48 ASTRONOMY • JUNE 2018
THE NEXT DAY, Michael and I made
our way to Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, a
suburb west of Chicago. For many years,
this U.S. National Accelerator Laboratory
has been just that — a series of under-
ground accelerators. But now the huge,
sprawling facility, which is like a small city
in itself, is transforming into a neutrino
detector among its primary functions. The
quest for cosmological answers is daily
business at Fermilab. Among them: finding
out exactly what constitutes dark matter.
Our host, Andre Selles, introduced us to
Marcela Carena, head of the Theoretical
Physics Group. Marcela, who leads a
dynamic group of researchers, generously
told us about all the research activities going
on at this amazing place. She gave us an
overview of particle physics, of the role of
Fermilab’s discovery of quarks, and of the
discovery of the Higgs Boson at CERN. She
described in detail the current major role of
neutrino detection.
Senior Operator Beau Harrison then
gave us an insider’s tour of the heart of
Fermilab operations, the master control
room. Our Fermilab visit was crowned by a
great discussion with Dan Hooper, a well-
known expert on dark matter who gave us
a solid overview of the challenges that
researchers face in identifying what dark
matter consists of, and how his research is
tackling the issue.
Neutrino
physics
FERMI
LABLeft: Marcela Carena, head
of the Theoretical Physics
Group and a professor at the
University of Chicago, was
one of our hosts at Fermilab.
She gave us a tour of the
facility and told us about the
exciting physics happening
there. MICHAEL E. BAKICHBelow: This is the 300-ton
(near) particle detector
for NOvA, the experiment
in which Fermilab sends
neutrinos to a 14,000-
ton detector in northern
Minnesota. The near
detector sits 350 feet
underground and measures
the composition of the
neutrino beam as it leaves
Fermilab. COURTESY OF FERMILABEmployees gather around readouts in 2015 on the day the MicroBooNE
Experiment — a 170-ton liquid-argon time projection chamber — recorded
its first particle tracks. “BooNE” is an acronym for Booster Neutrino
Experiment. COURTESY OF FERMILAB
Fermilab’s main particle accelerator, known as the Tevatron, is the large ring in the background.
In front of it are the main injector rings. In 1995, researchers using the Tevatron discovered the
top quark. The accelerator has been inactive since 2011. COURTESY OF FERMILAB