Okay, the last of my Fermilab posts...
Aug. 21st, 2014 07:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pheloniusfriarI decided to go ahead and post a selection of the photos I took while at Fermilab. I went out for a few minutes one afternoon (while some work was being done on the detectors that I didn't need to be part of, and because I think someone had finally managed to piss me off and I figured a break was in order) to take some pictures of the Fermilab Test Beam Facility building and environs. That was on May 21st. I got out again on the 22nd, after the test beam campaign was over and took some photos around the Fermilab campus. In particular, I walked around the Tevatron Accelerator Ring (about 4 miles / 6.4km or so), a lovely nature walk? Go figure. Surreality was the order of the day that day. Here, I have had to shrink the pictures drastically to fit them two by two (I took these with my cheapo digital camera rather than my crappy phone camera), so if you want to see larger versions of them, you can click on the image and the full version will open in a new tab.
First up is a view of the Fermilab Test Beam Facility (FBTB) buildings. I call this one "The Rainbow Connection". The entrance I showed in my previous post is on the right hand side of the building in this picture (behind the buildings and central test beam concrete shielding that runs off the left of the photo). I thought the rusting buildings in the foreground made for an interesting shot. The part of the building on the left hand side of the central test beam housed both the ILCTA Horizontal Test Stand (for the proposed International Linear Collider, or ILC, which might be built in Japan if it ever does end up getting built) and the High Intensity Neutrino Source R&D Lab (yes, Fermilab generates shit tons of neutrinos and sends them through the Earth to detectors on the other side of the continent, and they have plans to generate much higher quantities in the future... heh, "high intensity neutrino flux" sounds like something from Star Trek). The thing straight up the road and to the left of the buildings (behind the red construction fencing) is the Muon g-2 Ring (pronounced "gee minus two"), but more on that later. If you turned to the left from that picture, you had a view of the main accelerator beamline. They bled a small quantity of the particles from the main beamline to the test beam areas for 4 seconds every 60 seconds, but the bulk of the 120GeV protons produced in the accelerator ring were sent straight down the vacuum pipe shielded under the berm you see. You can see an access door (locked and interlocked) going into the berm and a barn behind the berm (this is where the bison are cared for, amongst other things). The windvane on the barn is, in my opinion, a nice touch here (for a heaping dose of surreality).
Here is a closeup picture of the Muon g-2 Ring (remember, pronounced "gee minus two"...). This photo makes me laugh every time I see it: "Hmmm... I wonder if it's okay for me to go up and touch it", lmao. Click the link if you want to find out more about it (it's a site mostly intended for the non-physicist, so don't be scared). In short though, they are going to measure an intrinsic property of the angular momentum of high energy muons (the gee minus two parameter) to determine if it matches theoretical predictions exactly. If it doesn't it means that there are particles hidden in the vacuum of space that we haven't detected before, and that would be interesting to say the least. Click on the link and go to "Photos and Videos" for the fascinating story of how they moved the damned thing from the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York city to Fermilab (spoiler: they had to close highways all the way between and redirect traffic around because it took up both sides of the road and even move hydro poles, and floated it part of the way, it's pretty epic).
The next four shots are from a few hundred metres up the road from where I was staying (see an earlier post for where that was). I really like willow trees, always have... The little lakes (big ponds?) had all sorts of ducks and other wildlife. In the last shot, I actually managed to catch a dragonfly in the shot (it's right above the little shrubs near the middle of the picture).
Now, a little architecture and art... the first is a shot of the main office tower (okay, the only office tower), which goes by the moniker Wilson Hall. The pond out front is actually part of cooling system for the accelerator that is located behind the office tower. Cool looking and functional. The International Sovereign Twin Airstream was created by artist Edward Tufte, replete with Feynman diagrams (I took this shot for my friend Suzanne who fantasizes about living on the road towing an Airstream behind her). It was empty inside, except for a little "easter egg" that someone planted, heh.
The next photo is one of my favourites, it's a picture of the Tevatron accelerator. Ever wonder what a 1000GeV proton accelerator looks like, here ya go. Not what I was expecting either.
Okay, that was something of a distortion. In fact, the Tevatron ring is at my back when I took this photo, but the entire inner portion of the ring (the centre of the ring) is a wilderness conservation area (prairies and wetlands). The water you see is part of the cooling system for when it was in operation. The Tevatron itself shut down in 2011 due to budget cuts (pretty much because all funding, from all over the world, went to the Large Hadron Collider... its creation devastated large swaths of scientific research, but that's another story, and it's hard to criticize given the successes at the LHC, but it didn't have to happen that way). While I walked around the Tevatron ring's ring road, appropriately named (heh), the portion that intersected with the Main Injector ring (that accelerates the protons to 120GeV, no mean feat), you could actually hear the power surging through the system. The access and equipment buildings jutting out of the mound of dirt that helped to shield against the radiation being emitted by the particles within, coupled with the thrumming that could be felt as well as heard, was like something out of the game Half Life. Exactly like the feeling of being in Half Life... it was pretty creeptacular if I do say so myself (which I apparently just have). These pictures are more representative of this section of the ring. The hill on the right of the third photo that curves around to the left is the active accelerator path (again, it's in concrete and buried under dirt as shielding). The building provides power, cooling, and control to the superconducting magnets that keep the protons going around the ring, and also a way to access the tunnel that the accelerator is in. There were buildings like this, as well as larger experiment stations, all around the 4 mile (circumference) circle. The road that curves to the left goes all the way around, and I went on a lovely (and strange) stroll around it on the last day I was at Fermilab. It was one of the few things I had wanted to do while I was there, and I am very happy that I managed to get to at least that goal while I was there. All the way around, the Tevatron ring was to my right, and the water and prairies and wetlands were to my left (except for the ones where I'm on the ring itself). Because it's hard to see on the small pictures, there's a duck on the lake where I'm at the halfway mark looking back toward Wilson Hall.
