The excavation of the caverns that will house the gigantic particle detectors of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment in Lead, South Dakota is complete.
In the culmination of a decade’s worth of effort, the DES collaboration of scientists analyzed an unprecedented sample of more than 1,500 supernovae classified using machine learning. They placed the strongest constraints on the expansion of the universe ever obtained with the DES supernova survey. While consistent with the current standard cosmological model, the results do not rule out a more complex theory that the density of dark energy in the universe could have varied over time.
Ten international funding agencies will contribute to the construction of the gigantic particle detectors a mile underground for the Fermilab-hosted Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.
DOE awarded Fermilab $9 million to further develop technology for national-scale quantum networks to improve the transmission of information as part of the Advanced Quantum Network for Scientific Discovery project.
Scientists working on Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment released the world’s most precise measurement yet of the magnetic moment of the muon, bringing particle physics closer to the ultimate showdown between theory and experiment that may uncover new particles or forces.
Scientists working on the Dark SRF experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have demonstrated unprecedented sensitivity in an experimental setup used to search for theorized particles called dark photons.
The cryogenic plant, to be installed a mile underground, will provide the cooling for two large liquid-argon neutrino detectors for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.
A large number of scientists are working on improving the Standard Model prediction of the value of muon g-2 using new data and new lattice calculations. By measuring and calculating this number to ultra-high precision, scientists can test whether the Standard Model is complete.
DOE Office of Science officials, Gov. Pritzker and other local legislators joined international partners and collaborators and at Fermilab for the opening of two new buildings and the groundbreaking of another to usher in a new era of science.
Scientists working on the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment are developing a vertical drift detector. The new technology may open doors to building large neutrino detectors at a lower cost and in a simpler manner.
The international DUNE collaboration is conducting final tests of the components for its first neutrino detector module, to be installed a mile underground in South Dakota. Preparations for ramping up the mass production of these components are underway.
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To cool quantum computing components, researchers use machines called dilution refrigerators. Researchers and engineers from the SQMS Center are building Colossus, the largest, most powerful refrigerator at millikelvin temperatures ever made. The new machine will enable new physics and quantum computing experiments.
To prepare for the shipment of large, delicate particle accelerator components from the UK to Fermilab, the PIP-II team flew a “dummy load” across the Atlantic Ocean, recording every little bump the dummy experienced. After careful validation of all transportation data, the team will ship a 10-meter-long prototype cryomodule early next year.
From high atop a mountain in the Chilean Andes, the Dark Energy Camera has snapped more than one million exposures of the southern sky. The images have captured around 2.5 billion astronomical objects, including galaxies and galaxy clusters, stars, comets, asteroids, dwarf planets and supernovae.
Scientists at America’s premier accelerator laboratory have successfully used a new technique, called optical stochastic cooling, to cool a particle beam and make it denser. The new method may enable future experiments to create more particle collisions. Denser particle beams provide researchers a better chance of exploring rare physics phenomena that help us understand our universe.
Recently, a team of researchers with the Illinois‐Express Quantum Network (IEQNET) successfully deployed a long-distance quantum network between two U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories using local fiber optics. The experiment marked the first time that quantum-encoded photons — the particle through which quantum information is delivered — and classical signals were simultaneously delivered across a metropolitan-scale distance with an unprecedented level of synchronization.
Quantum computing experiments now have a new control and readout electronics option that will significantly improve performance while replacing cumbersome and expensive systems. Developed by a team of engineers at Fermilab in collaboration with the University of Chicago, the Quantum Instrumentation Control Kit, or QICK for short, is easily scalable.
The Department of Energy has formally approved the start of full construction for the PIP-II project, an upgrade to the Fermilab accelerator complex that includes a new linear accelerator. PIP-II is an essential enhancement that will power the world’s most intense high-energy neutrino beam. It is the first particle accelerator built in the United States with significant contributions from international partners.
Scientists of the Collider Detector at Fermilab collaboration have achieved the most precise measurement to date of the mass of the W boson, one of nature’s force-carrying particles. The measured value shows tension with the value expected based on the Standard Model of particle physics.
For more than a decade, scientists have wondered whether a theorized new particle, a fourth kind of neutrino called the sterile neutrino, might exist in our universe. Evidence of this would add a new particle to the physicists’ best theory, the Standard Model of Particle Physics. A new particle would be a radical shift in our understanding of the basic building blocks of the universe. MicroBooNE’s four new experimental results all show the same thing: no sign of the sterile neutrino. Instead, the results align with the Standard Model of Particle Physics. With sterile neutrinos further disfavored as the explanation for anomalies spotted in neutrino data, scientists are investigating other possibilities. Unexplained data point toward promising research areas and lead us to more fundamental truths about how physics works at the smallest level.
The Dark Energy Survey collaboration has created the largest ever maps of the distribution and shapes of galaxies, tracing both ordinary and dark matter in the universe out to a distance of over 7 billion light years. The results are based on the first three years of data from the survey.
The ICARUS detector, part of Fermilab’s Short-Baseline Neutrino Program, will officially start its hunt for elusive sterile neutrinos this fall. The international collaboration led by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia successfully brought the detector online and is now collecting test data and making final improvements.
A new robotics project named Argonaut at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will share that same name and spirit of adventure. Argonaut’s mission will be to monitor conditions within ultracold particle detectors by voyaging into a sea of liquid argon kept at minus-193 degrees Celsius — as cold as some of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.
The Fermilab-hosted international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment will shoot the world’s most powerful beam of neutrinos from the Department of Energy’s Fermilab in Illinois to detectors 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) away at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. Data collected from this ambitious experiment will help scientists answer such lofty questions as how black holes form and why the universe itself exists.
