Physicist Bill Foster was elected in a special election to Congress in the 14th District of Illinois. In a bizarre form of torture which only our political system could have devised, his term ends at the end of the year and the district will have to vote again for Congress in November. Both party nominees are running again.In the Chicago suburbs at the eastern end of the district, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is (until later this year) the world's largest proton-antiproton collider. The machine, which is over a mile in diameter and shown in an image from Mr. Foster's website below, is on spectacular grounds including a prairie restoration project and a buffalo research station. It is headquartered in Wilson Hall, shown above. Mr. Foster was involved in the building of giant particle detectors shown below.
The picture below of CDF ot Fermilab doesn't do a good job of showing how impressively huge it is. The detector is about six stories high- when you walk out on the catwalk over it and look down inside, there is miles and miles of wiring and thousands of boxes of electronics in cabinets.
The proton decay experiment is shown with a diver, which gives an idea of the size of the tank. This experiment was built in a salt mine near Cleveland where thousands of feet of rock could shield the experiment from nearly all exterior sources of radiation. A flash from a proton decay in the tank would be picked up by the array of photomultiplier tubes in the background and the experiment electronics would pinpoint the location of the decay and find information about the energy and decay products. They didn't see any proton decays, but the detector also detects neutrinos, particles which have almost no interaction with normal matter and so can pass through the entire Earth. Out of trillions of neutrinos passing through it from a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, in 1987, the detector recorded 13 events in the only detection of an astronomical neutrino source other than the Sun.
You've got to wonder- after working in this environment, which looks like a facility a James Bond villain would have, isn't Congress kind of a step down?
From campaign website:
Over the last 25 years Bill has played a leading role in several groundbreaking experiments in elementary particle physics. He also managed several multimillion dollar accelerator construction and research projects, and led teams of engineers and physicists to help build the latest round of Fermilab's giant particle accelerators. Along the way he has designed and built equipment using a number of advanced technologies, including high speed electronics, superconducting magnets, analog and digital integrated circuit design, and high power electronics. Bill has received several awards for these technical developments.
| Science at Fermilab The bottom of the picture is a computer-generated display of the Top Quark using software that Bill Foster wrote in about 1990. |
The IMB Proton Decay Detector
In 1979, Bill joined the IMB (Irvine-Michigan-Brookhaven) collaboration as one of the key members who designed, built and conducted research. The IMB detector was a 60-foot cube of ultra-pure water constructed in a salt mine underneath Lake Erie. The water was surrounded by 2000 light-sensitive phototubes, designed to detect proton decay. The experiment became famous for the observation of the neutrino burst emitted by a nearby Supernova (exploding star).
A diver takes a swim in the IMB detector.
CDF - The Collider Detector at the Fermilab Tevatron
In 1984, Bill moved to Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois and join one of the largest and most exciting experiments in the world. The Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) is the first and largest detector at the Fermilab Tevatron, the world's highest energy particle accelerator. The goal of the experiment was to discover the identity and properties of the particles that make up the universe and to understand the forces and interactions between those particles. Bill designed and built significant parts of the original equipment, and Bill and his equipment participated in the discovery of the Top Quark, the heaviest known form of matter.
| The Collider Detector at Fermilab, being rolled out of the collision hall after the discovery of the Top Quark.
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Bill's Integrated Circuit Designs
In the early 1990's Bill led the team that designed a new type of integrated circuit (computer chip) that allowed particle physics collisions to be measured with unprecedented speed and accuracy. Bill's design is still being used at high energy physics experiments being built today.
| Photograph of one of Bill's integrated circuits.
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Bill and Fermilab's Particle Accelerators
In 1994 Bill began working on Fermilab's giant particle accelerators. During this time he managed several multi-million dollar accelerator construction and research projects. Bill was the co-inventor of Fermilab's Recycler Ring, the newest of Fermilab's giant machines. Each time Femilab's machines operate, the particle beams go through over 500 magnets that Bill designed and led the teams that built them.
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Bill's Antiproton Recycler Ring is located in one of Fermilab's long circular tunnels. The Fermilab High-rise is at left. | The inside of the 2-mile long tunnel. Bill's Recycler magnets are the green objects at top. |
Read More:
What is Fermilab? http://www.fnal.gov/pub/about
What is Particle Physics? http://www.fnal.gov/pub
Physics at Fermilab: http://www.fnal.gov/pub
Fermilab's Chain of Accelerators: http://www-bd.fnal.gov/public
The CDF experiment: http://www-cdf.fnal.gov
http://particleadventure.org
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