Fermilab at 50

The following sections are included:

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Editors’ and Publisher’s Note
• About the Editors
• Contents

At its inception, Fermilab was a dream and an aspiration of an entire community of scientists worldwide — from coast to coast in North America and internationally. It was brought into reality by a visionary scientific leader, Robert Rathbun Wilson. It was a vision of an innovatively designed nested set of increasingly energetic circular particle accelerators, fed by a linear accelerator at its source. The complex circus of rings provided high energy charged particles (e.g. protons) to probe the deeper structure and forces at work in the subatomic world. The scientific canvas has evolved with time from “internal target” experiments to external “fixed target” experiments to “colliding beam” experiments — a canvas that today has the near-complete picture of the structure and function of the elementary particles and forces as embodied in the so-called “Standard Model” of particle physics. Today, the laboratory is poised to launch a unique international experiment in the next decade that will explore the nature of the remaining elusive particle we call the “neutrino.” It will do so by using high intensity protons from Fermilab’s ‘nested’ accelerator complex producing intense bursts of neutrinos, which will propagate over long distances of thousands of kilometers, allowing us to observe, monitor, analyze and measure the “many faces” the neutrino presents to us along its flight — much like that of catching a Japanese “kabuki” player in act…

On the occasion of Fermilab’s 50^th anniversary, I send my warm greetings and congratulations for half a century of dynamic inspiration and leadership, culminating in Fermilab’s status as a world-renowned basic science research institution today…

On the occasion of Fermilab’s 50^th birthday, I am happy to offer my congratulations on the lab’s past successes and best wishes for its future. There has been much technical and scientific collaboration between Fermilab and SLAC over the last 50 years. I leave those things to others. This is a personal reminiscence covering some of my own involvement with Fermilab and its previous directors…

When one mentions Fermilab, I remember Aurora, the town nearby. As you know, I escaped Hitler in Germany as a young man of 12 years of age and taken into an American foster home. My foster father had a farm, Farroll Farm, in Aurora which housed Pepper and Salt — two beautiful ponies for riding. So, my first impression of Chicago, Illinois was with the town of Aurora and with Pepper and Salt…

It’s my honor to recognize Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory on 50 remarkable years of scientific discovery. What began in 1967 with a small group of scientists on the Illinois prairies has grown into the United States’ premier particle physics laboratory. By studying matter at the smallest of scales, Fermilab has helped shed light on some of the biggest mysteries of matter, energy, space and time for the benefit of all. I’m proud to represent a state that is home to such an important piece of our nation’s scientific landscape…

When Fermilab’s first Director, Robert Wilson, testified before Congress in 1969, his defense for the United States to fund High Energy Physics, the national lab and its exciting research was succinct: It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture … In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending…

My first impression of Fermilab, that towering icon of science, was … yes, a herd of bison! But as I reflect on that visit to the Lab long ago, and the incongruity of it all, perhaps it was appropriate, given the unworldly nature of yet another group of Fermilab residents: sub-atomic particles…

My career in physics has spanned over 35 years at nine institutions from east to west, but Fermilab has always been at the center. Fermilab’s role has changed — and so has mine — but we have never been far from each other…

On behalf of Northern Illinois University, congratulations to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory on your leadership and accomplishments in particle physics and astrophysics and on your 50^th anniversary! We are proud of our long and productive relationship with Fermilab and look forward to the next half-century of exciting physics…

On behalf of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, I’d like to extend my warmest congratulations to Fermilab on its 50^th anniversary…

As the leading laboratory of high energy physics in United States, Fermilab plays a key role in the cooperation of high energy physics between China and United States…

My first visit to Fermilab was in March 1977 on the occasion of the Particle Accelerator Conference which was being held in downtown Chicago. It was quite an introduction to the City since the conference straddled Saint Patrick’s Day…

I was an undergraduate in 1983 when the Tevatron switched on and set a new world record energy for a proton accelerator, but I have to confess, I didn’t notice. That was the year that CERN announced the discovery of the W and Z bosons, followed by the Nobel Prize to Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer one year later. As the years went on, particle physics became my passion, and by the time the Tevatron produced its first proton-antiproton collisions in 1985, Fermilab had become a significant presence in my life, and would remain so for more than thirty years…

