Tom Kobilarcik:
a man of many hats

Tom Kobilarcik works on the beamline for the E-905 / SeaQuest experiment

If you ask Tom Kobilarcik to explain his job, you won’t get a short answer.

“It’s hard to explain a typical day; there aren’t typical days,” said Kobilarcik, an engineering physicist for the External Beamlines Department. “But it doesn’t get boring, and that’s what I like about it the most.”

Kobilarcik, who has worked at Fermilab since 1989, began as a beamline operator before moving into a coordination role for beamline installation. In the past year, Kobilarcik was promoted to External Beamlines Department deputy head. In his new role, he will direct numerous support teams to install all the projects that use particle beams.

Kobilarcik currently oversees the installation and machine maintenance of four beamline projects: MiniBooNE, the MuCool Test Area, the E906 SeaQuest project and the NuMI target station. Planning these endeavours can take anywhere from months, in the case of E906, to decades, in the case of the NOvA neutrino experiment.

“The type of thing where you have to put together a lot of pieces and make sure it all works in a very precise way, that’s the type of thing that Tom is genuinely very good at,” said beamline physicist Sam Childress, who has worked with Kobilarcik for 21 years.

The job’s challenge, Kobilarcik said, is determining the best way to use Fermilab’s abundant talent to get a project running most efficiently.

“Once you’ve done that, you step back and let the other groups do their job and the project gets done really well,” Kobilarcik said. 

Often, beamline projects are technically challenging. The difficulties arise in instances such as designing a magnet for the KTeV kaon experiment, which required a large team of skilled physicists. Others require a diversity of skills. In one such project, Kobilarcik had to couple his computer programming abilities with his beamline knowledge to develop high-precision software to steer a particle beam.

Kobilarcik credits the various support groups – engineering, mechanical support and instrumentation among others – for the success of his projects.

“We’ve got great people working here,” he said. “Our technicians and our professional staff really put the sweat into it to get the projects going.”

-- Sara Reardon

An artist's rendition of CDF is made of junk

John Zaklikowski’s 2008 piece "Collider Detector at Fermilab" is 72 x 72 x 8 inches and has an ancient Chinese divination device called a Luo Pan Compass serving as the central focus. One of the artwork detector's many onion-like layers is made of shiny hard drives and the next of circuitry and hard disks. Dotting one layer is a series of computer keys, spelling out gibberish everywhere but in the upper-right quadrant, where a sharp observer can spy the word HIGGS. The detector itself rests on a foundation of silver lids, of the variety one might find on the top of a cheese shaker.

Learn more about this artwork in symmetry magazine’s “From junked part to detector art”.

Science community gets stimulus boost

From The Times Herald, Oct. 6, 2010

Delaware Valley College in Doylestown has lots of plans for the $707,569 it has been granted, thanks to the National Science Foundation (NSF).

NASA, NSF and the National Institutes of Health were among 28 agencies that have been allocated a portion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009’s total $787 billion.

And those groups funneled that money into various projects.

DelVal will use its share to renovate chemistry and biology labs and convert existing space in the Mandell Science Building into an Integrated Multidisciplinary Science Education and Research area.

Read more