Meet Fermilab’s new director

If it hadn’t been for one of his university physics professors, Nigel Lockyer might now be a civil servant or a businessman instead of a particle physicist and the new director of Fermilab. After his junior year at York University in Toronto, Lockyer worked for the Ontario ministry of industry and tourism. His job was to advise engineers who came to the government with technical questions about their companies.

He enjoyed the work, and he had an offer to stay on; he was also considering going for an MBA. But when the professor got wind of his plans, says Lockyer, “he twisted my arm and said, ‘This is not you. You should be going into physics. You are not going to get rich, but you’ll enjoy it.’ After that, everything just followed.”

That included Lockyer getting his PhD at the Ohio State University, being a postdoc at SLAC, and serving 22 years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. Then in 2007, Lockyer was lured back to Canada, to TRIUMF , the nuclear and particle-physics laboratory in Vancouver, British Columbia. He served as director for six years before taking the reins at Fermilab on 3 September.

Lockyer succeeds Pier Oddone, whose eight years in the top job were a period of discovery at the lab’s particle-physics, neutrino, dark-matter, and high-energy cosmic particle experiments. During his tenure, Oddone started new experiments, launched a remote operations center for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, oversaw the closure of the Tevatron, and worked on a strategy for Fermilab’s future.

From his California vineyard, Oddone says, “The challenge I wish Nigel would have is an outstanding new physics discovery that opens new vistas and changes the direction of the field.” But in practice, the real challenge is likely to be budgetary. “One critical aspect of planning for Fermilab is to achieve coherence with the broader particle-physics community, something that becomes quite difficult with highly restricted resources,” says Oddone.

Physics Today‘s Toni Feder caught up with Lockyer at TRIUMF in August and followed up with phone calls just before and after he moved to Fermilab.

PT: What attracted you to leave academia for TRIUMF?

LOCKYER: I really wanted to be associated with building something. When I went to TRIUMF, I went from working with a group of about eight graduate students to working with hundreds of people. You have to take more of a backseat role—you don’t have your hands on equipment like you are used to—but it certainly allows you to influence a program.

TRIUMF had a pretty substantial accelerator division that was anxious to do something new. That was very attractive to me. Going back to Canada was also attractive.

PT: What do you count as your achievements as director of TRIUMF?

LOCKYER: In a nutshell, my major accomplishments at TRIUMF were to introduce a new accelerator complex, called ARIEL [Advanced Rare Isotope Laboratory], and nuclear medicine.

I brought the project to TRIUMF. The civil construction is complete, and the first beam is [scheduled for] September 2014. ARIEL will allow the laboratory to produce rare isotope beams using electrons through a process called photofission. It can study the so-called neutron-rich isotopes. That gets at the heart of understanding supernova explosions. The question you are trying to answer is, What is the origin of the chemical elements that are heavier than iron?

What [ARIEL] really allows TRIUMF to do is run multiple experiments at one time, which is going to increase the scientific output of the lab. At the moment, no facility can tell everybody to go away while we run an experiment for a year. But with multiple sources of isotopes, TRIUMF will be able to have some very long-running experimental programs.

The second thing people associate with my time at TRIUMF is nuclear medicine. I spent a lot of what I would call my free time learning the subject. And then, when the medical isotope crisis came up, we put together a workshop at least a year before everybody else. We looked at alternative approaches and ended up pursuing a small cyclotron. We’ve had a lot of success with it.

PT: Tell me more.

LOCKYER: Reactors make molybdenum-99. It’s put into something called a generator, and that generator is milked for the decay of the ⁹⁹Mo, which is technetium-99m, the isotope that goes into your body.

In the cyclotron method, we produce ^99mTc directly. The advantage of the generator is that the parent lasts longer—66 hours for ⁹⁹Mo versus 6 hours for ^99mTc. Every major medical center has a small cyclotron. What we are saying is that you could retrofit it with a different target to produce ^99mTc directly.

We expect to have this [available to treat] humans this spring in Vancouver. And we will be looking to have it in the Vancouver supply chain in early 2015. The hurdle is regulatory at this point.

PT: What will you miss about TRIUMF?

LOCKYER: It’s a small lab, but it’s got a lot of very talented, highly dedicated people. The size is such that you can mobilize to address a particular problem.

PT: TRIUMF has a long history of spawning spinoff companies. You mentioned that you would like to bring that to Fermilab.

LOCKYER: At TRIUMF we created a spinoff company [Advanced Applied Physics Solutions , or AAPS] to look inside the lab and see what technologies might be commercializable. An example is the accelerator technology for ARIEL—it’s the same as for the ILC [International Linear Collider]. We chose the technology because we could leverage off of all the investment that the world had made in superconducting RF—making cavities out of solid niobium, processing them, putting them inside cryomodules. . . . A local Vancouver company, Pavac Inc, makes the cavities. They make them for TRIUMF, Fermilab, for India, for China. They are positioning themselves to bid to make them for the ILC.

Fermilab has a program called IARC —Illinois Accelerator Research Center. The model of how it functions—the business plan—is just being put together. It’s a great opportunity for particle physics to be more outward looking in terms of how we can help the private sector. It’s not so different from AAPS, but it will be more ambitious. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun to see if we can make it successful. And I think it will be important that Fermilab not only pursues the questions that excite our imaginations, but also have some practical component where the taxpayer can say, “Geez, that’s important stuff. That technology is helpful. It’s helpful in the medical world. It’s helpful [in terms of] economic impact.”