I entered a Fermilab orbit in 1981 when then-Director Leon Lederman called for “a small, simple and clever” experiment to be sited at the D0 point in the Tevatron lattice, sharing with the fixed target extraction kickers on a push-pull basis. He envisioned a total cost of $1M and a run of about two years starting in 1986. Together with Mike Marx and colleagues mostly from Stony Brook and Brookhaven, I had been preparing a design for the LAPDOG experiment at Isabelle at BNL. But by 1981 the Isabelle magnets were in trouble and the handwriting was on the wall, so the Tevatron looked like an attractive alternative. Some 19 proposals of varying viability were submitted, ranging from lexan sheets for a monopole search to a multi-ton detector with a 10T solenoid field. (I believe that Leon felt all failed to meet his “small, simple and clever” dictum.)…

Happy birthday Fermilab! How can you be 50 already? I remember you when you were just a baby. You were only two when I began my studies in physics, fresh out of diapers but what a prodigious child you were: by the time I received my doctorate, you had already discovered the b quark! It’s been a wonderful 50 years, and our knowledge of physics, the microcosm and the early Universe would look very different without you…

This 50^th anniversary milestone offers an opportunity for reflection on the history of the distinctive contributions that Fermilab has made to our understanding of the universe and the impact of the laboratory on our everyday lives…

I arrived at Fermilab with my family in September 1983 to start a Theoretical Astrophysics Group. My colleague in this endeavor was Michael Turner. Mike was a new assistant professor at Chicago, and before coming to Fermilab, I was a staff member at Los Alamos…

I am deeply honored to be invited to contribute to this volume celebrating five decades of extraordinary achievements by the men and women who created Fermilab and made it a center of world physics…

My first visit to Fermilab was 1978, when I interviewed for a postdoc position by Hans Jensen, Alvin and others with the nascent CDF. I went to SLAC. While at SLAC, after working in Burt Richter’s group, there was an exodus from our group to join Roy Schwitters and CDF and I went as well. I signed up with Brig William at the University of Pennsylvania. That set the next roughly 20 years. During that time, our group did many good things but that is another story. However, my first thoughts of Fermilab always go to Leon, who was just incredibly supportive of young scientists and encouraging. I had submitted a proposal called BCD, a dedicated b-quark experiment in the collider, with my friends, to the Fermilab PAC. They rejected it because it was too ambitious (my view). I went to Leon to complain, which as an assistant Professor took some gall. I said, “You don’t like b-physics.” His reply, “How can you say that, I discovered the b-quark?” My reply, “OK, you are right.” Then he said, “I’ll give you $50K to do some research on your detectors. Go see Ken Stanfield.” Well, that was my introduction to Ken, who was obviously not overly pleased with Leon for giving me $50K. Good news, I got my $50K, however not with a smile. Thanks, Ken!…

Congratulations to Fermilab on 50 years of service and leadership to the particle physics community. In addition to providing accelerator beams for many successful on-site experiments, Fermilab has participated in a wide range of experiments off-site, including many in the field of particle astrophysics. The solid scientific and technical capabilities of Fermilab personnel have been very valuable in collaborations for experiments in underground laboratories such as SNOLAB and we have enjoyed and benefitted from these collaborations…

On behalf of all my colleagues here at DESY, I would like to express our warmest congratulations to achieving 50 years as a successful and world-leading lab. May the next 50 years be just as successful and may we continue to expand our borders of knowledge in many decades of collaboration to come!…

It is a great pleasure to know that Fermilab is reaching the ripe age of fifty. Fifty years is certainly a long time and such moments are a good time to pause and reflect, to look back at all the past achievements and milestones as well as look forward into the future…

Not when I entered particle physics in 1969, nor for a decade after, was Fermilab part of my dreams. But for 25 years from 1983 until I became Director of Jefferson Lab in 2008, I worked there. It was the core of my career. I am forever stamped with the adventures, challenges, attitudes, and approaches of Fermilab…

