Researchers at Fermilab just broke ground on a new research and industrialization facility called the Illinois Accelerator Research Center. 


When it’s finished sometime in 2013, scientists and private businesses will use the new 42,000-square-foot building to develop new accelerator technology that can be used for industry, medicine and national security purposes. In addition to a new building, the project will use space once dedicated to the now-silent Tevatron. 

Scientists from Fermilab and the Argonne National Laboratory will use the facility for research, but Fermilab says a major focus will be developing partnerships with private industry. Although we usually think of the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider, there are something like 30,000 other accelerators around the world, working on projects from paleontology and biology to food packaging. Accelerator-related industries are worth an estimated $500 billion a year, Fermilab says.


“However, the nation lacks enough training centers for accelerator scientists to feed this growing segment of the economy,” as Fermilab Today points out. And the country’s accelerator leadership is under fire. The new research center will address this problem. The facility will have space for test accelerators, cryogenics infrastructure, temperature-controlled workspaces, high-capacity electrical power systems and more.


Meanwhile, the scientists at Fermilab are still planning major new facilities and new experiments to follow on the heels of the storied Tevatron. A proposed new high-intensity proton accelerator, awesomely called Project X, would spark the development of new accelerator tech, which could also feed into the IARC. A new neutrino project called LBNE would use the world’s highest-intensity neutrino beam to determine why matter prevails over antimatter in the universe, and a new muon experiment called Mu2e will study whether muons can change into electrons, the way quarks and neutrinos can switch teams. 


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Science Scene - What's Your Flavor?

Physicists working with a Fermilab neutrino experiment may have found a new elementary particle whose behavior breaks the known laws of physics. If correct, their results poke holes in the accepted Standard Model of particles and forces, and raise some interesting questions for the Large Hadron Collider and Tevatron experiments. The new particle could even explain the existence of dark matter.

This bad boy to the left uses 170,000 ampere current to create a magnetic field capable of directing neutrinos to a detector.  When I was in high school and college, I worked at Fermilab in the electrical shop, and remember when the first neutrino detector, the Muon Lab, was built.  It is interesting to see today that Fermilab still maintains some relevance.

Neutrinos have been mystifying physicists since they were first theorized decades ago. They are one of the building blocks of matter, and to the best of our knowledge, they come in three varieties, called flavors: electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos. Oscillation is what happens when neutrinos turn from one flavor to another; an electron neutrino might turn into a muon neutrino, and then turn back again. How often they do this tells physicists about the infinitesimally small differences in their masses. Neutrino mass is important because it may lead us to physics beyond the Standard Model. And that is exactly what seems to have happened.

Examining three years’ worth of MiniBooNE data, researchers detected more oscillations than would be possible if there were only three flavors. The simplest explanation is that there’s another flavor, and that it is “sterile,” meaning it does not interact with the weak nuclear force; it only interacts via gravity, which makes it really hard to detect. Incidentally, the same holds for dark matter. Sterile neutrinos could therefore help explain dark matter, which makes up most of the universe. 

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