Daily Herald

February 4th, 2015

Fermilab employee Rob Snihur of Chicago looks at art by Xavier Cortada and Pete Markowitz at the opening reception Wednesday for Art@CMS at Fermilab in Batavia. Snihur has worked at Fermilab for 12 years and worked on the CMS Detector experiment for five of those years. The CMS Detector is part of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland.
Laura Stoecker | Staff Photographer

The CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland is the inspiration for an art exhibit that opened Wednesday at Fermilab in Batavia.

The exhibit features the work of eight artists with works in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, collage and digital art.
It also includes a life-size, five-story 2-D reproduction of one of the detectors, hanging in the Wilson Hall atrium.

More than 40,000 people have seen this exhibition in nine countries, including two previous installations in the U.S. Roughly 1,000 U.S. scientists contribute to the CMS experiment.

The 50 feet tall, 14,000 ton machine is able to detect the smallest particles of matter in the tiniest fractions of a second.

It is one of the two particle detectors that enabled the discovery of the Higgs boson — nicknamed the God particle — in 2012.

The collection will be on display in the Fermilab gallery from Feb. 4 through April 22. The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

For more information, visit fnal.gov.