When I was considering accepting the directorship of Fermilab, one of my colleagues at Berkeley remarked, “there is a lot of juice at Fermilab.” Indeed, I encountered that “juice”: passion, creativity, team work, unity of purpose, can-do attitude, reverence toward a seemingly ever-more-golden past and irreverence towards management, bureaucracy and the second floor of Wilson Hall. At times “firewater” might have been a better description than just plain “juice”…

In early September of 1971, my family and I set out from Ithaca N.Y. for the National Accelerator laboratory (NAL): the next high-energy physics frontier. Six months earlier, I had joined E87A, a search for the photoproduction of heavy vector bosons that decayed into lepton pairs. Won Yong Lee of Columbia University and Tom O’Halloran of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign had proposed E87A in 1970 and NAL approved it in 1971, subject to developing a satisfactory Agreement with the Laboratory. It had to specify an affordable E87A analysis magnet, to provide a description of our novel photon beam and to specify our requirements for the detector enclosure and counting room. The Laboratory had placed our experiment in the Proton East beam complex. My goals were to draft the agreement and then help the Proton Laboratory start the construction of the photon beam and build a place to do our experiment. The groups from Columbia, Hawaii and Illinois would build the detectors and the electronics and acquire an on line computer to manage the data acquisition…

I have difficulty imagining that Fermilab is only 50 years old, since I feel like I was working there for eons. In my early training at SLAC, Fermilab was part of flyover country where one did not stop on the way to CERN. I first started to come to Fermilab regularly in the early 80s, during construction of CDF. My early time at Fermilab was spent mostly in test beam lines measuring calorimeter performance. I recall spring data taking periods that alternated on a daily basis between frozen ground and a sea of mud. We posted a full-page newspaper ad (in those days people still read newspapers!) in the counting room for retirement homes in sunny Florida. The tagline of the ad still sticks with me today: “We came for the climate, but we stayed for the lifestyle!” This seemed to summarize the test beam atmosphere well, with wild temperature variations going on outside while we spent long nights debugging recalcitrant electronics cards and figuring out how calorimeters really work. We had more fun than we could stand. Great climate and lifestyle! Those days inevitably led to the golden era of Fermilab Tevatron Collider running that carried us into the new (nu?) era of today…

I could not have imagined, as I became interested in science in grade school, that my formal education in college and graduate school would be perfectly timed, so that I would begin my career in physics at the very moment Fermilab was poised to come into existence as the home of the high-energy frontier. During the early 1960s, while I was in college, the community proposed a number of high energy machines in the 100 GeV to 1000 GeV range. In 1962-1963 Norman Ramsey chaired panels which recommended several steps, one of which, proposed by Berkeley, would become Fermilab. In 1965 ninety of the nation’s universities banded together to form the Universities Research Association to manage what would, in the words of our second director, Leon Lederman, be “a truly national laboratory.” Near the end of my years as a graduate student, in December 1968, Robert Wilson, our first director, and a group of dignitaries broke ground at Weston, IL for the Fermilab LINAC. In my post-doc years, 1969 to 1971, I participated in the preparation of a proposal for what would become E7 and attended the first Users Meeting in the village barn. In 1974, I participated in the preparation of a proposal to search for “charmed particles” submitted even before the so-called November revolution in which the J-Psi was discovered. This became E357. In 1977 I was recruited to the laboratory by Drasko Jovanovic, Dick Lundy and John Peoples. I was assigned to the Proton Department and became one of the founding members of the Tagged Photon Spectrometer collaboration so that I could continue to pursue an interest in Charm…

During my career, I have had the honour of working at the world’s two premier particle physics laboratories. During the 1990s I worked for CERN on the OPAL experiment at the LEP collider, focussing on the precision studies of the electroweak sector. On returning to the UK in 2000, I started the neutrino group at Cambridge University and joined the MINOS collaboration, marking the start of my long association with Fermilab. This was during the early days of the long-baseline neutrino programme and the idea of studying the oscillations of these most elusive of particles in a controlled accelerator beam experiment resonated with my experiences at LEP — precision physics requires the right experimental tools. MINOS also represented a return to familiar ground; the MINOS far detector was located in the Soudan mine, which is where I spent time a graduate student on the Soudan-2 experiment…

