DOE/Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Building something as complex as a superconducting cryomodule takes the efforts of an entire team of scientists, engineers and technicians. This picture was taken in January 2020 in Fermilab s Industrial Center Building at the end of the SSR1 cryomodule assembly. (Photo: Lynn Johnson, Fermilab)
There is a first time for everything. Sometimes that thing is a highly complex machine designed to accelerate an 800-million-electronvolt proton beam to enable decades worth of cutting-edge experiments at the United States foremost particle physics laboratory.
In January, scientists and engineers at the Department of Energy s Fermilab successfully completed phase-one testing on a prototype of the first superconducting cryomodule to be fully designed, assembled and tested at Fermilab for the PIP-II accelerator.
Image of the apparatus used in the experiment. The proton beams pass through each of the shown layers, with the iron wall at the end of the path in the.
DOE/Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
How long have you been at Fermilab?
I m coming up on 26 years in March. I ve been with the Department of Energy national labs for a little over 32 years overall. I did my graduate work at Brookhaven National Lab on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, then I came to Fermilab. I worked in operations here for a little bit, then I worked on electron cooling and FAST/IOTA, and now I m working on the PIP-II accelerator project.
What do you do for PIP-II?
I m responsible for machine protection systems to make sure that the accelerator won t have excessive beam loss or issues that will cause damage to the very expensive cryogenic systems. The protection system is critical in order to operate the test bed for PIP-II, called PIP2IT.
DOE/Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Fermilab scientists have been conducting experiments to look for quantum fluctuations of space and time at the smallest scale imaginable according to known physics. At this limit, the Planck length, our classical notions of space and time break down.
Imagine the ratio of the size of the universe compared to a speck of dust. That s about how big the speck of dust is compared to the Planck length, 10
-33 centimeters. The Planck time is how long it takes light to travel that distance.
Quantum mechanics tells us that everything is constantly fluctuating on small scales, but Planck-scale jitters of space and time themselves are so small that they ve never been measured in the laboratory. Better understanding movement at the Planck scale may help physicists answer a basic and important question: Why do things appear to happen at definite times and places?
DOE/Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Engineers and technicians in the UK have started production of key piece of equipment for a major international science experiment.
The UK government has invested $89 million (£65 million) in the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, a particle physics experiment being built by the U.S. Department of Energy s Fermilab at locations in both Illinois and South Dakota. DUNE will study elusive particles called neutrinos in a bid to advance our understanding of the origin and structure of the universe.
DUNE will measure the so-called oscillations of the neutrinos as they travel at nearly the speed of light. An upgraded particle accelerator at Fermilab (outside Chicago) will accelerate subatomic particles and smash them into a target, forming a beam of neutrinos that will be fired 800 miles through the Earth s crust to a specialized detector being built deep underground in Lead, South Dakota.