Fermilab is operated by the Fermi Research Alliance (FRA). It is part of the Department of Energy (DoE) with a 2001 funding in the amount of $277 million, a good chunk of the department’s total annual budget of about $3.18 billion back then. The DoE spent a total of about $726 million on high-energy physics in 2001.
Located on the East side of Batavia, IL, the core research area at Fermilab is particle physics, which involves the very smallest building blocks of matter. Scientists investigate the foundations of matter to understand the forces that hold them together or force them apart.
On a 6800-acre site – just under 10 square miles – Fermilab operates a range of proton/anti-proton accelerators to enable various sub-atomic collisions. Using enormous amounts of energy, collisions can reveal exotic particles of matter, which are detected by special devices.
These experiments have allowed scientists to discover several new particles over the years, including the top quark in 1995, the last undiscovered quark of the six predicted to exist by current scientific theory; Fermilab was also the site of the discovery of the bottom quark in 1977 and the site where direct evidence for the tau neutrino was discovered (2000). Most recently, you may have heard of discovery of the “triple scoop” baryon, which contains one quark from each generation of matter.