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Nigel Stuart Lockyer (born 5 November 1952) is a British-American experimental particle physicist. He is the current director of the Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-based ScienceS and Education (CLASSE) as of May 1, 2023. He was the Director of the Fermilab, in Batavia, Illinois, the leading particle physics laboratory in the United States, from September 2013 to April 2022.
Prior to becoming Fermilab's Director, Lockyer served as Director of TRIUMF, Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, from May 2007 to September 2013, and was a Professor of Physics at the University of British Columbia and University of Pennsylvania. He was born in Scotland, raised in Canada, and attended graduate school in the United States.
After receiving his Ph.D., Lockyer spent four years at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University as a postdoctoral research fellow, working with Nobel Laureate Burton Richter, who directed SLAC from 1984 to 1999. At SLAC, he was a spokesperson for the Mark-II collaboration.
In 1984, Lockyer began his 23-year career as a physics faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania. While at UPenn Lockyer also lectured on Benjamin Franklin, and taught a class with playwright Tom Stoppard on his Arcadia.
From 2002 to 2004, Lockyer served as co-spokesperson for a 600-person international collaboration known as CDF, the Collider Detector at Fermilab experiment at the laboratory's Tevatron particle accelerator. The project achieved world acclaim for discovering and studying the top quark, one of the fundamental building blocks of nature, a counterpart to the bottom quark.
Fermilab has the most powerful neutrino beams in the world to explore the nature of neutrinos and is proposing a project to host the first large-scale, international basic science project on U.S. soil. The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE, is a proposed world-leading neutrino experiment, which includes more than 1,000 scientists from more than 30 countries and 170 institutions, and involves construction at both Fermilab and the Sanford Underground Research Facility (Sanford Lab) in Lead, South Dakota.
CERN, representing European institutions, is a major partner in the experiment. CERN has developed a neutrino platform to advance technology for neutrino experiments, with a significant part of this effort focused on DUNE. Fermilab will improve its Short-Baseline Neutrino Program with three detectors: MicroBoone, which completed in 2021; ICARUS, which arrived from CERN at the end of 2016 and started taking data in 2017; and the smaller Short-Baseline Neutrino Experiment (SBND), which was completed in 2024 and has started taking data. All three detectors will work in unison to search for sterile neutrinos and to advance liquid argon Time Project Chamber technology which has been adopted by DUNE. ICARUS, was refurbished at CERN after four years at the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) Gran Sasso National Laboratory and was transported to Fermilab by a group of scientists led by Carlo Rubbia, Nobel Laureate in Physics. The facility required for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) will comprise the world's highest-intensity neutrino beam at Fermilab and the infrastructure necessary to support detectors installed deep underground at Sanford Lab. Using accelerators at Fermilab, an intense beam of neutrinos would be produced and travel 1300 kilometers through the earth to an underground neutrino detector at Sanford Lab. LBNF would be the most powerful tool in the world to study neutrinos and has been identified by the U.S particle physics community as the highest priority domestic construction project.
Excavation of an underground facility, including labs and neutrino detector in the Black Hills of South Dakota began in 2017 and was completed in 2024, while construction at Fermilab is scheduled to be completed around 2030.
In order to supply the required intense bean of neutrinos to the detectors at the new and far sites Fermilab has proposed the Proton Improvement Plan II (PIP-II). The project, which will improve Fermilab's particle accelerator complex with a major overhaul and power boost, will involve retiring the cooper linac and building a new superconducting radio-frequency linac. The proposed upgrade to the linear accelerator involves an international collaboration with India, whose Department of Atomic Energy will contribute hardware in exchange for experience in building high-intensity superconducting radio-frequency proton linacs.
The largest of Fermilab's new projects is the recently completed NOvA Neutrino Experiment at Fermilab and in Ash River, Minnesota. NOvA will investigate neutrino oscillations, a phenomenon that could hold important clues to the evolution of the early universe. The first NOvA results, which were released in August 2015, verify the experiment's massive particle detector is detecting neutrinos fired from 800 kilometers away and making great progress towards its goal of a major leap in our understanding of neutrinos.
Fermilab is a U.S. hub for research into the Higgs boson and other high energy phenomena and is making major upgrades of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector—one of two large detectors located at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Europe.
Fermilab is involved in cosmic research through the Dark Energy Survey, which includes over 120 scientists from 23 institutions in the United States, Spain, United Kingdom, Brazil, and Germany. The project relies on a Dark Energy camera, a high-resolution camera built at Fermilab for a telescope in Chile that will look for evidence of dark energy that is responsible for the expansion of the universe. In March 2015, a team of researchers using data collected during the first year of the survey discovered a rare dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way.
In the fields of astrophysics and particle physics, the nature of Dark Matter is important, and Fermilab is engaged in several generation one dark matter searches, including DAMIC, SuperCDMS, PICO, and Darkside50.
A new state-of-the-art facility being built at Fermilab, the Illinois Accelerator Research Center, or IARC, will provide resources for accelerator industrialization. The facility will allow not only scientists and engineers from Fermilab, but those from Argonne National Laboratory and Illinois universities to collaborate with partners from industry to develop breakthroughs in accelerator technology and new applications in energy and environment, medicine, industry, national security and discovery science.
He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to science and UK-US relations.
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