A new face at DOE

Michael Salamon is a program director for dark matter experiments at DOE's Office of High Energy Physics.

Science doesn't happen in a vacuum. Experiments require support and oversight. They also require a liaison between laboratories and agencies that fund them.

For many working on dark matter projects, Michael Salamon is that liaison. He's the new program manager for dark matter experiments at DOE's Office of High Energy Physics. Having combed the skies for evidence of the existence of neutralinos decades ago, he now combs proposals and budgets so others may advance the Cosmic Frontier.

As an astrophysics professor at the University of Utah in the late 1980s and '90s, Salamon was a member of the Fly's Eye collaboration, which measured the energies of ultra-high-energy cosmic ray showers. His research program also included suborbital searches for cosmic antimatter and theoretical work in high-energy particle astrophysics.

He was also a public advocate for the use of space-based observatories for fundamental physics investigations. That caught the ears of people at NASA, who recruited Salamon in 2001 to head a new program, Fundamental Physics In Space, which later became the Physics of the Cosmos Program.

"It was traumatic to leave academia, but it was with the idea of providing a valuable service to the science community," Salamon said.

For nine years he oversaw research and development for projects such as the Joint Dark Energy Mission and the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna.

Last May he joined DOE, where he's in charge of a full portfolio of non-accelerator experiments at the nation's five major high-energy laboratories. As program manager, Salamon evaluates experiments, distributes resources and, during rough patches, conducts triage.

"He knows the details of the science of the experiments and has lots of experience with how government works," said Kathy Turner, with whom Salamon co-manages the non-accelerator program. "We're happy he's here."

Salamon still channels his inner professor, volunteering his time to teach physics at George Washington University. As is the case with his current position, it's the love of sharing science that drives him.

-- Leah Hesla

Window-washing at Wilson Hall begins today

Interior and exterior Wilson Hall window-washing will take place for most of the remainder of September. See the Sept. 3 issue of Fermilab Today for the schedule.

Please clear all items from in front of windows on days work is scheduled for your floor. Crews will also ask you to step away for a few minutes while windows are being cleaned.

Contact Enixe Castro at x2798 with any questions.

The do-it-yourself cyclotron

From symmetry, August 2010

If the only thing amateur car builders needed was a ride to work, they wouldn't ever build cars. While it's certainly nice to take the finished product around the block to show the neighbors, there's something more than transportation motivating a hot-rod builder.

That's the analogy Mark Yuly uses for a project he's working on with his undergraduate physics students at Houghton College: building a particle accelerator.

Yuly belongs to a rare breed of people who have a deep fascination-you could even call it an obsession-with cyclotrons. For many of those obsessed, the only way to satiate their hunger for these machines is to build their own. There are no guidebooks or instruction manuals, and if you bought the raw materials off the shelf, it would cost around $125,000. On average, amateur cyclotrons take two to three years to build. And while it would drive some people crazy to build their own car and never drive it, in the 80-year history of amateur cyclotron building, only occasionally have the finished products been used for experiments or in education: Yuly says, "That's not why we build them.

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