With the approach of National Prairie Day — recognized on the first Saturday in June — volunteers and staff at Fermi National Acceleratory Laboratory will have even more to commemorate, as 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of prairie restoration on the grounds of Fermilab.
Fermilab’s prairie restoration initiative was built on the idea of responsible land stewardship by transforming the laboratory’s unused open spaces back into native prairie that once dominated the Illinois landscape. The restoration began humbly in a nine-acre patch within the Tevatron particle accelerator ring, guided by Robert Betz, a biology professor at Northeastern Illinois University. Today, it spans over 950 acres.
Central to this ongoing effort are volunteers from Fermilab Natural Areas, an outside not-for-profit organization whose work is coordinated with Fermilab employees. Their contributions include activities such as seed collection and invasive species control.
“Volunteers are truly the backbone of Fermilab’s prairie restoration efforts,” said Wally Levernier, Fermilab’s ecologist. “When employees and visitors see the natural areas, it is largely the way it looks because of the efforts started by Robert Betz and continued by volunteers and staff.”
Dynamic ecosystem
An ecosystem is a dynamic relationship between a group of species — including plants, animals, bacteria and fungi. Their coexistence shapes the landscapes we recognize, such as prairies, forests, woodlands, marshes and wetlands.
“Prairies were historically one of the predominant ecosystems in Illinois,” Levernier said. “Settlers often described the vastness and beauty of prairies. Today, only about 0.01% of Illinois’ original 22 million acres of high-quality prairie remains — just about 2,300 acres.”
Unlike forests or wetlands, prairies have a deep and dense networks of roots, with three-quarters of plant material existing underground. This hidden network plays a critical role in stabilizing soil, which helps prevent erosion, and in storing carbon. Organic carbon improves soil structure, enhances water retention and increases nutrient availability for plants.
“Grasses in prairies can have fibrous roots that reach 10 to 12 feet underground,” said Mitch Adamus, a Fermilab technician and former chair of the Prairie Committee. “That’s where plants and animals go to survive the winters.”
Living laboratory
Fermilab’s prairies have also become a resource for scientific research. Restoring a prairie from scratch gives scientists a rare opportunity to study how ecosystems gradually develop.
Since Fermilab’s prairie restoration was established in stages, this created what ecologists call a chronosequence — sections of land with similar soil and environmental conditions planted at different times that represent various stages of ecosystem development.
In the summer of 1985, soil ecologist and distinguished senior scientist Julie Jastrow from Argonne National Laboratory began studying this chronosequence to see how soil health evolved as farmland was restored to prairie.
“It turned out to be fantastic data,” Jastrow recalled. “We could track how the prairie changed the soil over time.”
As plants grow and the prairie ecosystem develops, ongoing monitoring and research studies have become crucial in finding insights into the health of the restored prairie.
One of the discoveries from studies on Fermilab’s prairies was how soil structure improves during the restoration. Jastrow and her team found that as farmland transitions back to prairie, the soil gradually forms what ecologists refer to as stable crumb structures, which help retain organic matter.
The network of pores that develop within and between these crumb structures, together with organic matter, help sustain the growth of prairie plants by promoting a healthy balance of water, air and nutrients in the soil.
Significantly, the research helped gain new insights into a prairie’s role in storing carbon. As prairie plants grow, their fibrous roots and associated fungal networks bind small soil particles into larger clusters, creating a foundation for long-term carbon storage.
“We found that healthy soil structure, particularly the formation of stable soil aggregates of various sizes, plays a key role in storing carbon,” Jastrow explained.
While these soil structures form relatively quickly — in less than 10 years — the Argonne team found the actual buildup of organic carbon takes much longer, possibly hundreds of years. Most of this stored carbon isn’t in visible plant debris but is associated with soil minerals, protecting it from rapid decomposition.
The path ahead
Even after decades of restoration, Fermilab’s prairies are still evolving. Compared to untouched, native prairie — some of which can be found in small patches on Fermilab’s site — restored sections still contain less organic carbon, but they are steadily improving.
Over the years, land managers and ecologists have gained valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t in prairie restoration. “Originally, we thought prairies would become self-sustaining much sooner,” said Levernier. “But we now know that restoration is a long process that requires active management and patience.”
Part of maintaining the prairie involves conducting periodic prescribed burns. These carefully controlled fires, managed by trained staff, replicate the natural disturbances that historically shaped prairie ecosystems and help stimulate new plant growth.
Despite challenges, the long-term benefits of restoring the prairie are undeniable.
“In the end, restoring native grasslands is one of the most effective ways to improve soil health and store carbon,” said Jastrow. “But it’s a slow process that requires patience and long-term conservation efforts.”
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.
For nearly a century, physicists have been colliding particles to gain insight into the nature of our physical world. This approach has driven some of the greatest breakthroughs in physics, including the discoveries of the top quark at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron accelerator and the Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Now, a new frontier in particle physics is beckoning: the potential to unlock scientific knowledge by colliding subatomic particles called muons. Once constructed, a muon collider could reveal new physical phenomena that revolutionize our understanding of energy, matter, space and time.
Muons, which belong to the lepton family along with electrons, tau leptons and corresponding neutrinos, are about 200 times heavier than electrons. Unlike protons —composite particles made of quarks and gluons — muons are fundamental particles with no known internal structure.
