The goal of the Fermilab Test Beam Facility (FTBF) program is to provide flexible, equal and open access to test beams for all detector tests, with relatively low bureaucratic overhead and a guarantee of safety, coordination and oversight.
Hundreds of researchers come and go through the FTBF, testing their detectors on one of the two test beams. The FTBF is the only facility in the United States that allows scientists from all over the world to test their detectors with high-energy hadron beams. Some experiments run for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for several weeks. Since the facility began operating in 2005, it has served over 633 collaborators on 45 experiments in 24 countries.
FY17 Beam Requests
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FTBF is a Particle Physics Division-operated, high-energy beam facility devoted to Detector R&D. The Facility is located on the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory site in Illinois, United States, on the west side of the Meson Detector Building.
The facility uses two versatile beamlines (MTest and MCenter) to produce a variety of particle types and a range of energies in which users can test equipment or detectors to prepare for running a full experiment.
A Fermilab Test Beam Committee, chosen from a broad range of expertise from both national labs and universities, was formed in April 2014. The committee develops guidelines to help schedule time for experiments and suggest possible upgrades to the test beamlines. Committee members come from Fermilab, Argonne, CERN, Cornell University, Iowa State University and SLAC.
