![]() Public Domainįaced with a recalcitrant ferret, the scientists reassigned her to a section of 12-inch-wide tubes in the Meson Lab, a testing facility that was still under construction. A technician checks a device that monitors the vacuum system in a section of the giant 200 BeV Synchroton being built, circa 1970. Perhaps she was daunted by the narrow, lightless black loop-it was four miles around. Then they’d attach a cleanser-dipped swab to the string and pull it through.īut Felicia refused to enter the main ring vacuum tube. Felicia was to bring the string from one end of a tube to the other. They placed a custom collar around Felicia’s neck and a diaper around her rear ferret poop in a tube would stop a proton, too. Her fur was brown and black except for white patches on her face. At 15 inches long, she was the smallest ferret they’d had. The ferret arrived by special delivery from the Wild Game and Fur Farm in Gaylord, Minnesota. “A ferret would not hesitate to run down the inside of the stainless steel tube, even if that involved a long journey into the unknown.” “In his part of Yorkshire, hunters used ferrets,” Frank Beck, a former head of research services at Fermilab, wrote. Robert Sheldon, a British engineer who’d been brought on to NAL to find “shortcuts and money-saving ideas,” suggested a ferret, equipped with a cleaning tool, could do the job, scampering through the vacuum tubes as if flushing rabbits out of a warren. But how? Felicia emerges from a 300-foot-long vacuum pipe at the NAL. “So when the magnets were excited to a higher field,” he wrote, “they were pulled inside the magnet gap, stood up and stopped the beam, because they were slightly magnetic material.” Yamada finally realized the cause: metal slivers left behind when they cut into the vacuum tubes. But when they tried to accelerate the particles above seven BeV, the magnets shorted out. By August, they sent one around 10,000 times. Yet on June 30, 1971, they managed to send a beam of particles all the way around the ring for the first time. Over the next several months, the team replaced 350 magnets. At first, just two magnets failed when the glass fiber insulation around their coils broke. These aren’t fridge magnets: Each is 20 feet long and weighs nearly 13 tons. It was outfitted with magnets, which guide the beam through the accelerators: “774 dipole magnets-which steer the particle beam-and 240 quadrupole magnets-which focus the beam,” as the physicist Ryuji Yamada, who designed the dipole magnet, recalled. What did was an accelerator four miles around called the main ring. Public Domainīack in 1971, the design was a little different for one thing, the injector and recycler rings didn’t exist. The National Accelerator Laboratory under construction near Batavia, Illinois, circa 1969. These are the most fundamental elements of the universe. The resulting collision, observed by a particle detector, reveals their interiors and sometimes creates exotic particles. The particles are then sent to various testing facilities, where they’re smashed together or against a fixed target. The linac provides the proton beam and the initial jolt of energy the booster accelerates it the recycler “batches it” into groups of protons for a more intense beam and the main injector ring zips the beam around tens of thousands of times to nearly the speed of light. The NAL-today known as Fermilab, after the physicist Enrico Fermi-has a chain of accelerators: a linear accelerator (linac), a booster, a recycler ring, and a main injector ring. The low-tech solution proposed for this high-tech trouble? A ferret named Felicia.īut first, a bit of background. They soon ran into a perplexing problem: Magnets that were essential to its operation kept failing. Department of Energy that he could get it running within five years for $250 million, and they were four years in. NAL director Bob Wilson had told the U.S. In February 1971, physicists at the National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, began testing the biggest machine in the world: a ring-shaped, 200-billion-electron-volt (BeV*) proton synchrotron particle accelerator.
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