Fermilab in 2012: Upgrades shift focus to the intensity frontier

The upcoming year will be busy at Fermilab, and the largest projects are already beginning. Friday 16 December marks the ground-breaking for the Illinois Accelerator Research Center, a 3,900-square-metre building for accelerator research and development, industrialisation and training of the future generation of accelerator scientists. The centre is expected to open in about two years.

The NOvA project will generate and send a beam of neutrinos to a 15,000-ton detector in Ash River, Minnesota. The neutrinos will complete the 800-kilometre trip in less than three milliseconds. Image source: NoVA Experiment.

At the high-energy frontier of particle physics, Fermilab scientists will continue analysing the dataset from the recently retired Tevatron particle accelerator’s two experiments, CDF and DZero, and will continue their strong participation in the CMS experiment at the LHC.

Neutrino physics at Fermilab will take a big step forward. In February, crews will begin assembling the 15,000-ton NOvA far detector in northern Minnesota. The detector will begin measuring properties of neutrinos sent from Fermilab to Minnesota in 2013. The lab expects to receive full approval for and begin construction of the 170-ton MicroBooNE neutrino detector, which is based on liquid-argon technology. Planning for the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment, which would send neutrinos from Fermilab to South Dakota, will also continue throughout 2012.

The new year will bring some changes for the Fermilab accelerator complex. In the spring the complex will shut down for a year-long upgrade in preparation for the NOvA neutrino (see image) and new muon experiments. Advanced accelerator R&D will also move forward, with the installation of a second complete cryomodule and progress toward the completion of a superconducting radio-frequency test accelerator, in addition to the construction of the new accelerator research centre.

In the area of particle astrophysics, scientists in Chile will finish installing the Dark Energy Camera on the Blanco telescope, the cryogenic dark matter search will begin taking data with an improved detector, and the COUPP dark-matter experiment will move its 60 kg detector from Fermilab to SNOLAB in Canada.

by Kurt Riesselmann and Amy Dusto, Fermilab Office of Communication