Argonne's rich heritage

Argonne National Laboratory is a direct descendant of the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory, part of the World War II Manhattan Project. At the Met Lab on Dec. 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi and his band of about 50 colleagues created the world’s first controlled nuclear chain reaction in an abandoned squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field. By the end of February 1943, Fermi’s reactor had been moved to the then-remote Argonne Forest section – named for the Argonne Forest in Europe where a major battle was fought during World War I – of the Cook County Forest Preserve. The small laboratory that grew up around the reactor became known as “the Argonne Lab. ”

In 1946, the Argonne Lab was officially renamed “Argonne National Laboratory” – the nation’s first national laboratory – and given the mission of developing nuclear reactors for peaceful purposes. Long a world leader in advanced nuclear reactor systems and technology, Argonne designed, built and tested the prototypes for the commercial reactors that today produce 20 percent of the nation's electricity and conducted the earliest design work on the Naval Submarine Reactor that powered the nation's first nuclear submarines.

In the late 1940s, Argonne moved to its current location in southwest DuPage County, Ill.

Over the years, Argonne’s research has expanded to include many areas of basic and applied science and engineering that support the U.S. Department of Energy's mission of providing the nation with a safe, reliable and environmentally friendly energy supply. The laboratory's current R&D programs focus on energy, biological and environmental systems, and national security.

Argonne's Nobelists

Three Argonne physicists have been honored with Nobel Prizes:

• Enrico Fermi, Argonne’s founding director, won the 1938 Nobel Prize in physics for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons.
• Maria Goeppert Mayer shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in physics. While working at Argonne in 1948, she developed the “nuclear shell model” to explain how neutrons and protons within atomic nuclei are structured.
• Alexei A. Abrikosov shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in physics for research on condensed-matter physics and superconductivity.