees and landscaping. I was told you needed his permission to cut a tree down or even cut a limb from a tree. According to one story, Wilson moved the beam target areas because there was a group of trees at the targets’ planned location.
Wilson didn’t like things that reminded him of the war years. He didn’t like barbed wire. One of the early jobs I did was going around cutting barbed wire off the fences. He didn’t like fences, period, but particularly didn’t like barbed wire. In one case, right across from our office was a water tower with a fence around it and some barbed wire on top. I had to go cut that off. He wanted no part of it. Eventually, he took the fence and everything down. He also didn’t like trailers or Quonset huts – anything that was military-related. Word was he was just intense about that kind of thing.
As a director, he was completely geared to building an accelerator — very hands-on in that respect.
I vaguely remember the speech he gave in front of the old director’s complex. We were all standing out in the street. He said something to the effect that we had just received a few million dollars, and we were going to spend it all in the next couple of days so we could build our machine. That was his attitude.
He was building a laboratory, and we were going to build an accelerator — today.
George Davidson is the head of transportation services at Fermilab.
Plans for a new accelerator laboratory began in April 1963. Subsequent Aprils brought the completion of the Central Laboratory Building, the installation of the final Main Ring magnet and other important milestones. Read on.
Atomic Energy Commission logo. Credit: Wikimedia
April 1963: Plans for a new lab
Physicists had discussed the need for a new accelerator laboratory in the United States for years before the Atomic Energy Commission (the predecessor to the Department of Energy) built the National Accelerator Laboratory, which would later be named Fermilab. These early discussions culminated in a report published in April 1963 by a panel of scientists led by Norman F. Ramsey. It recommended that the United States build an accelerator with an energy of 200 GeV. In a conference at Brookhaven National Laboratory in June of that year, Columbia physicist Leon M. Lederman suggested that the United States needed a “truly national laboratory” that would give all experiment proposals equal consideration rather than favoring those from any particular institution. These ideas laid the groundwork for the National Accelerator Laboratory.
The MINERvA detector saw first neutrinos in April 2009.
April 1, 2009: MINERvA detects first neutrinos
MINERvA is a neutrino scattering experiment that uses Fermilab’s NuMI beamline and seeks to measure low energy neutrino interactions. The detector, located in the MINOS near detector hall, observed its first neutrinos on April 1, 2009.
The Central Laboratory Building, later renamed Wilson Hall, was under construction in 1973.
April 5, 1973: Central Laboratory Building complete
The Central Laboratory Building, later named Wilson Hall, was designed by architect Alan H. Rider with significant input from lab director Robert R. Wilson, who was inspired, in part, by French cathedrals. Construction began in 1971, and on April 5, 1973, the lab held the topping out ceremony for the building. The ceremony signified that the last bucket of cement had been poured. Lab staff would move into the new building during 1973 and 1974.
The vast preserve that was the Fermilab site received a special designation in April 1989.
April 5, 1989: National Environmental Research Park designation
On this day, Fermilab was designated as one of the Department of Energy’s six National Environmental Research Parks. These parks serve as outdoor laboratories where environmental research is carried out.
Fermilab Director Robert R. Wilson and visitors watch as the last magnet is installed.
April 16, 1971: Last Main Ring magnet installed
Lab staff installed the final magnet in the Main Ring on April 16, 1971. Lab Director Robert R. Wilson, Atomic Energy Commission Chair Glenn Seaborg, Universities Research Association President Norman Ramsey, and the visiting chairman of the Soviet State Committee on Atomic Energy Andronik M. Petrosyants were present for the event.
The Tevatron was installed below the Main Ring.
April 28, 1984: Tevatron superconducting accelerator dedication
The superconducting accelerator that was installed below the Main Ring was dedicated on April 28, 1984.
Since it began taking data in 2009, the MINERvA collaboration has published roughly 20 papers on neutrino-nucleus interactions. It’s a strong, promising start for the experiment, and scientist Laura Fields, who started her new two-year term as MINERvA co-spokesperson on March 17, intends to keep up the momentum.
Fields offers kudos to current MINERvA co-spokesperson, Fermilab scientist Debbie Harris, and her predecessor, University of Rochester scientist Kevin McFarland, for the experiment’s success.
“The previous spokespeople put the experiment on a really good path,” Fields said, half-joking that “my first goal is not to break all the good things they’ve done.”
In addition to continuing the push to publish, Fields will work to help finish MINERvA’s current data-taking run, which uses the medium-energy NuMI beam at Fermilab to produce neutrino interactions in the detector. In previous years, MINERvA used a low-energy NuMI beam.
“It’s really a boon for MINERvA,” Fields said. With a higher-energy beam, scientists get more neutrino interactions. “We can get a lot of good stuff out of that data.”
Fields received her Ph.D. from Cornell University under the supervision of Ritchie Patterson and, in 2010, went on to complete a Northwestern University postdoc under professor Heidi Schellman (now at Oregon State University) conducting research for MINERvA and DUNE. Fields led the team that published the experiment’s first two papers in 2013. In 2015, she joined Fermilab as an associate scientist in the Scientific Computing Division.
“Laura has been crucial to MINERvA’s physics program since she joined the experiment as a postdoc,” McFarland said. “She has been an effective mentor to so many of MINERvA’s students.”
Indeed, as co-spokesperson, Fields will work to actively support MINERvA’s early-career researchers by making sure their work is showcased in experiment publications.
“I’m looking forward to interacting more with the students and postdocs of MINERvA and to helping them get all we can out of our data,” she said. “I’m also going to work to be a good role model for the women in our collaboration.”
With Fields’ election as MINERvA’s co-spokesperson, both of Fermilab’s operating short-baseline neutrino experiments are now led by women. The MINERvA experiment is led by Fields and Harris, and the MicroBooNE experiment is led by Yale University-Fermilab scientist Bonnie Fleming and Fermilab scientist Sam Zeller.
“I am looking forward to the day when it will not be a big deal for there to be two women spokespersons of an experiment,” Harris said. “In the meantime I am enjoying the buzz about this and grateful to Kevin for deciding to step down in order to let a new person with new ideas lead the collaboration.”
McFarland said he feels the same way about his successor.
“As one of my hometown’s heroes famously said, ‘Failure is impossible.’ Susan B. Anthony said this not as a statement of optimism, but because she knew with certainty that all factors pointed to the eventual success of her cause,” McFarland said. “With MINERvA’s rich data set and Laura leading us, I feel the same way about the success of MINERvA’s physics program.”