Lab brings complex science hardware to life
 Physical Sciences Lab director Dave Huber shows a segment of a prototype sensor for a Compact Muon Solenoid project, which will be part of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at CERN Laboratory in Switzerland. This multi-billion dollar project, which involves hundreds of universities, will go after the last remaining particles of matter that have been theorized, but never proven to exist. Part of CMS is being built in Japan, but design work is taking place here. PSL is working on two end caps for the machine that weigh 2,200 tons each. Photo Jeff Miller
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Dave Pearson, left, and Eric Schloesser install a radio frequency generator into a tomotherapy unit, a prototype of the next generation of medical devices that will precisely target cancer cells with beams of radiation. Photo Jeff Miller
Instrument maker John Sine stamps matching halves of large conical washers before shipping the pieces to a heat-treating facility. Photo Jeff Miller
CAD specialist Glen Gregerson looks through computer- generated blueprints for a device under construction at the lab. Photo Jeff Miller
At Stoughton’s Physical Sciences Laboratory, a glimmering stainless steel pod resembling a miniature bank vault gets a final inspection. Computer readouts fine-tune the machine for its ultimate task: Pinpointing the structure of materials, one atom at a time.
Farshid Feyzi, associate director of the facility, puts some perspective on this impossibly precise machine. He says it’s the equivalent of having a sharpshooter take aim from Madison and hit a target the size of a dinner plate – in Los Angeles.
These are the kinds of parameters staff at PSL manage as one of the nation’s leading toolmakers for Big Science. This particular device – called a double crystal monochromator – is headed for use at Argonne National Labs. It’s one of the many federal laboratories for which PSL has built machines in its 33-year history.
PSL staff built a collider detector for northern Illinois’ Fermi Lab, which was used to help identify the top quark, one of the landmark physics discoveries of the 1990s. Staff also built gamma ray telescopes stationed in Hawaii and ice drills for the cosmic neutrino experiment in Antarctica.
But PSL’s biggest influence is local, as a provider of one-of-a-kind research tools for UW–Madison scientists. PSL handiwork can be found in dozens of labs around campus, from humming donut-shaped confinement rings for fusion experiments to DNA sequencing machines.
PSL’s work floor looks like any machine shop, with milling machines, lathes and drill presses grinding away on aluminum, copper and steel. But PSL tools have transformed research projects on campus from paper theories to functional experiments.
“Many times faculty come in with a basic idea – “wouldn’t it be great to do something like this,'” Feyzi says. “Sometimes it’s out of the blue or a fresh idea in their field. We can help them with the concept, design and construction of a device that will fit their research needs.”
One prominent current project at PSL is a tomotherapy device, a potentially revolutionary new way to deliver radiation treatments for cancer. Tomotherapy offers the promise of delivering hundreds of precisely tailored beams in exactly the dosage to kill cancer, but protect healthy tissue.
The machine’s complexity is in the details. A finely machined tungsten box, about the size of a toaster oven, has 64 flat tungsten leaves each controlled by a piston. The leaves are choreographed to shift back and forth in the radiation’s path, sculpting an exact dosage as the beam completes a pass around the patient.
Even though all drafting work today is done through computer-aided design, PSL has a complete archive of all its hand-drawn blueprints over 33 years of projects.
“It certainly makes us feel good to be participating in some of these landmark projects,” says Dave Huber, PSL director. “We can take loose specifications and translate them into a functioning machine.”
Tags: research