Fermilab gives a sendoff to the final superconducting component for the LCLS-II particle accelerator at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. LCLS-II will be the world’s brightest and fastest X-ray laser. A partnership of particle accelerator technology, materials science, cryogenics and energy science, LCLS-II exemplifies cross-disciplinary collaboration across DOE national laboratories.
Fermilab user and University of Chicago PhD candidate Ihar Lobach explains how his team used Fermilab’s IOTA electron storage ring to glean insights that can be difficult to obtain on an electron beam and how this proof of principle could benefit the Advanced Photon Source Upgrade at Argonne National Laboratory.
SpinQuest is a collaboration of 50 individuals from 13 institutions from around the world. It starts at Fermilab’s Main Injector accelerator, which will fire our familiar protons at a polarized target. A quark from a proton in the proton beam and an antiquark from a proton in the target will interact, eventually producing a pair of oppositely charged muons, heavier cousins of the electron.
SpinQuest is supported by the DOE Office of Science.
One of the DUNE near detector’s subdetectors, SAND, will detect neutrinos with an electronic calorimeter, which measures particle energy, and a tracker, which records particle momenta and charge. A second subdetector will use liquid argon to mimic the neutrino interactions in the far detector. The third will use gaseous argon. Working together, they will measure particles with more precision than other neutrino detectors have able been to achieve. Credit: DUNE collaboration
A Fermilab team has completed tests for a crucial superconducting segment for the PIP-II particle accelerator, the future heart of the Fermilab accelerator chain. The segment, called a cryomodule, will be one of many, but this is the first to be fully designed, assembled and tested at Fermilab. It represents a journey of technical challenges and opportunities for innovation in superconducting accelerator technology.
The prodigious amount of data produced at the Large Hadron Collider presents a major challenge for data analysis. Coffea, a Python package developed by Fermilab researchers, speeds up computation and helps scientists work more efficiently. Around a dozen international LHC research groups now use Coffea, which draws on big data techniques used outside physics.
A physicist making great advances in particle detector technology, Estrada is recognized by the American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields for his creation and development of novel applications for CCD technology that probe wide-ranging areas of particle physics, including cosmology, dark matter searches, neutrino detection and quantum imaging.
A Fermilab scientist and his team have developed new way to make antireflective lenses, enabling big discoveries about the cosmic microwave background radiation and the fabric of the universe.
Fermilab scientist and University of Chicago professor of astronomy and astrophysics Craig Hogan gives perspective on how the Holometer program aimed at a tiny scale — the Planck length — to help answer one of the universe’s most basic questions: Why does everything appear to happen at definite times and places? He contextualizes the results and offers optimism for future researchers.
The U.S. DOE has given the U.S. High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider Accelerator Upgrade Project approval to move full-speed-ahead in building and delivering components for the HL-LHC, specifically, cutting-edge magnets and accelerator cavities that will enable more rapid-fire collisions at the collider.
Well-known and appreciated by the scientific community for his work on beam physics and supercolliders, Shiltsev joins an organization whose membership included Marie Curie, Albert Einstein and Luigi Galvani.
The American Astronomical Society recognizes Frieman’s significant theoretical contributions to inflationary cosmology and dark‐energy theory and his contributions to optical surveys.
Engineers and technicians in the UK have started production of key piece of equipment for a major international science experiment. The UK government has invested £65million in the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. As part of the investment, the UK is delivering a series of vital detector components built at the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Daresbury Laboratory.
After more than 15 years of work, scientists at three DOE national laboratories have succeeded in creating and testing an advanced, more powerful superconducting magnet made of niobium and tin for use in the next generation of light sources.
Faint light from rogue stars not bound to galaxies has been something of a mystery to scientists. The dimness of this intracluster light makes it difficult to measure, and no one knows how much there is. Scientists on the Dark Energy Survey, led by Fermilab, have made the most radially extended measurement of this light ever.
The international collaboration, including Fermilab, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, NOIRLab and others, releases a massive, public collection of astronomical data and calibrated images from six years of surveys. This data release is one of the largest astronomical catalogs issued to date.
Fermilab scientists and engineers are developing a machine learning platform to help run Fermilab’s accelerator complex alongside a fast-response machine learning application for accelerating particle beams. The programs will work in tandem to boost efficiency and energy conservation in Fermilab accelerators.
The MicroBooNE neutrino experiment at Fermilab has published a new measurement that helps paint a more detailed portrait of the neutrino. This measurement more precisely targets one of the processes arising from the interaction of a neutrino with an atomic nucleus, one with a fancy name: charged-current quasielastic scattering.
The U.S. Department of Energy has formally approved the scope, schedule and cost of the PIP-II project at Fermilab. The PIP-II accelerator will become the heart of Fermilab’s upgraded accelerator complex, delivering more powerful proton beams to the lab’s experiments and enabling deeper probes of the fundamental constituents of the universe.
A joint team of researchers at Fermilab and partner institutions have achieved quantum teleportation, teleporting information over a distance of 44 kilometers. The remarkable achievement supports the premise that scientists and engineers can build a workable and high-fidelity quantum network using practical devices.
From working at the CIA to designing science facilities at Fermilab, Kate Sienkiewicz enjoys tackling complex problems. Currently, she oversees the team tasked with designing and building conventional facilities at the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility near site for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment — all with the overarching goal of understanding the universe.
Results from the ProtoDUNE single-phase detector at CERN pave the way for detectors 20 times larger for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab.
David Ibbett, Fermilab’s first guest composer, converts real scientific data into musical notes and rhythms. His latest piece, “MicroBooNE,” will make its world premiere at a virtual concert on Dec. 8. In this audio interview, Ibbett shares a sneak peek of the song and explains his compositional process.