Scientists explore the future of high-energy physics By Steve
Koppes Photo courtesy of Fermilab If the Fermilab-UChicago
collaboration is successful, it will allow new types of
accelerators to be built at great cost savings.” In a 1954
speech to the American Physical Society, the University of
Chicago’s Enrico Fermi fancifully envisioned a particle
accelerator that encircled the globe. Such would be the ultimate
theoretical outcome, Fermi surmised, of the quest for the ever-
more powerful accelerators needed to discover new laws of
physics. “How much energy you can put into a particle per meter
corresponds directly to how big the machine is,” says Steven
Sibener, the Carl William Eisendrath Professor in Chemistry and
the James Franck Institute at UChicago. This means that future
accelerators must either grow to inconceivable sizes, at great
costs, or they must somehow pump far more energy into each
particle per meter of acceleration than modern technology will
allow. Sibener and Lance Cooley, AB’86, of the Fer