John Peoples, Fermilab director at time of top quark discovery, dies

Chicago Tribune

3 days ago

Physicist John Peoples Jr. was the third-ever director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Batavia, and in his 10 years in charge oversaw efforts to boost the power of the Tevatron, a circular particle accelerator that in 1995 contributed to the discovery of the top quark, the largest of all observed elementary particles.
Scientists who study the building blocks of matter had widely believed since 1977 that the top quark existed, as it was the last undiscovered quark, or elementary particle, predicted by current scientific theory. The discovery, considered to be one of the most significant discoveries in science, advanced scientists' understanding of the fundamentals of the universe.
'He was so committed to the lab and he was able to master so many details related to the lab that if you just brought your A game, you were already in trouble,' said Joel Butler, former chair of Fermilab's department of physics and fields. 'But he managed to inspire us all — he was so good at things himself that he inspired us to achieve more than we thought we possibly could. He was an exemplar.'
Peoples, 92, died of natural causes June 25 at the Oaks of Bartlett retirement community in Bartlett, said his son-in-law, Craig Duplack.
Born in New York City, Peoples grew up in Staten Island and received a bachelor's degree in 1955 from Carnegie Institute of Technology, then a doctorate in physics in 1966 from Columbia University. He taught physics at Columbia and at Cornell University before joining Fermilab in 1971, four years after it opened. He was made head of the lab's research division in 1975.
Peoples became a project manager in 1981 for the lab's Tevatron collider, a 4-mile ring on the lab site where collisions of particles occurred until it was shut down in 2011. After a brief detour in 1987 to work on a collider at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California, Peoples returned to Fermilab in 1988 as deputy director. He was promoted the following year to replace the Nobel Prize-winning Leon Lederman as Fermilab's director.
'He was an extremely hard worker,' said retired Fermilab Chief Operating Officer Bruce Chrisman. 'He was dedicated to the science, and he visited every experiment at midnight — because that's when students were running the thing, and he would show up in control rooms for the various experiments just to talk to them and see how things were going from their perspective.'
Peoples lobbied federal legislators in the 1990s to retain funding as Fermilab physicists worked to try to discover the top quark and solve other essential puzzles about the universe. Peoples secured $217 million in funding in 1992 for a new main injector, or an oval-shaped ring, that allowed scientists to stage about five times more collisions each year, thus keeping the U.S. internationally competitive in the field of high-energy physics.
Peoples oversaw the shutdown of the scuttled next-generation particle accelerator project known as the Superconducting Super Collider, or SSC, in Texas that was canceled by lawmakers in 1993 because of rising costs.
'When he became director, the decision to place the SSC in Texas had been made, and the lab was in a state of demoralization that we had been bypassed despite the fact that we had the capability to (host) the SSC, so John had to develop a plan,' Butler said. 'He positioned us for both alternatives — he positioned us successfully for what would happen if the SSC ran into trouble, which it did, but he also had a plan to keep us prosperous and contributing to the forefront of science for at least the decade that it took to build the SSC.'
'He tried to respect the fact that the people at the SSC — many of whom were looking for jobs — they were good people. They were not the problem why the SSC failed,' Butler said.
In 1994, Fermilab researchers tentatively announced that they had found evidence of the long-sought top quark, although a second team working independently said more work was needed.
'We've been improving the collider and the detectors at the lab to the point where they are much more powerful now than ever anticipated when they were built,' Peoples told the Tribune in 1994. 'We're continuing to upgrade them, and we're arriving at a place where investigations can go forward that will assure this lab's future into the next century.'
The following year, both teams of physicists formally confirmed that they had isolated the top quark.
'We're ecstatic about this,' Peoples told the Tribune in 1995. 'It's been a goal of this lab for a long time.'
Peoples subsequently oversaw efforts to learn whether a common but elusive particle called a neutrino has any mass. He also led efforts to expand the laboratory into experimental astrophysics and modernize Fermilab's computing infrastructure to enable it to handle the demands of high-energy physics data.
As an advocate for scientific research, Peoples reasoned that seemingly arcane discoveries can unexpectedly yield astonishing and wide-range applications and results.
'The things that we do, even when they become extraordinarily practical, we have no idea that they will,' he told the Tribune's Ted Gregory in 1998.
In 1999, Peoples stepped down as Fermilab's director to return to research. He remained closely involved at Fermilab, and he also oversaw the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico, which is a wide-ranging astronomical survey, from 1998 until 2003. After that, Peoples oversaw the Dark Energy Survey, another astronomical survey, for a time.
Peoples retired from Fermilab in 2005, but remained director of the Dark Energy Survey until 2010.
In 2010, Peoples was awarded the Robert R. Wilson Prize for Achievement in the Physics of Particle Accelerators — named for Fermilab's first director — from the American Physical Society.
Peoples' wife of 62 years, Brooke, died in 2017. A daughter, Vanessa, died in 2023, and another daughter, Jennet, died several decades earlier. There were no other immediate survivors.
There were no services.