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Witherell: challenges ahead for particle physics. Credit: FERMILAB

Michael Witherell, a physicist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has been appointed director of Fermilab, the largest high-energy physics laboratory in the United States.

Witherell, an experimentalist and member of the National Academy of Sciences who pioneered the use of more powerful detectors and high-speed data acquisition systems in particle physics, will replace John Peoples as director of the laboratory at a critical time (see Nature 394, 611; 1998).

Within six years the Large Hadron Collider will open at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, and Fermilab's main injector, its largest experimental facility, will lose its place at the high-energy frontier of particle physics.

Together with Jonathan Dorfan, another young physicist recently named as the next director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California, Witherell faces the task of reinvigorating a US high-energy physics community still recovering from the 1993 cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider (see Nature 365, 773; 1993).

“Fermilab has a terrific physics plan for the next five or six years,” Witherell said in an interview. “What happens after that is the big issue, not just for Fermilab, but for all of high-energy physics in the United States.”

Witherell also thinks it is time SLAC and Fermilab, the primary centres of the discipline in the United States, buried their traditionally fierce rivalry. “I think it is a great opportunity that Jonathan Dorfan and I will be coming in at the same time.”

SLAC and Fermilab “need to work together”, he says, and if they can't, “we shouldn't be directors”. Witherell takes over at Fermilab on 1 July, and Dorfan assumes the directorship of SLAC from Burt Richter on 1 September.

Although Witherell lacks experience in managing a major facility, having spent his entire career with university teams at Department of Energy facilities such as Fermilab, he is familiar enough with the politics of the laboratories: for the past three years he has chaired the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, advising the energy department on its $700-million particle-physics programme.

Witherell won't talk about Fermilab's long-term direction, saying only that both front-runner proposals for future machines there — a new lepton collider and a muon collider — “need to be looked at very seriously”.

But the sensitive inter-laboratory relations the new director can expect to deal with were well illustrated last week with Fermilab's announcement that a team there had demonstrated direct CP violation — the asymmetry between matter and antimatter — more emphatically than before. The result will be published shortly in Physical Review Letters.

Fermilab's announcement drew an unusually direct public riposte from Konrad Kleinknecht, professor of physics at the University of Mainz in Germany. He issued a statement saying that a similar result had been found 11 years ago at CERN, and was subsequently “contested by an experimental group at Fermilab”.

The Fermilab result “is a brilliant confirmation of the earlier observation at CERN, and deserves credit for that”, Kleinknecht's statement said.

Bruce Winstein of the University of Chicago, spokesman for the Fermilab experiment, said the laboratory “had bent over backwards to be gracious to CERN”, whose work was indeed discussed and credited in the Fermilab announcement.

But Winstein admitted that he hadn't noticed the headline on the Fermilab press release — “Fermilab physicists find new matter-antimatter asymmetry” — when he approved it.