Fermilab Today

In 1970, Sandra Rumple, a National Accelerator Laboratory employee, began a memo to founding director Robert Wilson by recounting a vision she'd had. In her vision, NAL had won the Kentucky Derby thanks to a horse named Anti-Matter.

"He had received hundreds of hours of training and devotion on the 6,800 acres of the NAL site as well as good feed and care," wrote Rumple of her dream.

Her playful sketch introduced one of several more serious proposals from employees for a boarding stable and riding club for NAL employees. In 1971, after some back-and-forth with the director, the employees got their wish: The Indian Creek Stables and Indian Creek Riding Club became an official part of the recreational life of the laboratory.

Next fall, in October 2016, the riding club and stables at Fermilab will close, but their 45 years at the laboratory will leave an important legacy, a reminder that Robert Wilson's vision of Fermilab as a pioneering laboratory extended to the vast prairie land on which it is built.

"When I'd tell people I worked at Fermilab, I'd also mention that I have my horse here, and they would ask, 'What? What do you mean?'" said Technical Division's Marsha Schmidt. Schmidt's quarter horse, Style, boards at the Indian Creek Stables, which is where Schmidt also kept her first horse, Biddy, in 1980. "I'd relate the story of how Wilson wanted to start it, adding to the beauty of the site. It's been a huge part of my life."

In appealing to Wilson in 1970, Rumple connected Fermilab's natural beauty with the establishment of a home for horses on laboratory grounds. She claimed they would be a productive addition to the facilities, lending a "rural elegance" to the grounds.

And so they have. Over the years, the horses have provided people with a way to enjoy the prairie paths and a rare, enjoyable mental and physical activity.

"It's a cathartic release for me to take the horse and be out on the prairie," said Target Systems Department's Chris Kelly, who owns a roan named Honey and has been an ICRC member for more than 20 years. "It's an indescribable feeling to see the 6,800 acres that way — the beauty of the different seasons, riding on a snowy night. I'm not a fast car guy, but I do like to go fast. Seeing things on horseback is my idea of speed."

Until earlier this year, the Indian Creek Stables, situated on Site 56 near DZero, were always at or near capacity — 17 horses. ICRC members pay dues to cover the cost of horse care, stable maintenance and trail upkeep.

"I had never owned a horse before Ru arrived at Fermilab," wrote recent ICRC member Barbara Oddone in an email. "I have sweet memories of the pleasure of riding at the forest preserves and around Fermilab, especially in spring and summer under the immense sky and surrounded by so much bird and wildlife activity."

The owners of the five horses currently living in the Indian Creek Stables are looking for new homes to board the horses.

"Equestrianism has been a special part of our lab's history," said Fermilab COO Tim Meyer. "Just as Fermilab is going through a transformation from the Tevatron to LBNF/DUNE for its second 50 years, so too the campus and community are evolving in the face of new constraints and new opportunities."

The opportunity to keep horses on site has led not only to strong bonds between ICRC members and their animals, but also to lasting relationships with other people by sharing their passion for riding.

"We've always been open to employees and visitors to come out and experience what it's like to ride a horse," Kelly said. "The relationships I've made that way are still strong — with people all over the world. The way they appreciate the horses — it's universal."

Even after they leave, the horses at Fermilab will be remembered for their companionship, the perspective of the prairie they offered, and the rural elegance they added to the Fermilab site.

—Leah Hesla

Horses have been a notable part of Fermilab's history. On Sept. 19, 1986, as part of a labwide party, then-director Leon Lederman inspired fellow physicists on the noble quest for knowledge by donning a knight's suit of armor and ascending the stairs in front of Wilson Hall on his horse Cody. Photo courtesy of Ellen Lederman

In the News

New model of the cosmos: a universe that begins again

From Cosmos, Sept. 14, 2015

On March 17, 2014, the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics held a press conference to announce "a major discovery". It was not an exaggeration. A team of astrophysicists had detected evidence of gravitational waves from a time when the Universe was almost indescribably young.

It was the most powerful confirmation yet of the 30-year-old theory of inflation which explains why the cosmos looks the way it does. The distribution of galaxies, the relative proportions of ordinary matter and dark matter, the curvature of space-time, the fact that the cosmos looks essentially the same no matter where you look — all of this can be understood if you assume that the entire visible Universe expanded for the briefest interval from something about the size of a proton to something about the size of a grapefruit at faster than the speed of light when it was less than a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. In the words of University of California, Santa Cruz, cosmologist Joel Primack: "No theory this beautiful has ever been wrong."

