Fermilab Tour

For the first day at the conference, we had the opportunity to go on a lab tour of our choice. I, Sadie Tetrick, chose to go to the Fermilab tour. The main idea of Fermilab is "by building some of the largest and most complex machines in the world, Fermilab scientists expand humankind's understanding of matter, energy, space, and time, capturing imaginations and inspiring future generations". The tour consisted of visits to their nearby particle accelerator, the Tevatron, and I also got to see the MINOS and NOvA near detectors.

These are pictures of the RFQ at Fermilab. The RFQ system performs the same function as the Cockcroft-Walton generators but in a much smaller space. The Cockcroft-Walton generators provided beam to the lab's accelerators for over 40 years.

This is a picture of Linac, which is a H- (negative hydrogen) particle accelerator. It consists of 16,000 superconducting cavities and is about 20 miles in length. One of the main uses of the Linac is superconducting RF material research, which plays a role in testing and understanding the failures of certain materials. I also learned that Fermilab is big on treating cancer with neutron therapy. I was able to actually see the device that they currently use for this treatment. There were even before and after pictures of patients who treated their tumors with this process. 

These are various pictures of the particle accelerator, the Tevatron. This device was used to accelerate high energy particles, in particular protons (and in the past, anti-protons). The LHC has now taken over in the world-leading location for high energy particle acceleration. This is the reason why the Tevatron was currently not in use.

This is a picture of NOvA. It consists of lots of layers of a plastic material bunched together. The picture only shows a small portion of the entire thing.

 This is the entrance to the MINOS and NOvA near detectors. It is very far underground and we had to take a long elevator shaft ride to get access to the area.

These last pictures are all of the MINOS and NOvA detectors which detect the neutrinos produced by the accelerators. There were many wires and it was a very large detector. These neutrino projects both have larger far detectors located in northern Minnesota. I do not remember the exact numbers but there were a lot of neutrinos being sent to the Minnesota every second. The main goal of the detectors is to observe the oscillations of neutrinos and further explore their properties.

-Sadie Tetrick