Message from the Director
Forging ahead on three frontiers
What does the future hold for Fermilab? To answer this question, we’ll need to take a journey to the Frontiers.
At the Intensity Frontier, particle physicists explore fundamental particles and forces of nature using intense particle beams and highly sensitive detectors. With these tools, we search for signals of new physics phenomena by measuring elusive particles – such as neutrinos – and extremely rare processes that carry the imprints of phenomena beyond our direct reach. Fermilab has already staked its claim on this Frontier, and is today home to the most intense high-energy beam of neutrinos in the world. Project X, a proposed new Fermilab accelerator, would ensure our future leadership, serving as the key component in the world’s most powerful set of facilities for the exploration of neutrinos and rare processes.
At the Energy Frontier, over the next few years the Tevatron’s huge dataset will keep the CDF and DZero scientists busy with the promise of further discoveries. After we stop accumulating data from the Tevatron later this year, new data from the Large Hadron Collider will open many new avenues of exploration. Our remote operations and analysis centers support the work of more than 7 00 U.S. physicists on the LHC’s CMS experiment. Discoveries at the LHC will guide the world’s particle physics community as they move forward with plans to build future global accelerators. Together with colleagues around the world we are developing the technologies that would enable these new accelerators, opening new horizons for discovery.
At the Cosmic Frontier, we will build the world’s most sensitive dark matter detectors, and bring the innovative technologies and techniques of particle physics to ground and space telescopes. We’re completing the construction of the world’s largest digital camera for the Dark Energy Survey, which will map one-tenth of the sky and will carry out the largest galaxy survey to date as part of the quest to understand the nature of dark energy, the major component of the universe. We are developing new technologies to detect particles that make up dark matter. These particles, which are five times more abundant than the matter we are familiar with, are as yet undetected despite being all around us.
We can see Project X on the horizon, along with many other promising projects and opportunities at the Energy and Cosmic Frontiers. But the reality of our nation’s current fiscal situation, and uncertainties surrounding science budgets for this and next year, make planning for our laboratory’s future a challenging process.
I invite you to browse this section of our website to learn more about Fermilab’s current research program, the projects and experiments that will ramp up over the next few years, and our plan for Fermilab’s long-term future. Be sure to check back over the next few months, as more information about federal funding for basic science, and its impact on Fermilab’s plan for the future, becomes available.
Our laboratory has a future of world-class scientific opportunity ahead. I look forward to working with Fermilab employees, contractors and users, and the national and international scientific communities, to get us there.
—Pier Oddone