"This isn't exactly your classic microscope."
- Dr. Ben Kilminster, Fermilab
Founded in 1967, the National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, was renamed in honor of Enrico Fermi in 1974. With the 1983 addition of the Tevatron, Fermilab became home to the most powerful particle accelerator in the world.
Built on 6,800 acres of restored Illinois prairie, Fermilab is popular with bikers, naturalists, and equestrians as well as high energy physicists looking for the deepest secrets of existence. A U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics, Fermilab was the home to the discovery of the top quark in 1995 and continues to perform fundamental science research.
The Tevatron, a four-mile underground accelerator, takes particles from a series of twists, turns, and transformations and uses superconducting magnets to boost them to almost the speed of light. With protons and antiprotons circling in opposite directions, scientists collide the beams in two 5,000-ton detectors at energies of 2 trillion electron volts (TeV), revealing the conditions of matter and its structure at the smallest scale.
In addition to investigating the fundamental nature of matter, Fermilab treats cancer patients with particle beams, develops superconducting magnets used in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), and learns new ways of working with electric currents and magnetism. A historical force behind the development of fiber optic networks and cluster computing, Fermilab also hosts a number of smaller fixed target experiments and neutrino experiments.
The site is open during the day to public with photo identification. A herd of buffalo has lived on the site since its inception, reminding physicists of Fermilab's position on the frontier of physics as well as the area's immediate history. Contrary to popular belief, the buffalo are not the proverbial "canaries in the mineshaft" which caused us to nix Where the Buffalo Glow as an early working title of the film.
The Tevatron will shut down in by 2010, though the facility is one of the potential sites for the proposed International Linear Collider.