Iowa State physicists are working in collaboration with the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory to discover the most fundamental particles of nature.

Fermi Lab, west of Chicago in Batavia, Ill., is a 6,800-acre site with the world’s most energetic particle accelerator.

John Krane, post-doctoral resident associate in physics from ISU, works at the lab and said energy is the name of the game in particle physics.

After accelerating particles to speeds approaching the speed of light, the physicists observe them when they collide.

“With what boils down to freshman physics, you can learn a lot,” he said.

These collisions yield the secrets of the sub-atomic realm of nature. This is all done with the goal of finding simplicity in the laws of physics, said John Hauptman, professor of physics.

One of Fermi Lab’s most famous achievements was the discovery of the top quark in 1995. Studying the top quark may lead to further understanding of why matter has mass.

“We’ve always gone after the most interesting new physics,” Hauptman said.

ISU physicists at Fermi Lab are well-regarded within their group and are on the cutting edge of particle physics, he said.

Hauptman said doing such experimental work can be somewhat risky.

“When we started looking for the top quark, we didn’t know it was there,” he said.

The Fermi Lab consists of several accelerator rings, one of which is a large underground ring measuring 4 km in circumference, particle detectors and offices. It is on the large ring that protons and anti-protons are accelerated and collided.

“We’ve got magnets in there to turn the beam, and we’ve got electric fields [in the direction of the beam] to accelerate [the particles],” Krane said.

Currently, a group of ISU professors and students work in the particle detector called Dzero.

“Essentially, it’s quite a bit of steel and uranium plates enclosed in this cryostat [for cooling],” Krane said of Dzero.

Surrounding the cooling apparatus is a crude, box-like structure with a magnet surrounding it.

The ISU delegation at Fermi also has been working with researchers from the University of Iowa to build detectors for a new accelerator being built in Europe, Krane said.

“It is probably the fastest particle detector yet made,” he said.

The Fermi Lab currently is between runs, Krane said.

They are updating their detectors and still processing data taken from the run lasting from 1992 until 1995.

The next run should begin in 18 months and could run for a number of years.