Fermilab’s ‘muon shot’ could see suburban lab become site of revolutionary particle collider

The deepest mysteries of the universe could be unraveled in suburban Chicago.

That’s what some of the world’s top minds are aiming for as they lay out a vision for the next generation of particle physicists to take up the quest to better understand our cosmological origins.

An influential committee of scientists released a report this month suggesting that Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia — known as Fermilab — could play an even bigger role in that quest in the years ahead than it does today as the premier American particle physics testing facility.

Researchers on the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, or P5, recommended the federal government bolster support for an underground experiment beaming neutrinos from Fermilab more than 800 miles to South Dakota in hopes of figuring out more about those elusive subatomic particles.

They also called for exploring the possibility of building a revolutionary new particle collider more powerful than any ever created — a groundbreaking device they said would fit perfectly on the Fermilab campus.

The P5 report also noted the critical computing might of Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, reinforcing the Chicago area as a hub for the future of particle physics.

“It’s not a coincidence that Chicagoland turned out pretty well in this report,” says University of Chicago astrophysics professor Abigail Vieregg, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. “The national labs allow us to be strong in this area and have a national presence. I feel fortunate to have Fermilab and Argonne in our backyard.”

University of Chicago

Vieregg was part of the panel enlisted by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to map priorities for the next decade under different budget scenarios.

After a series of public meetings to garner ideas, the panel narrowed their biggest questions — what’s the nature of the Higgs boson, dark matter or neutrinos? — and offered possible paths toward answering them.

Among their agenda items is reinforcing Fermilab’s Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE, with an additional detector to track the particles’ journey across the Midwest.

Experts say neutrinos could be the key missing puzzle piece in explaining why equal amounts of matter and antimatter didn’t annihilate each other when the universe formed in the Big Bang — and therefore how we even exist 13 billion years later.

“The study of the universe on its biggest scales is intricately tied to the smallest scale of the universe,” Vieregg says. “Measurements made in particle colliders can connect directly to the measurements we make looking back in time as we observe the universe.”

Work on DUNE is underway, but the recommendation to develop a first-of-its-kind particle collider would take decades to materialize.

A muon collider would be more efficient than the proton and electron colliders that researchers now use to race particles around tubes approaching the speed of light, then smashing them together to see what happens — and potentially which other new particles might emerge.

Ryan Postel / Fermilab

But muons — pronounced MEW-ons — are fairly elusive themselves, so “it’s up to creative physicists to figure out how we can make this happen,” says Vieregg, who estimates that such a device would be 10 times more powerful than the current standard bearer of the field: the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

That device took more than 10 years and $4 billion to build, the cost shared among multiple European nations.

The P5 report recommends researching and developing a cost estimate and construction timelines for the potential muon collider, with the researchers noting that it would likely be “almost exactly the size of the Fermilab campus.”

“At the end of the path is an unparalleled global facility on US soil,” the researchers wrote. “This is our muon shot.”

Northwestern University physics and astronomy professor Michael Schmitt says it would be a valuable investment “because that’s the good side of humankind. The desire to understand things is what drives us here. It’s not glory or comfort. We just really want to know why the universe is the way it is. Is there something better we could invest in? Maybe health care, general education. But most people also feel there should be some wonderful things that society does in addition to working on the basic problems of humankind.”

Vieregg says developing an unprecedented testing ground could lead to other practical advancements.

“When you’re pushing the boundaries of science and technology — when you’re working in a way most people don’t work — you stumble on things that can be life-changing,” she says.

Geza Gyuk, senior director of astronomy at the Adler Planetarium, compares the pursuit to art.

“It’s delving into something that says something about who we are,” Gyuk says. “It’s learning about where we come from. Why do we make poetry? It doesn’t put food on the table, but it speaks to us in our human nature. It’s what makes us human.”

Adler Planetarium