Fermilab came onto my radar screen in 1971, during my senior year at Caltech. I was working on my senior thesis — an unmemorable theoretical paper on the production of spinless W bosons with 3 citations and counting — with Barry Barish. He and Frank Sciulli were building one of the first neutrino experiments (E-21). I was so excited about this new lab that I briefly considered applying for graduate school at UIUC, which I mistakenly thought was the closest university. However, one of my Caltech mentors, Richard Feynman, advised me to go to Stanford and I did. Fermilab was in my future, but it would be a few more years before I arrived, after I finished graduate school and came to UChicago as an Enrico Fermi Fellow…

When I was a student, I heard a lot of stories about how Fermilab was built and how heroic Bob Wilson was. Unfortunately, I am too young to be a part of that team and witness that historic period. The first time I came to Fermilab, I was impressed by the architecture, landscape, and the marvelous Tevatron. Fermilab is not only a great lab for physics, but also a great place to work…

I have had the great privilege of leading two great national laboratories: Fermilab and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Each one had as a founding Director a visionary scientific leader who put his strong personal stamp on the laboratory he founded…

I’m pleased to say that I’ve been part of the Fermilab family for almost all of my professional life — and it’s a little sobering to realise that that covers thirty of the lab’s fifty years. I started here as a University of Florida postdoc in 1986, working on the E733 neutrino scattering experiment and on the test beam for the DZero calorimeter. I went on to Florida State University and then to the SSC Laboratory in Texas, and it wasn’t until the cancellation of the SSC in 1993 that I became a Fermilab staff member, one of a small number of ‘refugees’ who were, as we joked at the time, metaphorically airlifted off the roof of the embassy in like the last US personnel to leave Vietnam…

In the Opening Lecture at the EPS conference in Geneva (EPS Proceedings of the 1979 EPS Conference), in the chapter devoted to “The Lesson from Past Deserts”, it is reported that “not very many people would have bet on the existence of the 9.5 GeV object discovered by Lederman et al. at Fermilab”. This discovery (1977) was presented at the “Ettore Majorana Centre for Scientific Culture” in Erice to celebrate the 15^th Anniversary of the International School of Subnuclear Physics Ettore Majorana, and it was “the most spectacular news”. Robert R. Wilson, a strong supporter of the Erice Centre, Director of Fermilab, was in Erice celebrating the totally unexpected discovery…

Because of Enrico Fermi’s work as a faculty member at the University of Chicago, Fermilab has always held special meaning not only for high energy physicists from around the world but for the University of Chicago itself. This meaning is not only one of remembrance and celebration, but derives from appreciation of the active, ongoing important work that has taken place at Fermilab over the past 50 years, as well as the role our own physicists have played in it…

My first encounters with Fermilab were indirect. At SLAC, I would hear about it from director Pief Panofsky, who was a prominent figure on advisory committees as the Fermilab program was being created. On return from such meetings he would vent his frustrations with its startup, especially with regard to the Bob Wilson philosophy of “underdesign”, and fix what goes wrong later on.” At SLAC, Pief expected things to work properly on Day One, which was usually what ended up happening…

It is a pleasure to contribute to the retrospective of Fermilab’s first 50 years. I first visited Fermilab (then known as the National Accelerator Lab) when the tunnel for the main ring was about 30% complete. The tunnel construction was a cut-and-fill operation where a trench was excavated and then pre-cast concrete pieces were placed for the tunnel floor and walls. The excavated dirt then covered the concrete to form the shielding berm. Magnets were installed as the tunnel was being completed. This was my first visit to the prairie and my main impression was one of isolation. While today the lab is surrounded by residential suburbs, in the early days there were only cornfields. My secondary impression was how the rich black prairie soil would stick to your shoes. There were no sidewalks so after walking around for about an hour each foot would weigh about 20 pounds…