And finally, to wrap up, the inside of Wilson Hall is just as cool as the outside...
First up is a view of the Fermilab Test Beam Facility (FBTB) buildings. I call this one "The Rainbow Connection". The entrance I showed in my previous post is on the right hand side of the building in this picture (behind the buildings and central test beam concrete shielding that runs off the left of the photo). I thought the rusting buildings in the foreground made for an interesting shot. The part of the building on the left hand side of the central test beam housed both the ILCTA Horizontal Test Stand (for the proposed International Linear Collider, or ILC, which might be built in Japan if it ever does end up getting built) and the High Intensity Neutrino Source R&D Lab (yes, Fermilab generates shit tons of neutrinos and sends them through the Earth to detectors on the other side of the continent, and they have plans to generate much higher quantities in the future... heh, "high intensity neutrino flux" sounds like something from Star Trek). The thing straight up the road and to the left of the buildings (behind the red construction fencing) is the Muon g-2 Ring (pronounced "gee minus two"), but more on that later. If you turned to the left from that picture, you had a view of the main accelerator beamline. They bled a small quantity of the particles from the main beamline to the test beam areas for 4 seconds every 60 seconds, but the bulk of the 120GeV protons produced in the accelerator ring were sent straight down the vacuum pipe shielded under the berm you see. You can see an access door (locked and interlocked) going into the berm and a barn behind the berm (this is where the bison are cared for, amongst other things). The windvane on the barn is, in my opinion, a nice touch here (for a heaping dose of surreality).
Here is a closeup picture of the Muon g-2 Ring (remember, pronounced "gee minus two"...). This photo makes me laugh every time I see it: "Hmmm... I wonder if it's okay for me to go up and touch it", lmao. Click the link if you want to find out more about it (it's a site mostly intended for the non-physicist, so don't be scared). In short though, they are going to measure an intrinsic property of the angular momentum of high energy muons (the gee minus two parameter) to determine if it matches theoretical predictions exactly. If it doesn't it means that there are particles hidden in the vacuum of space that we haven't detected before, and that would be interesting to say the least. Click on the link and go to "Photos and Videos" for the fascinating story of how they moved the damned thing from the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York city to Fermilab (spoiler: they had to close highways all the way between and redirect traffic around because it took up both sides of the road and even move hydro poles, and floated it part of the way, it's pretty epic).
The next four shots are from a few hundred metres up the road from where I was staying (see an earlier post for where that was). I really like willow trees, always have... The little lakes (big ponds?) had all sorts of ducks and other wildlife. In the last shot, I actually managed to catch a dragonfly in the shot (it's right above the little shrubs near the middle of the picture).
Now, a little architecture and art... the first is a shot of the main office tower (okay, the only office tower), which goes by the moniker Wilson Hall. The pond out front is actually part of cooling system for the accelerator that is located behind the office tower. Cool looking and functional. The International Sovereign Twin Airstream was created by artist Edward Tufte, replete with Feynman diagrams (I took this shot for my friend Suzanne who fantasizes about living on the road towing an Airstream behind her). It was empty inside, except for a little "easter egg" that someone planted, heh.
The next photo is one of my favourites, it's a picture of the Tevatron accelerator. Ever wonder what a 1000GeV proton accelerator looks like, here ya go. Not what I was expecting either.
Okay, that was something of a distortion. In fact, the Tevatron ring is at my back when I took this photo, but the entire inner portion of the ring (the centre of the ring) is a wilderness conservation area (prairies and wetlands). The water you see is part of the cooling system for when it was in operation. The Tevatron itself shut down in 2011 due to budget cuts (pretty much because all funding, from all over the world, went to the Large Hadron Collider... its creation devastated large swaths of scientific research, but that's another story, and it's hard to criticize given the successes at the LHC, but it didn't have to happen that way). While I walked around the Tevatron ring's ring road, appropriately named (heh), the portion that intersected with the Main Injector ring (that accelerates the protons to 120GeV, no mean feat), you could actually hear the power surging through the system. The access and equipment buildings jutting out of the mound of dirt that helped to shield against the radiation being emitted by the particles within, coupled with the thrumming that could be felt as well as heard, was like something out of the game Half Life. Exactly like the feeling of being in Half Life... it was pretty creeptacular if I do say so myself (which I apparently just have). These pictures are more representative of this section of the ring. The hill on the right of the third photo that curves around to the left is the active accelerator path (again, it's in concrete and buried under dirt as shielding). The building provides power, cooling, and control to the superconducting magnets that keep the protons going around the ring, and also a way to access the tunnel that the accelerator is in. There were buildings like this, as well as larger experiment stations, all around the 4 mile (circumference) circle. The road that curves to the left goes all the way around, and I went on a lovely (and strange) stroll around it on the last day I was at Fermilab. It was one of the few things I had wanted to do while I was there, and I am very happy that I managed to get to at least that goal while I was there. All the way around, the Tevatron ring was to my right, and the water and prairies and wetlands were to my left (except for the ones where I'm on the ring itself). Because it's hard to see on the small pictures, there's a duck on the lake where I'm at the halfway mark looking back toward Wilson Hall.
And finally, to wrap up, the inside of Wilson Hall is just as cool as the outside...
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Date: 2014-08-22 04:01 am (UTC)ttyl