A Peruvian-born, award-winning physicist was named the new director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and he takes the helm at a critical time in energy research.
After a yearlong search involving 60 candidates, the appointment of Piermaria Oddone, 60, was announced Friday by the 90-member consortium of universities that manages the lab for the U.S. Department of Energy.
Oddone, a U.S. citizen, has been deputy director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California since 1989. He'll take over the Fermilab job July 1, replacing Michael Witherell, who will have served as Fermilab's director for six years.
Fermi remains the top high-energy physics lab in the world, where collisions of subatomic particles are used to study the building blocks of matter and energy. A more powerful accelerator is expected to begin operating in three or four years at Europe's top particle-physics facility.
Two months ago, the international physics community ago agreed how to build a new linear collider, a multibillion-dollar project, by the end of the decade. Fermilab wants that tunnel — extending up to 25 miles underground — built on its campus near Batavia.
Oddone said one of his goals would be to bring the new linear collider to the lab because it would give the United States a bigger stake in the research and potential spin-offs. The collider is expected to provide clues to such questions as how the universe evolved and how much mass from various energy particles is used to create a human being.
Oddone said particle physics seeks to answer "the most awesome questions we can ask. We don't know what gives us mass. We don't know even in how many dimensions we live.
"The most subtle things that you might see in the wings of a butterfly, the incredible explosions of a supernova and, if you go further back to the beginning of the universe to what we think was the Big Bang, all this is connected in some beautiful mathematical structure," he said. "If we don't explore that, we're really missing a lot."