Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
(Fermilab), physical science research center located near Batavia, Ill., est. 1968 as the National Accelerator Laboratory, renamed 1974 in honor of Enrico FermiFermi, Enrico, 1901–54, American physicist, b. Italy. He studied at Pisa, Göttingen, and Leiden, and taught physics at the universities of Florence and Rome. He contributed to the early theory of beta decay and the neutrino and to quantum statistics.
..... Click the link for more information. . It was built on the site of the former village of Weston. Universities Research Association operates it under contract to the U.S. Dept. of Energy. Work at Fermilab is devoted to the study of the fundamental nature of matter and energy through basic research on elementary particleselementary particles,
the most basic physical constituents of the universe. Basic Constituents of Matter
Molecules are built up from the atom, which is the basic unit of any chemical element. The atom in turn is made from the proton, neutron, and electron.
..... Click the link for more information. . From 1983 to 2011, the principal device used in this study was the Tevatron, a synchrotron particle acceleratorparticle accelerator,
apparatus used in nuclear physics to produce beams of energetic charged particles and to direct them against various targets. Such machines, popularly called atom smashers, are needed to observe objects as small as the atomic nucleus in studies of its
..... Click the link for more information. capable of accelerating protons and antiprotons up to energies of 980 billion electron-volts. Fermilab discovered the bottom quark (1977) and top quark (1995).