Execution mode

Going all the way back to Robert Wilson in the 1960s, some formidable figures precede you as Fermilab director…

Coming back to Fermilab is, for me, a little like coming home. My family and I moved to the United States in 1998, and Fermilab was the first place I worked in the Department of Energy (DOE) system. It was also a place where people really took me in. Fermilab, like many national laboratories, is built on the shoulders of giants – and Robert Wilson was one of them.

He got this huge site, more than 6000 acres, with a real vision for expansion and growth in science. He was also a genuine fan of architecture, truly inspired by it. Our Wilson Hall is a tribute to that. It echoes what people call the folding hands of Beauvais Cathedral in France. Having that building stand out from the prairie was a statement.

That’s Robert Wilson’s legacy at Fermilab: a science of statements and the ability to do things fast, effectively, things that people thought could not be done. So, honestly, sitting in that chair feels good.

Wilson’s 1969 Congressional testimony is one of the most celebrated defences of fundamental science. What do you make of his case today?

He told Congress that high-energy physics had to do with dignity and all the things that we really venerate and honour in our country. That is still true. Despite the strain on science funding and all the questions about whether we are spending money effectively, the government is still willing to invest more than five billion dollars at Fermilab over the next five to ten years. This feels almost contrarian to what you hear in the press. Yes, science is under pressure. But the commitment is there, for the very same reason Bob Wilson stated back then.

That said, I believe we carry a genuine responsibility to deliver to society. That has been the basis of the social contract since Vannevar Bush wrote Science, the Endless Frontier in 1945; the document that helped create the national laboratory system and agencies such as DOE, the National Science Foundation and NASA. I don’t expect every citizen to understand exactly what a neutrino does or why it matters. But the outcomes of science, and the technology we develop on the way, whether that’s AI, quantum information tools, electronics, those are things we have to deliver. It’s part of the social contract.

Then, under Leon Lederman, and driven forwards by figures like Helen Edwards, Fermilab expanded the world’s energy frontier with the Tevatron…

Helen Edwards is actually directly responsible for the fact that I’m in this country. It’s her fault, really. When I was a group leader at DESY in 1998, 37 years old, with two small kids and having just built a house in Germany, Helen walked into my office. She asked, “Norbert, what do you want to do with your future?” She was very direct and wouldn’t take no for an answer. I hesitated, and she said, “You need to think about this. You should go to the United States.” Six months later, I was at Fermilab.

She was undeterrable. If she had a mission, a North Star, there was no lab director, no government official, no one who could deflect her from it. She and Alvin Tollestrup, a name that doesn’t get talked about enough, developed the superconducting magnet technology under Leon Lederman’s leadership that made the Tevatron what it was. That technology later allowed DESY to build HERA and ultimately landed in the LHC at CERN.

Alvin could explain superconductor physics on first principles and very quickly come to how you wind a magnet and what fundamentally limits its performance. A physicist and a technologist at the same time. They were both giants. There’s no question about it.

You mentioned moving from Europe to the United States. How different were the two scientific cultures, in the late 1990s?

You sure you want to write about this? [chuckles] Before I left DESY, I went to the director, Björn Wiik. He was himself a visionary leader, the person behind the TESLA concept for superconducting RF. When he asked where I saw myself in five or ten years, I answered, “I want your job. I want to be a director.” He was very direct too. “You are only 35 years old,” he said. “To become a director in Europe, you have to look like me. You have to have grey hair and a beard.” I found that frustrating. But I think it was largely true at the time.

In the United States, age didn’t matter. Nationality didn’t matter. What mattered was: could I do it? A 39-year-old German, alongside a Canadian, Thom Mason, and the son of Croatian immigrants, Anthony Chargin, suddenly found themselves in charge of building one of the biggest science projects in the United States: the Spallation Neutron Source, inspired by a former South Korean accelerator physicist, Yanglai Cho. That’s a story you can’t make up. That is where my career really started.

The transition from Lederman to John Peoples coincided with both the golden age of the Tevatron and the era of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). What do those two directors, and that moment, tell us about leadership in big science?

I knew Leon well because I actually lived in his house. He had a place off-site, and when my family first arrived we had very little money, so he said: “You need a house. I have one.” And we moved in. He came by regularly, stored his Porsche in the garage, and we talked a great deal. I learned a lot from him.

He was the kind of person you simply liked. Everybody at Fermilab loved Leon. He was funny, extraordinarily smart and he had a vision for the laboratory. I asked him once why he stepped down after nine years as director. He told me, “If you are a lab director, you have to make important decisions, and with every decision you make, you lose 10 percent of your friends. After 10 decisions, they are all gone. That is when you step down.” That was a true Leon answer. But it reflected his deep understanding of what leadership really costs.

I deeply believe high-energy physics can again be a launchpad for open international collaboration

John Peoples was very different. He was hands-on, deeply involved in building the complex and the Antiproton Source. Where Leon was the beloved visionary, John was the builder who wanted to be involved. And he had two extraordinarily difficult jobs at the same time: managing the closure of the SSC in Texas, which you could see drain him, and running a programme that ultimately delivered the discovery of the top quark.

