Following an architectural design competition among the DUSAF firms, it was built between 19. Today, Wilson Hall, the central laboratory building, is the heart of the 6,800-acre Fermilab site. In 1965, a consortium of major US research universities, Universities Research Association (URA), Inc., was established to manage and operate the accelerator laboratory for the AEC (and its successor agencies the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) and the Department of Energy (DOE)) and address the need for a more national laboratory. Columbia University experimental physicist Leon Lederman championed “the truly national laboratory” that would allow any qualifying proposal to be conducted at a national, rather than a regional, facility. Groundbreaking in October 1969 for the new 200 GeV Synchrotron (Image: Fermilab)Īgainst this backdrop arose a major movement to accommodate physicists in the centre of the country and offer more equal access. Simultaneously, physicists were expressing frustration with the geographic situation of US high-energy physics facilities. Yet the discovery of the omega baryon particle at Brookhaven in 1964 meant high-energy physicists felt that a new high-energy accelerator was crucial to exploring new physics. This period coincided with the Vietnam war, so the US Congress hoped to contain costs. By September 1965, he had proposed an alternative, innovative, less costly (approximately $90 million cheaper than the original) design. Wilson, being a modest yet proud man, thought he could design a better accelerator for less money and let his thoughts be known. It began in the 1960's, when Cornell physicist Robert Rathbun Wilson saw early plans for a new accelerator in the US to rival Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, and CERN in Switzerland, he considered them too conservative, unimaginative and too expensive. Fifty years ago, physicists in the US established a new laboratory and with it a new approach to carrying out frontier research in high-energy physics.
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