It’s big. It’s cold.
And after a three-month journey across the Atlantic Ocean and up the Mississippi River to suburban Chicago, it could soon help researchers crack the secrets of the universe.
A 209,000-pound cooler the size of a train car that can plunge temperatures below those in outer space rolled to its home Wednesday at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, where it’ll help experts beam subatomic particles across the Midwest to learn more about, well, everything.
Fermilab’s new so-called “coldbox” is a key component of a state-of-the-art particle accelerator under development on the Batavia research campus to explore how neutrinos — elusive particles that vastly outnumber the atoms we’re all composed of — move and behave.
“At the end, it will help a lot to understand really how the universe, or even ordinary matter, came to be and why it exists,” said world-renowned accelerator physicist Pantaleo Raimondi.
He’s the project director of the Proton Improvement Plan-II, a $1 billion, 15-year, international effort to upgrade Fermilab’s accelerator complex that’s been operating since the 1960s.
It includes a new linear accelerator that will beam neutrinos from Batavia about 800 miles to detectors in South Dakota as part of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment or DUNE.
Beaming particles that far requires superconducting radio-frequency technologies that have to be kept extremely cold. That’s where the coldbox comes in, at the heart of a cryogenic plant that can reach 456 degrees below zero.
“It’s sort of the gun that will shoot neutrinos from here to South Dakota, and they’ll detect them here and there and try to understand how neutrino flavors change during the journey,” said PIP-II project manager Cristian Boffo. “That’s a big question that a lot of scientists around the world are trying to answer.”
The roughly $30 million coldbox — covered by an in-kind contribution from India’s Department of Atomic Energy — left its manufacturer in France in mid-October for a 25-day trip across the Atlantic by ship.
Then the 55-by-14-foot device was transferred to a barge in New Orleans for a 1,000-mile journey up the Mississippi River. It took a right at the Illinois River, landing in Romeoville around the holidays.
A heavy-haul rig carried the behemoth to Fermilab’s campus in late December, a 22-mile road trip taken at just 10 mph to safely accommodate the massive contraption.
A smaller 10-axle, remote-controlled trailer completed the final leg of the coldbox odyssey Wednesday, inching across the campus to the final PIP-II site at just 3 mph for a cheering crowd of Fermilab researchers.
“It’s going to be a fun new toy,” Raimondi said.
Wednesday’s single-digit wind chill — balmy by coldbox standards — wasn’t a factor in the delivery. It could’ve been moved in the dog days of summer.
“It doesn’t matter. In fact, it’s been stored outside for the past month, and there’s absolutely no problem. It’s designed for that,” Boffo said.
Experts from India are expected in the next week to help with the coldbox installation. “That’s actually when the fun starts,” Boffo said.
Besides the fundamental questions of our universe, accelerator research can lead experts to stumble upon advancements related to windmill energy production, quantum computing and other more immediate, practical uses.
“There is much more than the basic science, which certainly is our goal, but the impact on society — it’s more toward the technology that we develop and how that can be used,” Boffo said.
The new accelerator — also developed in partnership with Italy, Poland, France and the United Kingdom — is expected to be ready in 2029.
