User Demographics

by Judy Jackson

Alabama sends three; Poland four. Two hundred and thirty four come from Italy, 63 from Pennsylvania and 150 from California. There's one apiece from Ecuador, Slovakia and Turkey. Russia and New York are about equal, with 185 and 171, respectively.

As Run II begins in the spring of 2001, Fermilab's users come to Batavia from universities and laboratories the world over to work on experiments at the energy frontier. Of the total number of 2,528 users, 1,579 come from 100 institutions in 34 states. The remaining 949 are from 104 foreign institutions in 26 countries. Interestingly, however, the number of foreign nationalsó1,368óamong Fermilab experimenters exceeds the number of U.S. collaborators at the laboratory, since many U.S. university physics departments and labs include non-U.S. physicists. At 557, the number of graduate students makes up about 22 percent of the total user community.

Not surprisingly, the collider detector experiments have the largest collaborations, with 599 experimenters from 69 universities and labs at DZero, and 578 from 54 institutions at CDF.

Daniele Pedrini, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, BTeV, with daily log book

I came for the physics. I arrived in 1984, one of the first Italians to come to Fermilab, and I have been here ever since, working on the physics of heavy mesons.

When you do this kind of work, you do it for yourself. Something happens inside youócall it the holy fire of physics, the need to know how the universe works. It's been that way for me since I was six or seven years old. I really could not do anything else but satisfy my curiosity to understand how Mother Nature works.

Matt Herndon, The Johns Hopkins University, CDF,

with a model a150 silicon power supply

There are not too many places in the world where you can do particle physics. I've already worked at SLAC and CERN. There is exciting physics at Fermilab right now. I've lived in Europe for a few years, and I was ready to come home for awhile. I've worked with electron-positron collisions. Now I'm ready to give hadrons a try.

The next ten to fifteen years are mapped out, and the accelerators are being built. From the physics viewpoint, we have some idea what we might find. When we get to the next generation of experiments, we will either learn that discoveries that integrate our understanding of physics are right around the corner, or we will learn that these discoveries are many orders of magnitude farther away. I'm working on the CDF supersymmetry group, and I think there is a fair chance that we will see signs of something.

Bassar Sabirov, Dubna, DZero, with mini-drift tube

Only Fermilab is at the high-energy frontier. There is nowhere else. Our institute, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, supports us in doing experiments at the energy frontier.

My personal goal is to learn more about the top quark in Run II. I believe we will see a revolution in our understanding of particle structure.

Laurent Duflot, Orsay, DZero, with a calorimeter

baseline subtraction card

I want to look for new phenomena at the energy frontier. To look for supersymmetry, I need to stay at the highest-energy accelerator, and that is at Fermilab.

I hope to find supersymmetry, to explain the laws of nature by fundamental supersymmetric particles. If these particles exist, we should be able to see them in Run IIa.

Simona Rolli, Tufts University, CDF, with a laptop

It's a long story how I got to CDF. I was studying for my Ph.D. in Pavia when I read a book, ìLonely Hearts of the Cosmos.î It got me excited about cosmology. A professor suggested I go to Fermilab to learn more about it. Rocky Kolb invited me to come as a visitor for six months. So I came. My English was terrible. I barely understood twenty percent of what I heard. Eventually, I needed to finish my thesis on quantum chromodynamics theory, so I moved to the Fermilab theory group. In 1995, my university, Pavia, joined CDF, and so did I. I had to learn to be an experimenter. In 1997, I got a job at Tufts. I'm still interested in cosmology, but I have no time to think about it. I'm the convenor of the exotics group at CDF.

I always wanted to be a scientist; I just wasn't sure what kind. Now, it seems to me that my dream is happening exactly the way I hoped. As particle physicists, we are the equivalent of the natural philosophers, trying to find how things are made, to discover new things about the universe. As particle physics goes to higher and higher energy, we get closer and closer to the beginning of the universe. Somehow, our particle physics theory has to include gravity. I also think in terms of faith and God, but I am human, so I use the tools I have to understand reality.

Andrew Bazarko, Princeton University, MiniBooNE, with phototube

Fermilab is THE national accelerator laboratory. Particle physics has very few Meccas. To get an experiment done, you need the particle beams and technical support that Fermilab can offer.

The questions we are trying to answer are very interesting. In the next few years, we will understand mass a lot betteróboth for neutrinos and the Higgs, whether that's the right mechanism. In the years ahead, we are bound to find surprises. The things we learn play a role in other aspects of physics. They inform cosmology and our understanding of the universe. We may find particles that tell us about dark matter. It's sort of amazing that human beings can ponder these things at all.

Giovanni Pauletta, University of Udine, CDF,

with a scintillation counter (left) and a laser-based stability monitor

I have done nearly all my research at Fermilab since 1985, beginning with a fixed-target experiment and moving to CDF.

Physics gives us the opportunity to think about how nature works. I like spending time on doing things, getting to the bottom of nature. We have a global picture in mind, but we go back to work on our little piece of the puzzle. The big picture is too big for any one person. It's a privilege to be able to participate in this effort.

Giorgio Chiarelli, University of Pisa, CDF,

with silicon layer module

I first came to Fermilab in 1983, as a student. It happened by chance. Someone at Pisa suggested that I fill out a form to participate in a summer program at Fermilab. I did, and I was selected. I went to work on CDF at about the time they were breaking ground at BZero. When I went back to Pisa, I did my thesis on secondary vertices to detect the top quark. After I served in the army, I returned to join the top effort at CDF. In a recent speech to young students, I talked about the experience of the top discovery. We were very privileged. Not many people have such an opportunity. I think all of us who were together for that experience feel a bond.

Now we want the Higgs, the missing piece. I believe it will be found in the next few years, either at Fermilab or at CERN. It really doesn't matter. We are moving toward a cross-fertilization with astrophysics. That interests me both because of the common techniques that we can use, and because it is a completely new world, a different philosophical approach.

Fermilab Users by the Numbers