Wilson Hall

Batavia, IL (Feb 24, 2009)

This is the high rise building at the center of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab. The temple of high energy physics in the US, Fermilab is home to the Tevatron. With a circumference of 4 miles, the Tevatron is the most powerful accelerator in the word, capable to accelerate and smash protons and anti-protons at energies of 2 Tera-electron Volt (that is 100 million times the energy of the electron beam in a television picture tube - the old ones before flat screen TVs). This energy is packed in a volume which is 1 trillion times smaller than an atom. Fermilab’s Tevatron will lose its primacy at the end of this year, when the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will start to accelerate protons at energies 7 times larger, and lead nuclei at energies 600 times larger than the Tevatron.

I have spent the last week at Chicago visiting Mayli, working either at Argonne National Lab, or at Fermilab. On Friday I was at Fermilab attending the talk Mayli was giving, in which she presented the results of 4 years of work trying to understand the mysteries of neutrinos.