Short-lived particles
In particle colliders, high-energy collisions directly convert energy into new particles, demonstrating Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2, which links matter and energy. One of the main advantages of the muon collider is that it will directly translate energy from the particle collisions into new particles without energy being transferred elsewhere.
Since muons are not made of smaller constituent particles like protons or charged atoms, their collisions would produce a cleaner dataset. In contrast, when protons or charged atoms collide, part of the energy is wasted on ejecting secondary particles from their internal structure rather than being fully used to generate new particles.
As a result, a muon collider will use a smaller footprint and less energy to generate new particles for study. For instance, a more power-efficient, 10 TeV muon collider could yield data comparable in physics reach to a 100 TeV Hadron Collider, and it would be approximately five times smaller in size.
However, there’s a significant challenge. Muons exist for just a few microseconds, making it difficult to harness their potential for study.
“While the concept of the muon collider dates back to the 1970s, practical obstacles kept it theoretical,” said Sergo Jindariani, a Fermilab scientist. “Recent advances in technology have renewed interest in the muon collider.”
Improvements in accelerator and detector technologies have brought new possibilities for physics research. Superconducting cavities now accelerate particles to higher energies, superconducting magnets can generate stronger magnetic fields, and the integration of precision timing capabilities and artificial intelligence into future detectors will revolutionize their capabilities.
While these technologies are advanced by today’s standards, experts agree that even further breakthroughs are required before a muon collider can be built. A collaboration of theorists, experimentalists and accelerator physicists will be essential to developing the tools and infrastructure needed to make the collider work.
A new generation
To jumpstart this ambitious project, around 300 researchers from across the nation gathered at Fermilab last August to discuss the technical challenges, build educational initiatives for the scientific community, and garner support for developing and building the collider.
“There was an especially large contingent of early-career researchers drawn to the promise of pioneering new physics,” said Jindariani. “The earliest we can start building the collider is maybe in the 2040s. This machine is really for future generations to pick up and conduct physics with.”
Kiley Kennedy is a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University who works on the CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider, and she attended the inaugural Muon Collider workshop.
“I came into particle physics as an undergrad in 2015, and I didn’t build the detector I work on,” said Kennedy. “I inherited it. It’s really cool to think about building a detector that hopefully I will be able to use.”
Kennedy added that senior researchers in the field might not have the opportunity to work on the collider when it’s fully constructed.
“I think they are paying it forward,” added Kennedy. “One quote that resonates with me is from Isaac Newton: ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ That’s really how I feel when I think about collider physics from the LHC to muon colliders.”
Condensing muons
One of the toughest technological challenges in colliding muons is condensing them to increase the number of collisions in the collider. Muons scatter after they are generated. Condensing the muons is like starting with a diffuse cloud the size of a basketball and compressing it into a smooth, dense cluster the size of a marble.
A critical step toward building a muon collider is developing a prototype of a muon ionization cooling demonstrator to help researchers tackle the challenge of condensing muons. Once completed, the prototype will harness a sequence of powerful magnets, absorber materials and cavities that contain electromagnetic energy to precisely squeeze the muons closer together, increasing the number of collisions between groups of muons.
A second, smaller workshop in October helped researchers conceptualize the details of this prototype, including the required equipment, space and timelines.
“The International Workshop on Ionization Cooling Demonstrator set the stage for building a prototype cooling system called the demonstrator,” said Diktys Stratakis, a Fermilab scientist. “Building the demonstrator would be a major step toward the muon collider.”
The International Muon Collider Collaboration aims to have the demonstrator operating by the 2030s. While the collaboration is international in scope, the ionization cooling demonstrator and the eventual full-scale muon collider could ultimately be constructed at Fermilab, bringing the next generation of particle physics capabilities to the United States.
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. Fermi Forward Discovery Group manages Fermilab for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov and follow us on social media.
Crews start outfitting LBNF caverns for DUNE experiment
Beginning today, photographers are invited to apply for a spot to capture exclusive and behind-the-scenes photographs of locations at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. Professional and amateur photographers will be able to explore and take pictures of scientific experiments and equipment in five designated research areas that are not accessible to the public.
The 2025 Global Physics Photowalk is a photo competition that begins with a local contest at each of the participating laboratories. As part of this, Fermilab will offer a day this summer for 25 photographers to tour the lab and take photos, which can then be submitted to the local contest. Fermilab judges will submit three of the local winners to the worldwide Global Physics Photowalk competition. The Interactions Collaboration will announce a shortlist of global finalists in September, and the winners will be selected by a jury and public vote.
Credit: Ryan Postel, Fermilab
This year’s Global Physics Photowalk has 16 participating particle physics laboratories from three continents. The winning photos will be featured in a future issue of the CERN Courier and in Symmetry magazine.
“Enabling photographers to capture the research and technologies at Fermilab is another way for people from all over the world to see the amazing high-energy particle physics we do,” said Fermilab’s interim director, Young-Kee Kim. “The connection between art and science is profound and can be universally understood in any language.”
Photos from previous years can be viewed on the Interactions website. Photographers of all skill levels are welcome and do not need to be a U.S. citizen to apply.
Space is limited for the Fermilab Photowalk day scheduled for Saturday, July 26, 2025, from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. Participants must submit the online application by June 1, 2025.
The 2025 Global Photowalk is organized by the Interactions Collaboration, an international group of science communicators dedicated to telling stories about particle physics research and achievements.
You can follow the Photowalk on social media using #PhysPics25.
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.