The instrumentation team of Fermilab's Environment, Safety & Health Section is the caretaker of a unique menagerie: albatrosses, chipmunks, hippos, pterodactyls, scarecrows, and an aardvark to name a few.
When 20-year-old Ryan Auer set out to find his very first job, he didn't expect to wind up at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, let alone on stage in front of over 1000 people at the lab's annual Family Day.
The inaugural beam for the CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso (CNGS) project took just 2.5 milliseconds to fly 732 km through the earth from Geneva, Switzerland, to its destination at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory near Rome on Monday, September 11, 2006.
From the day it was completed in the early days of Fermilab, the design of the Meson Lab roof has been an aesthetic success and a structural nightmare. It leaks. Always has.
The highest-energy particle accelerator in the world, Fermilab's Tevatron, boasts four miles of particle-accelerating circumference. But during thunderstorms it can become a bull's-eye for stray lightning bolts that demonstrate the intimidating power of nature.
How does a high school in upstate New York become a hot spot for monitoring the correlation between cosmic rays and solar flares? The story goes back to a flier from the University of Rochester about an outreach program called QuarkNet in the spring of 2000.
There's a new scientific path in Princeton, New Jersey. Out of the loam of a vacant lot, a cluster of quasicrystals winks at some pink plasma. Tectonic plates shift, and neurons connect in a hippocampus curve of bamboo.
Cavities propel charged particles by transferring energy from electromagnetic waves to the particles, speeding them up. Superconducting cavities are made of material that can conduct electric currents without resistance at a very low temperature.
At a special meeting in Lisbon on July 14, the CERN Council unanimously adopted a 17-point European Strategy for Particle Physics, based on the premise that "Europe should maintain and strengthen its central position in particle physics."
Buried deep in the mountains of southern China, a new neutrino experiment would rely on a series of Chinese nuclear reactors and the brains of scientists from several countries.
A little after midnight, foreign voices and scents of dinner drift from the kitchen and down the halls of Dorm 1. Slavic dialogue stirs me from sleep and the aroma of cooked kielbasa sausage grabs my full attention.
Traditionally, the big five particle physics laboratories have been Fermilab and SLAC in the United States, CERN in Switzerland, DESY in Germany, and KEK in Japan. However, a changing world economy is bringing new players into the game.
In the early 1950s, Nobel-Laureates-to-be Norman Ramsey and Ed Purcell created cards of physical constants they found themselves using most frequently.
