Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), physical science research center located near Batavia, Ill., est. 1968 as the National Accelerator Laboratory, renamed 1974 in honor of Enrico Fermi. It was built on the site of the former village of Weston. Universities Research Association operates it under contract to the U.S. Dept. of Energy. Work at Fermilab is devoted to the study of elementary particles, principally through the use of the Tevatron, a synchrotron particle accelerator completed in 1983 that is capable of accelerating protons and antiprotons up to energies of 980 billion electron-volts. Fermilab discovered the bottom quark (1977) and top quark (1995).

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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