PT: What are your goals as director of Fermilab?

LOCKYER: My goal is multipronged. I am very excited about the various physics questions that are on the table now and the ones I think are within reach.

I am very interested in questions of dark energy and dark matter. I am interested in questions of the early universe that can be addressed with cosmic microwave background. I’m very interested in neutrino physics—do neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently or not? That is one of the huge questions in the field. And it’s where Fermilab really has an opportunity to take a lead in the world. The challenge for me is to close the deal that Pier worked on for many years—which is to have this flagship program of a long-baseline neutrino experiment.

PT: That’s the LBNE, with Fermilab shooting neutrinos 1300 kilometers to a detector in the Sanford Underground Research Facility.

LOCKYER: Yes. The world would come to South Dakota to do their science, the science of CP violation, proton decay, supernova neutrinos. . . .

PT: What is still needed to realize the LBNE?

LOCKYER: In [Department of Energy] parlance, it has, so it has been configured, but as a small detector on the surface. After the Snowmass meeting [see Physics Today, October 2013, page 18], there was just overwhelming support for a detector underground that is much bigger. We are working hard to attract Europe to be part of the program. And my long-term goal is that Japan join us. That discussion has not taken place yet, but we will also be in discussion with Japan about the ILC.

PT: How important is it for the US community to host a world-leading experiment?

LOCKYER: I think it’s absolutely critical that we are a leader in this area. There are three opportunities on the table—the upgrade to the LHC at CERN, the ILC, and the LBNE. The neutrino [facility] matches best with the US program.

PT: How does the LBNE fit in with Fermilab’s Project X?

LOCKYER: Project X is a proposed accelerator. It is an upgrade to a facility that would allow you to make more neutrinos. I avoid the term Project X because it’s many things to many people—but for me, having a high-intensity proton accelerator that allows you to make more neutrinos for LBNE makes a lot of sense. It maybe takes 10 years of measurements into 3 years, and time is essential when you are competing with other people. But it’s a question of cost.

You go in steps here. First, you secure the experiment and get your international collaborators. Once it’s rolling, you’ve been working hard behind the scenes, then you say, “We could do even better with a high-intensity proton source.”

The technology of putting very intense beams on targets is of interest in many countries, for different reasons. It’s interesting for neutron spallation sources. It’s interesting for transmutation of elements in terms of nuclear waste. And it’s part of the technology needed in accelerator-driven reactors that India and China are interested in. So a lot of work is going on to design and build high-intensity proton machines and the targeting associated with [them]. If we are going to be the world-leading neutrino facility, we’d better be at the front of the line.

PT: What is the time scale for the LBNE?

LOCKYER: This is where the pain enters. The present thinking is 2022 would be the beginning of the physics program. I would like it to be faster.

PT: Can you get started while you are still securing international participation?

LOCKYER: We have started. I just think it’s being a good partner if you allow the people who are coming to build the experiment be part of the design process. To me, that is essential. I don’t want to go join somebody else’s experiment that’s already built because I’m going to look at it and say, “Geez, I wouldn’t have done it that way. If you did it this way it’d be much better.”

The Europeans have suggestions for changing the technology, and we’d be wise to listen to them.

PT: Elaborate, please.

LOCKYER: The liquid argon detectors can be quite different in their approach to detecting signal. Nobody has built anything this big before. If you think of 34 000 tons of cryogenic fluid, it’s a big deal. You want to make it as simple as possible. Sometimes a simple construction requires a more sophisticated approach. If you can make the modules bigger—the detector is a modular entity—it makes the detector cheaper and easier to construct. But drifting electrons further is more challenging.

PT: What other plans do you have for Fermilab?

LOCKYER: Let’s assume that the world decides to build the ILC, and it goes to Japan. And we go ahead with the LHC upgrade [to higher energy and intensity] at CERN and the LBNE at Fermilab. What’s next?

If you find something in the next run of the LHC, this will not be a small discovery. It would open a window to a whole new world beyond the standard model. That would be such a big deal that I think the worldwide particle-physics community would then go into planning the next machine.

Beyond the ILC is either a 100-TeV proton–proton collider, endorsed by the European strategy report, or a multi-TeV muon collider, being pursued by Fermilab. Either way, high-field magnet research will be necessary.

Fermilab and the US should be ambitious enough to host the next world machine.

PT: I got the impression that you were worried that the LHC won’t find anything more.

LOCKYER: The reason is, thus far we have found nothing. There is no hint of new physics. We would have liked hints. We’ve only got one factor of two left in our pocket. And if you don’t find anything in the next run, you would be scratching your head.

PT: What time scale are you thinking of when you consider facilities post-ILC?

LOCKYER: I am throwing the roulette wheel on this one, but I think maybe 20 years.

PT: You sound very optimistic. The mood at Snowmass seemed very upbeat. But what about the realities of the budget?

LOCKYER: The mood is still upbeat. Our number one goal for the next few months is for our community to coalesce on near-term and longer-term plans for the field. Our first challenge is to put together a strategic plan.

At the moment, we are focusing on what we want to do and not worrying about the budget—people are tired of talking about the continuing resolutions. They are talking about physics. It raises your happiness level, so then you can withstand the blows of reality. It’s an exciting time in our field. And what the LHC finds in the next few years will have a huge impact. I don’t know what we will be doing, but we have to get ready.