Fermi National Accelerator :: physics proton accelerator

During the early 1950's there was a need for a new large accelerator facility in the United States, therefore a group called MURA (Midwestern Universities Research Association) was formed by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission specifically to take on this enormous task. By the early 1960's the accelerator research panel had made several recommendations about the accelerator project. The panel reccomended that four things needed to be constructed to get the project under way. What the panel had suggested was that a super high current accelerator be constructed, a proton accelerator of approximately 200 GeV ( this would be Fermilabs original main ring) be constructed, storage rings needed to be constructed and a design study for an approximately 800 GeV machine needed to be formed. On November 21, 1967 President Lyndon Johnson signed a bill allowing the go ahead of the Fermi National Accelerator and by early 1968 congress approved funding to build the laboratory. In 1967 the Fermilab cost $243 million with an additional $120 million in 1983 to complete the Tevatron. The site chosen by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission was just outside Chicago Illinois in a small town called Weston, Illinois. The first person chosen to take on the complicated task of running the Fermilab was Founding Director Robert R. Wilson, and from the outset Robert committed the laboratory to firm principles of scientific excellence, esthetic beauty, stewardship of the land, fiscal responsibility and equality of opportuniy (Fermi website, http://www.fnal.gov/pub/contact/index.html). What excactly does the Fermilab do you ask? Well in the simplest terms possible the lab studies the tiniest building blocks of matter to learn and understand more about the forces involved in holding them together and the forces that separate them, otherwise known as particle physics. To study these subatomic particles the scientist must smash them together in order to see what comes flying out. One of the most interesting parts about the Fermilab is the immense size of the equipment used to carry out the experiments. The Tevatron is the highest energy particle accelerator in the world. It is located 30 feet below the surface and has a circumference of approximately four miles. The Tevatron uses accelerators that help add energy to the subatomic particles so that they can travel around the four-mile loop 50,000 times a second at a speed of 99.9999 % of light. To help study the collisions there are two collider detectors ( CDF and DZero), each about the size of a four story building.