For three decades, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has been a valuable asset both to the world of particle physics research and to the economy and prestige of the Chicago area.
But Fermi could face a future of diminishing returns, says its director, unless a major new accelerator is built–perhaps extending underground beyond the boundaries of the lab’s 6,800-acre campus near Batavia.
Under discussion these days are esoteric machines that would study electrons rather than protons or fire beams of neutrinos halfway across the United States, said Michael S. Witherell, who took over last summer as Fermi’s fourth director since 1968.
As part of his mandate, Witherell has been asked to plot the future of Fermi and high-energy physics in the United States. That future, according to Witherell and his bosses in Washington, is threatened by local proposals to run a highway through Fermi’s property. He argues that it could limit Fermi’s ability to stay ahead of the competition by not allowing it to build state-of-the-art equipment.
In high-energy physics, there is an inextricable link between the experiments and the equipment used to do the research. The edge goes to the facility with the equipment that allows physicists to explore at the frontiers of research into the nature of quarks, neutrinos and other subatomic particles.
“We have 2,500 scientists working here–a third of them are from institutions outside the U.S.,” Witherell said.
“They all come here simply because we have that accelerator out there. When there’s a better accelerator to do the research people want to do, they will go to that better accelerator.”
For now, Fermilab has the better instrument, the Tevatron, a 4-mile underground ring that is the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator.
With an annual budget around $280 million and 2,200 jobs, the facility also is among the top 10 employers in DuPage County.
In 1993, Fermi dodged a bullet when Congress scrapped a controversial $11 billion plan to build a 54-mile superconducting supercollider in Texas. It was a project Illinois politicians at one time had sought to bring to Fermi.
But a more powerful accelerator is expected to be available in about five years, when work is completed on the new $6 billion Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Europe’s premier accelerator laboratory near Geneva on the border of Switzerland and France.
“There is room for a No. 2, but it’s complicated,” Witherell said. “We still will have a program of experiments here that will be quite strong on the world scene for a while. . . . But we need to have a new facility for that longer future.”
What happens if the United States opts not to earmark the billions of dollars needed for a new accelerator program?
“There will be a slow, at first, reduction in the scale of this laboratory,” Witherell said. “And with time, it will become a laboratory that builds experiments to do elsewhere–that are actually done elsewhere in the world–which of course would be something much smaller than it is today.”
Possible options for preserving Fermi’s future, according to Witherell, include:
– Building a new a proton accelerator that would be larger than the collider at CERN, which uses a tunnel 17 miles around.
– Building a muon storage ring, which would be used to shoot an intense beam of a type of neutrino called muons, possibly to a detector at a research facility on the West Coast. Witherell said a muon storage ring could be built entirely on Fermilab’s site.
– Building what is called a linear electron positron collider, which smashes electrons rather than protons, as do the Tevatron and the accelerator under construction at CERN.
A linear electron positron collider, which explores the universe of subatomic particles in a somewhat different way than a proton accelerator, would require a straight tunnel, about 15 to 20 miles long, rather than a ring.
It would be roughly the equivalent of building a tunnel between Batavia and Plano or the north edge of Elgin.
“That would be a powerful complement to the accelerator now being built in Geneva, (Switzerland,) so we could coexist quite well doing different parts of that science,” said Witherell, whose appointment, he said, carried with it the responsibility to “plan and develop the future of the laboratory and the future of high-energy physics in the U.S.”
None of the options for Fermi has been proposed formally or funded.
U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), whose district includes Fermi, said Congress is committed to maintaining the lab’s reputation and protecting the nation’s leadership in the field of high-energy physics.
But, Hastert said, “Any discussion of Fermilab’s expansion beyond its current borders is premature because major design issues remain unresolved.”
In the meantime, Fermi and its parent, the U.S. Department of Energy, want to protect their options.
And that is the reason they seem adamant now in their opposition to proposals from DuPage officials, who are seeking to solve traffic woes on the county’s western edge by building a stretch of four-lane highway through a portion of Fermi’s property.
The new highway would fill a crucial north-south transportation gap by extending Eola Road to link Roosevelt and Butterfield Roads west of Warrenville. County officials say an $850,000 engineering study is continuing, despite Fermi’s opposition.
Fermi officials say studies have raised concerns about the possible impact of ground vibrations on experiments if a road is built.