The following sections are included:

• Disclaimer
• What the Lab Means to Me
• Building a New Lab on the Cheap
• Enclosures E, H, Septa, and Getting Beam to Proton East
• The Pagoda and Title IX Trees
• The ‘Genghis Khan Style of Management’
• No Eyesores: My Little Jib Crane
• E100: Jim and Pierre; Bjorken, Berman and Kogut; Feynman and Field; the CERN ISR, and Direct Muons
• Flying Clowns and Neutral Currents
• Roping
• The Collider Detector Facility
• Conclusion
• About Henry Frisch

I arrived at Fermilab in September 1988 for my first postdoc, fresh out of graduate studies in Italy. When I landed at O’Hare, I found a limousine waiting for me. I couldn’t believe what I saw. Any of the cars I was familiar with — small FIATs clanking through narrow streets — could easily fit inside the limousine, in the space between the rows of seats. A space that was now occupied only by my outstretched legs. Staring outside the limousine window at the six-lane road leaving the airport and at the huge illuminated billboards, I felt like a character in a Hollywood movie. As we approached the lab, the driver told me that he didn’t like to drive in that area because he heard stories of buffalos whose eyes shine at night from the radiation created by the rocket scientists. So I arrived at Fermilab, feeling like an astronaut landing on an alien planet…

As a Research Associate and a Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) Fellow at FNAL from 1990 to 1993, I had some of the fondest memories of my academic career. The Tevatron was in mission, and the results from CDF and D0 were the hot topics at lunch and coffee breaks. Our experimental friends often discussed their “Zoo events” informally with us — it was not so customary by then for the theorists to rush out an “ambulance-chaser” paper. The top quark was of course the most pressing topic at the time, but to our surprise, the mass bound was monotonically pushing up to 91 GeV (CDF) and then to 131 GeV (D0). The hard work eventually paid off with the discovery of the top quark a few years later. The exploration for the SSC physics was also lively. It was a thrill to have witnessed and be involved in such groundbreaking works…

I was to start the last semester of my Physics undergraduate studies when I had to attend a course of my choice out of the official program. It could be any of the extra courses offered for that period. It was a requirement and I did not really care much about the course itself; I just wanted to meet the University requirements and receive my degree. I checked all courses in the list and only one would fit into my schedule: particle physics. That’s how I got into the business…

During graduate school at MIT, I noticed an announcement for the Ettore Majorana School of Particle Astrophysics, to be held in May 1986 in the historic city of Erice, Italy. “Particle Astrophysics” caught my attention as I was working on the possibility that quark matter may be stable and may transform neutron stars into strange quark stars (with Eddie Farhi and Charles Alcock) using both particle physics and astrophysics. The power of studies on this interface was just beginning to be become established, led by the Fermilab theoretical astrophysicists…

The first time I visited Fermilab, I was a postdoc at UCLA, fresh from my PhD in SISSA (Trieste, Italy). It was the 2003 Lepton-Photon conference. But soon after, I was invited to give a seminar and I returned the following October. Given my interests in phenomenology and astro-particle physics, I was immediately impressed by the research carried out at Fermilab. Whatever topic in theoretical particle or astro-particle physics one wanted to discuss, there was a leading scientist whom one could go and talk to, from Stephen Parke and Boris Kayser, as well as Carl Albright, and more recently Pilar Coloma, working in neutrinos with whom I had many enlightening physics discussions, to Marcela Carena, Bogdan Dobrescu, Keith Ellis (who later became the Director of my institute, the IPPP in Durham, UK), Patrick Fox, Roni Harnik, Chris Hill, Andreas Kronfeld, Joe Lykken, Chris Quigg, Scott Dodelson and many others. I always found the Theoretical Physics Department a very welcoming environment with a thriving scientific atmosphere and for this reason I visited many times for short and at times months long visits. Once I had the possibility to bring with me several of my students and postdocs and they greatly enjoyed the scientific discussions…

