The Fermi Visit

I very intelligently chose to wake up late this morning, at about eight, so I would at least get six hours of sleep. This still left me just enough time to shower and get breakfast before our early class start at 8:45. The reason for this change was our first field trip, to Fermilab, which is just an hour away from the University of Chicago. The trip was quite boring, so I will skip past that and talk about the actual visit. 

The huge, fifteen-floor building looked enormous in comparison with the vast flatlands that surrounded it. The architecture is also fantastic, and makes the building look like something out of an 80's sci-fi movie. The tour guide, Bob, first led us into the back room of the office building to give us a short lecture on the history of the lab and what its main function is (The answer to the latter would be testing particle collisions). Shortly afterwards, we passed into a testing facility which for the time looked a bit like a fancy warehouse, as all of their machinery is receiving updates and being fixed over the course of the summer. We saw one of the initiators of the particle acceleration, which looked like an rather small tube with a bunch of knobs and dials coming out of it. As we walked through the building, Bob gave us concise descriptions of the functions and workings of each of the pieces of equipment.

The Fermilab facilities.

We were served lunch afterwards, at the relatively early hour of 11. This was kind of frustrating, as I had eaten breakfast only two hours prior, so I just ate a light meal of salad in both the normal and fruit variations. After our short lunch, we went up to the 15th floor to look out over the different Fermilab areas, learn the purpose of each, and learn more about the two main accelerators on site. We then preceded to head down to the 7th floor, which housed a meeting room, in which we met one of the astrophysicists who works on site, Gaston R. Gutierrez. He answered our questions for about an hour or so, mostly focusing on what dark energy and dark matter are, as the former is his specialty.

Our final stop was at the muon g-2 (pronounced g minus two) lab, a relatively small region compared to the scale of the entire site. However, the importance of the experiments occurring there are not so small. Inside is a muon accelerator, a circular tube roughly fifty feet in diameter containing a carefully curated magnetic field generator to guide the muons in a perfectly circular path. What they are actually observing, though, is the precession (in very basic terms the spin of the rotational axis, like in a wobbling top) of muons as they travel through the accelerator to see whether we know all of the forces acting upon those muons.

The muon g-2 accelerator.

The travel back was no more marvelous than the way there had been, and as soon as I got back I went down to dinner, as I was starving from my early and minuscule lunch. After dinner, I began these blogs. It was a fun trip, and if this is the standard, I cannot wait for our week at Yerkes observatory. Good night, and see y'all tomorrow!