Volume 21 Friday, August 14, 1998 Number 16 Making an Art of Science Art and science blend elegantly in the work of Fermilab artist Angela Gonzales, leaving a lasting impact on the Laboratory and all who pass through it. Story on page 2. INSIDE f 4 Made in the USA for CMS 6 Acronyms of High-Energy Physics 8 Senate Confirms Richardson at Energy 9 Painless Physics: Spin 10 Park Place Artwork by Angela Gonzales Photos by Reidar Hahn Artist Angela Gonzales retired on July 31 after 31 years at Fermilab. High-Energy Artist Says Good-Bye Angela Gonzales retires after 31 years of creating distinctive designs for Fermilab by Mike Perricone, Office of Public Affairs From the day she arrived in 1967, Angela an individual style, and it removes the Lab from Gonzales’s cover art Gonzales added to Fermilab’s unique character having just the usual conglomerate look of for the 1987 Annual by taking an abstract view of the concrete. mundane plastic or concrete. It gives the Lab Report, celebrating She asked, “Do industrial-style buildings a feeling of being in touch with the arts as well Fermilab’s 20th have to be industrial gray in color?” She as with the sciences.” anniversary. answered with a palette of blue, orange and Both parents were artists, meaning yellow (even apple-green, in the early days) that Gonzales was in touch with the arts beginning was sure to arouse strong reactions but would with her childhood in 1930s Germany. Her never go unnoticed. Included was a row of father’s involvement in modern art, not favored propane tanks whose colors graduated from by Hitler, forced the family to move around orange to yellow. Europe. Gonzales has remained a committed “They didn’t have to be just obvious traveler, visiting her elderly mother annually old gray things,” said Nancy Peoples, wife of in Germany, and journeying to wide-flung Fermilab Director John Peoples, who worked destinations from Costa Rica to Egypt. closely with Gonzales on art committees at the “She once brought me back a bottle of Lab from 1980 until Gonzales’s retirement sand from the Sahara Desert,” said Hazel on July 31. Cramer, Gonzales’s friend and fellow “Her choice of colors gave the Lab a really committee-member though her own 26-year unique touch,” Peoples continued. “It’s such career at the Lab. 2 FermiNews August 14, 1998 Cramer recalled that Gonzales had worked “The next day I happened to see her at at Cornell with Robert Wilson, the Lab’s first the Oak Brook shopping center. I said ‘Hello’ director, and rejoined Wilson at Fermilab to but she didn’t say anything. Then she came work on the design for the site. She noted that back five minutes later, tapped me on the in addition to being an accomplished abstract shoulder and said, ‘I know who you are now. artist, working in a range of media from paint I can say hello.’” to ink to pencil, Gonzales was skilled at Socializing and friendship were separate technical illustration and produced distinctive categories. work for both experimenters and theorists. “If she’s your friend, she is truly your Her designs include the covers for many friend,” Cramer said. “She will not tolerate any of the Lab’s annual reports, including the criticism of a friend, even in a joking way.” commemoration of the Lab’s 20th anniversary After 31 years, Gonzales’s work speaks Judging the merits of an in 1987. forcefully of her contributions. art display in Wilson Hall in “She’s also a very clever writer, although “A lot of her work will be around us, but 1993 are Hanging Committee English is not her native language,” Cramer her day-to-day input will be missing,” said members (left to right) added. “She’s very widely-read, and she has Peoples. “With her retirement, I think the Mizuho Mishima, Nancy Peoples, Saundra Poces a great deal of knowledge in many fields.” Lab loses a lot. It’s almost like losing some and Angela Gonzales. Peoples described Gonzales as having of its original soul.” ■ a keen eye for art and design, and holding high standards. “She does not accept anything that she thinks is substandard,” Peoples said. Gonzales offered a blunt statement of those standards as recently as the holiday season of 1997, when the Wilson Hall atrium was decorated with a series of banners adapted from graphic representations of particle collisions. Not amused, Gonzales wrote to FermiNews and quoted Goethe in giving her judgment: “Den Geschmack kann man nicht am Mittelgut bilden, sondern nur am Allervozueglichsten,” which she translated as: “(Good) taste cannot be achieved by learning from the mediocre (I add trash; there is not even much ‘mediocre’ left to go by) but only from the most excellent.” Cramer, who continues to serve on the Lab’s Auditorium Committee after retirement, has known