Taking America Beyond the Standard Model

The first things you notice at Fermilab are the buffalo. After building the world’s most powerful particle accelerator underground, the physics lab decided to turn the land above it into a prairie preserve populated by a herd of American bison. A suburban legend floats around the surrounding town of Batavia, Illinois, that the bison serve the same function as canaries in a mine, with the physicists keeping tabs on the animals’ well-being in order to monitor the lab’s radiation. (In reality, Fermilab’s radiation is less dangerous than the sun’s). Apparently the lab used to kill a buffalo every summer for a barbecue, a report that conjures images of physicists putting on war paint and taking down the animal with concentrated beams of protons. That tradition has since fallen out of fashion, but its memory still lingers in Fermilab’s bar, where an enormous buffalo head is mounted on the wall above the pool table.

Fermilab’s bison are iconic, discussed and joked about far more often than most science lab oddities. People like to talk about the bison because they like to talk about Fermilab. The herd may be the heart of the lab, but it is only because for the last 50 years, the heart of high energy physics has beat beneath its hooves.

Fermilab is home to the Tevatron, a particle accelerator that smashes protons and anti-protons together and studies what comes out. It produces the most basic building blocks of the universe, like electrons, quarks, photons, bosons, and other equally implausibly-named particles. The discovery of the top quark at Fermilab in 1995 filled in the last gap in the Standard Model and wrapped up an important era for high energy physics. The Standard Model is a set of equations that describe the six forms of quarks we have discovered and their interactions on the subatomic scale. Nothing we have observed in experiments has contradicted it, but it has one major flaw: it does not describe gravity.

Most particle physicists are convinced that science extends beyond the Standard Model, and that at high enough energies we will be able to unite the rules that govern the quantum world, which the Standard Model describes, with the ones that describes ours, like gravity. To study that realm, the Large Hadron Collider, an accelerator seven times more powerful than the Tevatron, was built at CERN in Switzerland.

The LHC is scheduled to open next year, and a few years later the Tevatron is scheduled to shut down. Without the accelerator powering experiments it is difficult to imagine Fermilab staying relevant or even operational, especially considering the dismal level of support the U.S. gives to science. If the Tevatron shuts down, the bison might soon become the most interesting thing at Fermilab.

“For Fermilab to continue to be a major center, it’s got to have experiments,” Columbia physics professor Janet Conrad said in an interview. “It’s got to find its niche and figure out what its niche will be. And its niche is not going to be the highest energy scales anymore.”

Conrad studies neutrinos, a type of particle with almost no mass and no electrical charge. The three types of neutrinos hardly ever interact with anything; you’ll never notice, but there are a thousand trillion of them streaming through your body this very second. Neutrinos glide right through matter and since most high energy physics experiments are based on collisions, they are notoriously elusive and difficult to study. They are also extremely important to Beyond the Standard Model physics, which is also notoriously difficult to study, especially at the low energy scales we currently work with.

Neutrino physics offers a wide range of experimental possibilities, including investigating technology for future colliders and closely examining results we expect to get from the LHC. The LHC itself, however, cannot afford to put any resources toward it. Conrad is currently working on Project X, a proposal to use the Tevatron to provide beams of extremely high energy protons for neutrino experiments. And those neutrino experiments, potentially some of the most important and interesting at the world, would keep the Tevatron running and Fermilab a major player in high energy physics.

“The mentality at the lab has been so focused on highest energy, highest energy, highest energy that it’s really been hard for the lab to regroup and rethink this. But I think we can certainly put together a really good program, and that’s what this Project X workshop is about,” Conrad said. Physics experiments are incredibly expensive, so not taking advantage of the infrastructure we already have at Fermilab would be irresponsible. And although the LHC is incredibly exciting, it cannot do everything. The more experiments we have, the better.

It is hard to ignore that the U.S. is falling behind in almost every field of science. Shocking the international scientific community, we’ve lagged behind in recognizing and acting against global warming and, most mystifyingly, have even argued that evolution should not be taught in public schools. If the Tevatron shuts down completely, it would be one more nail in the coffin of science in America. Keeping the Tevatron running would not only contribute to the study of some of science’s most interesting questions, but it would also keep the U.S. excited about finding the answers.

Elizabeth Wade is a Barnard senior majoring in
comparative literature.
Fear of Physics runs alternate Mondays.
Specopinion@columbia.edu