The National Accelerator Laboratory (NAL), today’s FermiLab, was born with the clear mission to build the most energetic collider of its time, but no such clarity existed for its theory group…

I write down here some memory flashes from the intensive period of my postdoctoral fellowship at Fermilab during the years 1974/75–1975/76. Bernard Lewis warned us about our tendency to reinvent history. I hope I can draw the right balance between what actually happened and what I wanted to happen…

In January 1954, stepping down from his yearlong service to the American Physical Society, Fermi delivered the annual meeting’s Presidential address. The topic he chose was “What Can We Learn with High-Energy Accelerators?” Having focused in the previous years on pion-nucleon scattering, this was a subject very much on Fermi’s mind. But besides the physics questions arising from the analysis of data culled from experiments, he also wanted to attempt some crystal ball gazing into what energies might be reachable with future accelerators. And Fermi wanted to do so with some humor…

In 1993 I moved from Europe to the US with destination B0/CDF trailers, Tevatron, Fermilab, Batavia IL. I arrived in the midst of the momentous CDF announcement of the evidence of the top quark. Within the same year, the cancellation of the SSC was announced. It was a scientifically and intellectually glorious start for a graduate student at a time that became challenging in terms of prospects in the field of high energy physics. Fermilab equipped us all, students and postdocs from all around the country and the world, with the skills needed to become explorers and discoverers. It accomplished this with its infrastructure, its outstanding staff, including technical, engineering and scientific staff. Everyone’s mission-driven resolve and spirit was towards pushing the knowledge to new frontiers. Importantly, at the lab we were immersed in the culture of continuous interrogation of the data — from their production to the analysis, and interpretation — the scientific result. And the core principle was to always scrutinize what is widely accepted as given, and never stop thinking of new ways to test and expand our knowledge…

Fermilab is my second birthplace. On January 31, 1985, one week after I defended my PhD in Tokyo, I was standing in front of the HiRise soaring under the chilling-cold clear blue sky. Everything was completely new to me. Not just the weather, language and custom, but also high energy protons (800 GeV instead of 12 GeV), invisible neutral kaons instead of visible charged kaons, and the list went on. It was like standing in fog, but every time I moved, the fog cleared up little by little, and I could start seeing farther. I was literally starting a new life in a new world…

What an amazing half century of discovery this has been! Neutral currents, high energy neutrino interactions, jets, bottom quarks, top quarks, tau neutrinos, tests of quantum chromodynamics and the full Standard Model — Fermilab has played a central role in an epochal period. There is much to be proud of as we look back, and hopefully the next half century will be just as eventful.

Fermilab is one of the world’s most powerful High Energy Physics Laboratories. It has always been at the forefront in physics research and in accelerator technology…

I had an honorable position in China before I came to Fermilab in 1990. I was the ALEPH Chinese group leader and the Deputy Director of the Beijing Spectrometer. The scientific and technological development in China can be divided into two distinct eras. The first 30 years were marked by milestones such as the detonation of China’s first atomic bomb and the launch of the first artificial satellite. The second 30 years after reform were significant due to the introduction of the internet age. I have the privilege of being the only Chinese to have played a defining role during both periods. Not only did I take part in both the first atomic bomb and the satellite projects, but I also established a computer network and sent an email from Beijing to CERN on Aug. 25, 1986, which is officially recognized as the first event in Chinese internet history. The 1989 Tiananmen Protest movement changed my life’s trajectory. Because I videotaped activities during the Tiananmen protest and witnessed the Chinese army shooting unarmed students on street, I was immediately in danger and forced myself to leave my beloved motherland behind. Eventually, I began an illustrious scientific career at Fermilab…

The following sections are included:

• R R Wilson’s Congressional Testimony (April 1969)
• R R Wilson’s Sculptures Around the Fermilab Site
• 1981 Summer School on High Energy Particle Accelerators – The First of Its Kind Around the World and Precursor to the Now Well-Established US Particle Accelerator Schools
• Photographs of Nobel Laureates’ Visits to Fermilab
• Fermilab Timeline:1963-2017
• An Artwork Inspired by R R Wilson