Gonzales since 1968, and remembers Gonzales’s daughter as “a four-year-old crawling around on the floor and drawing pictures.” But she wryly describes Gonzales as “not a people person.” “Like many artists, she’s very involved with what she is doing at the moment,” Cramer said. “I met her in 1968. I remember being introduced to her, and I said ‘Hello,’ and she said ‘Hello,’ but then she went right on talking (with someone else) as she often does. FermiNews August 14, 1998 3 Made in the USA In the City of Big Shoulders, one of the first American-built parts for the CMS experiment is ready for shipment, thanks to Polish laborers and a Czech prince. by Sharon Butler, Office of Public Affairs Fred Lobkowicz wasn’t doing well last fall. When Lobkowicz fell ill, he was working Photo courtesy of University Rochester Just walking from his desk to the fax machine on a project important to the next generation “Fred Lobkowicz took was a strain. He had had a massive heart attack of particle physics: the design of a large device, me under his wing in in the summer of 1997 and had lost a great a motion table, that would help in testing the 1965, when I was deal of weight. His familiar booming voice Compact Muon Solenoid detector for the a fledgling graduate had thinned. Large Hadron Collider in CERN, the student working with But Lobkowicz hadn’t lost his devotion to European Laboratory for Particle Physics. my mentor John Tinlot physics, nor his intellectual vigor and sardonic The motion table needed to arrive in CERN on a muon storage ring (plus ça change…). In the sense of humor. Of Czech nobility, Lobkowicz by the summer of 1998 to be in time for the ensuing 30-plus years was fluent in English, French, German and next test beam run. from then to U.S. CMS Czech; steeped in history, physics, math and And so, despite deteriorating health, today, Fred was a good philosophy; skilled in mechanical design, Lobkowicz postponed a medical evaluation colleague and a good cryogenic engineering and electronics. With for a heart transplant so that he could review friend who is most a Ph.D. from the Eidgenossische Technische detailed drawings for a bid package requesting sorely missed.” Hochschule in Zurich, where Einstein once quotations for the fabrication of the motion ~ Dan Green, taught, Lobkowicz had earned international table. He signed off on the drawings on U.S. CMS Technical repute for his design and construction of liquid January 8, 1998, and a day later, entered Director argon electromagnetic calorimeters: complex the hospital. devices consisting of multiple layers of lead or On February 3, 1998, Lobkowicz died. uranium and copper-clad circuit boards, He was 65. immersed in hundreds of gallons of liquid Almost two centuries earlier, in 1804, argon maintained at very cold temperatures. Ludwig van Beethoven had dedicated his third Such devices have been key components of symphony, “Eroica,” to one of Lobkowicz’s detectors used at Fermilab—in the discovery ancestors (presumably after the temperamental, of the top quark and in the study of gluons. and disappointed, composer tore up his homage to Napoleon). This year, Lobkowicz’s colleagues dedicated the motion table to him. Testing the detector The motion table is a crucial piece of heavy equipment for the CMS experiment. It will allow the collaboration to calibrate and test the performance of their detector. The size of a five-story building, the CMS detector includes numerous specialized components. Nearest the beam are tracking devices so sensitive that they can measure the trajectory of a single particle to better than a thousandth of an inch. In layers surrounding these devices are, in order, the electromagnetic calorimeter, the hadronic calorimeter, a superconducting solenoid, steel, and muon chambers—components designed to measure the energies and identities of the particles George Ginther has emerging from the collision of protons inside. been finetuning the But will all these components perform the controls for the motion way they are supposed to? To ensure that they table, currently residing will, a section of the detector will be tested with on the factory floor of a beam extracted from CERN’s SPS accelerator. Industrial Maintenance The problem is: the beam follows a strait and in South Chicago. narrow path; in collisions, particles fly off in Photo by Reidar Hahn every direction. 4 FermiNews August 14, 1998 That’s where the motion table comes in, a 40-ton platform capable of holding a 40-degree wedge of the detector, from the tracking devices out to the first of the muon chambers. The motion table allows the detector to be moved around the beam, as if particles from collisions were hitting the detector from multiple angles.