These were very different people, very different characters. I think every character has its time. That is as true at Fermilab as it is at CERN. You can tell the same story through CERN’s directors. We just lost one, Herwig Schopper, who was a phenomenal leader. He spoke openly about the sacrifices he and the laboratory had to make to get CERN going. And when you look at CERN 50 years later, that is still a defining legacy, with the 27-kilometre tunnel and the science that continues to come out of it.

What lessons does the abandonment of the SSC hold for the large-scale projects being discussed today?

The real lesson of the SSC isn’t the failure itself. It is about implementation. The days when you could go to a government and say your project costs this much, then come back the next year and ask for 20 percent more, and the year after that another 20 percent – those days are gone. That is not the world we live in, and at the scale of projects we are talking about today, it would not be responsible.

John understood that deeply. I have tried to carry it through my own career. On my watch, I will always be direct with our funding agencies about what I see as risks and what things actually cost. That is non-negotiable for me.

Fermilab then repositioned itself at the intensity frontier. How do you keep the laboratory aligned behind the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) and the DUNE experiment?

You form a team, you focus the team and you execute. That sounds pretty mundane and simple. It is not. It is really hard. CERN went through something very similar under Robert Aymar with the LHC: the necessity to focus every resource and every engineering capability on one thing to make it happen.

I am a scientist, but also a project guy. I wake up every morning thinking about those five billion dollars. That is roughly eight hundred million a year. Three million dollars a day. My job is to organise a team that can responsibly and effectively deploy that every single day to build LBNF/DUNE.

When I spoke at my first all-hands meeting here, I laid out three bullet points, because nobody remembers more than three. First: beam at the DUNE far detector by 2031. Second: science at the High-Luminosity LHC and delivering on our commitments there. Third: develop science, technology and innovation for the benefit of society. Those are the three and everything flows from them.

I use the story of JFK visiting NASA and asking the janitor why he is there. The janitor says: “To put a man on the Moon.” That is the answer I want from everyone here. So I go around and ask people why they are here. And if I don’t get the answer I want, I ask again.

Neutrino physics is also receiving major investments in China and Japan, with JUNO already closing in on the neutrino mass hierarchy and Hyper-Kamiokande equipped to measure leptonic CP violation when it comes online. How does DUNE fit in that landscape?

We live in a world that is not the world of 20 or 30 years ago. We have to recognise that. But I deeply believe high-energy physics can again be a launchpad for open international collaboration.

The neutrino story is phenomenal for the US with the DOE’s support of the DUNE project. It is also great for CERN. The most significant large-scale investment CERN has made in an external experiment is in DUNE. And it goes both ways: Fermilab contributes significantly to the HL-LHC programme. That is one of the healthiest collaborations in the field, both at the personal level and at the level of laboratories and programmes.

In my world, it is better to make the wrong decision and correct it than to make no decision at all

As for competition among neutrino facilities, it’s healthy. It is all about what I call the three C’s: collaboration, cooperation, competition. Every scientific relationship works better when you are clear about which is which. There is competition with other neutrino experiments, of course, in the sense that whoever reaches an answer first gets the golden nugget. But there is also technology exchange, open science and the free sharing of knowledge. Both things are true.

When you look at the DUNE detector and the beam we are building, it will be, hopefully sooner than later, the most effective research instrument for this kind of science. It is nice to be number one. You never stay number one forever, but it is nice. CERN is number one in collider physics right now – a pretty good feeling. But you also have to deliver results.

How would you describe Fermilab’s culture right now?

Scientists are driven by curiosity. That hasn’t changed and it won’t. But when a large institution commits to building a major instrument, there is real tension between the broad research culture that develops over time and the laser focus that construction demands. Is there stress in the system? Yes, honestly, there is. The best thing you can do is recognise that, talk about it openly and make sure people can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The people who love construction have a clear finish line. The researchers have an extraordinary instrument coming, and the conceptual and technical work they do now is their investment in what comes after. The two groups are not perpendicular to each other. A good instrument requires constant feedback from the science side on what it actually needs to deliver, but you also can’t have an infinite conversation about what to build while you are trying to finish building it. Finding that line is delicate, and I spent my life basically walking it. At the SNS, at LCLS-II, at ITER. You pick.

There is a saying I keep coming back to: culture eats strategy for breakfast. Getting the culture right will take time and requires healthy tension. But it also requires the willingness to make decisions. I am not afraid to make a decision. Sometimes the wrong one, and that’s fine, it needs to be corrected. But in my world, it is better to make the wrong decision and correct it than to make no decision at all.

Where should Fermilab position itself in the next chapter of global high-energy physics?

I wanna stretch my hand to Europe, and to CERN in particular. I am very proud of the connection between our two institutions, at the programmatic level and at the personal level. I think we need to continue discussing how to keep the world open for those that want to share our values and share our way of doing science. People like me should be able to come to the United States. People from here should be able to go to CERN. That’s the foundation of everything we do.