From the Neutrino Division

Neutrino Division at one: year in review and a look ahead

Regina Rameika

Regina Rameika, head of the Neutrino Division, wrote this column.

As we approach the one year anniversary of the formation of the Neutrino Division, it is exciting to look back on the developments of the past year and to appreciate how far we, as a laboratory and community, have come in shaping the future neutrino program.

The commissioning of the ROC West control room for the neutrino and future muon experiments has led to an inviting venue for our users and community visitors. It is really inspiring to watch the dozens of school students crowd into the room and look in awe at the beautiful visual displays of our experiments. The enthusiasm and willingness of the shifters to share what they are doing is sure to inspire a new generation of scientists.

During the past year we have seen the first results from the NOvA experiment, the commissioning of the MicroBooNE detector and a steady stream of new results from the MINERvA experiment. In the coming year the MINOS+ experiment heads into the home stretch with precision measurements testing the three-neutrino paradigm. The future looks bright for a steady output of results from the NuMI and Booster beam experiments.

Speaking of the Booster beam, the new Short-Baseline Neutrino program is beginning to come together. The flagship detector of the SBN program will be the ICARUS T-600, currently under refurbishment at CERN and scheduled to be delivered to Fermilab in early 2017. If you drive in on the Pine Street side of the laboratory, you will see a new excavation and construction site adjacent to the MINOS surface building. This will be the new home for the ICARUS detector. In addition to the ICARUS detector, MicroBooNE will continue to operate in the Booster Neutrino Beamline, and a new near detector, called SBND, will be constructed adjacent to the existing SciBooNE hall. It is indeed an exciting time for the short-baseline program.

Last but not least, it has been a very exciting year in the development of the long-baseline program. Following the 2014 P5 report, which endorsed the development of an international program hosted by Fermilab, an international neutrino community has come together and formed the DUNE Collaboration. DUNE will build an experiment at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, South Dakota. Fermilab will be the host laboratory, operating the facility at SURF and providing the neutrinos, which will originate here at Fermilab, using a megawatt-class beam from our accelerator complex.

When the modern-era neutrino program launched in the mid-'90s with the MiniBooNE and MINOS experiments, I think it was safe to say that we really didn't know how far the program would go. Twenty years later, it is still going with a clear program mapped out for at least another 20 years. My how time flies!

Photos of the Day

Grasping at grass

A widow skimmer holds on to a blade of grass. Photo: Bridget Scerini, TD

Grass bows under the weight of a blue dasher. Photo: Marty Murphy, AD

Safety Update

ESH&Q weekly report, Sept. 15

This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ESH&Q Section, contains three incidents.

An employee stumbled and fell while loading empty plastic drums into the back of a pickup truck. He injured the fourth finger of his left hand when he caught himself from falling. He was given a rigid splint for the finger, making this case recordable.

An employee strained his shoulder after attempting to adjust the rear wheels of a loaded dolly with a crowbar. He was given limitations that prevent him from performing some of his routine job duties, making this case DART.

A door hit an employee's knee as he was hurrying out the door. This is a pending claim.

See the full report.

In the News

Two accelerators find particles that may break known laws of physics

From Scientific American, Sept. 9, 2015

At the smallest scales, everything in the universe can be broken down into fundamental morsels called particles. The Standard Model of particle physics — the reigning theory of these morsels — describes a small collection of known species that combine in myriad ways to build the matter around us and carry the forces of nature. Yet physicists know that these particles cannot be all there is — they do not account for the dark matter or dark energy that seem to contribute much of the universe's mass, for example. Now two experiments have observed particles misbehaving in ways not predicted by any known laws of physics, potentially suggesting the existence of some new type of particle beyond the standard zoo. The results are not fully confirmed yet, but the fact that two experiments colliding different types of particles have seen a similar effect, and that hints of this behavior also showed up in 2012 at a third particle collider, has many physicists animated. "It's really bizarre," says Mark Wise, a theorist at the California Institute of Technology who was not involved in the experiments. "The discrepancy is large and it seems like it's on very sound footing. It's probably the strongest, most enduring deviation we've seen from the Standard Model." Finding such a crack in the Standard Model is exciting because it suggests a potential path toward expanding the model beyond those particles currently known.