Chivas Makaroplos: Making Fermilab feel like home

Chivas Makaroplos

When Chivas Makaroplos came to Fermilab 11 years ago, she intended to stay for one year. Now she doesn't want to leave. "This place is incredible. It just grows on you," said Makaroplos. "I've made it my home."

And Makaroplos has made the Users' Center home for many people at Fermilab.

The Users' Center opened in the summer of 1973 to offer scientists new to Fermilab and their families a place to mingle, grab a drink and a bite to eat and enjoy a little recreation without having to leave the site.

Makaroplos, who also cooks for Chez Leon, keeps available tasty treats, decorations for holidays, a cozy fire and an ear to homesick graduate students.

"She has the perfect personality for the job," said Rob Roser, CDF co-spokesman. "She's everybody's best friend in an instant."

Roser and other CDF collaborators have been gathering at the Users' Center on Friday nights for several years. They've solved many problems over beers, he said. "You'll hear a lot of physics being spoken there," he added. "It's a way to brainstorm."

Many students have acknowledged Makaroplos in their theses, and one student from Japan said she was like his parent while in the U.S.

Makaroplos, 66, calls herself a "den mother.", She goes out of her way to get to know everyone who stops in and make them feel welcome. Keeping the Users' Center inviting strengthens the laboratory's community feel and gives people from different experiments and buildings across the property chance to met and interact.

Makaroplos' positive effect on people is evident by the glass cabinet in the center filled with souvenirs from around the world, given to her by former Fermilab users and employees. She also has an open invitation to visit many people.

"I don't feel like there's a place in the world I cannot go," Makaroplos said. "The physics world is very small. It's just like having one large family."

-- Kristine Crane

Where do old colliders go to die?

From Discover Magazine, April 4, 2009

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) got off to a famously troubled start last year as an electrical failure hobbled its launch. But a reboot is scheduled for this summer, and once the kinks are worked out, the LHC will finally earn the title of the world's most powerful accelerator. Seven times more energetic than its predecessor, Fermilab's Tevatron, this synchrotron will peer back in time to conditions that existed a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. With the LHC's ascendancy also comes a seismic shift in the pecking order of particle physics as once-great colliders suddenly become also-rans.

Tevatron, for one, refuses to pass quietly into obsolescence. Last fall scientists posted a description of a surprising anomaly in Tevatron data indicating that muons detected in their experiments appear to be descended from particles that cannot be explained by the standard model or by known background noise. Either an unknown, unpredicted particle has been found or a more mundane explanation has eluded the hundreds of scientists on the team. While physicists crunch data for explanations, one thing is clear: Tevatron is still alive and kicking.

Aside from its muon puzzle, Tevatron is still searching for the Higgs boson; physicists will push the collider for clues as long as it operates. Last year researchers on the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF)? project and the DZero experiment produced results that constrained the possible mass of the Higgs. Physicists expect to continue testing that will help pin down the possible mass of the particle.

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