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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The American Astronomical Society recognizes Frieman’s significant theoretical contributions to inflationary cosmology and dark‐energy theory and his contributions to optical surveys.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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This month, Thyssen Mining Inc. was awarded the contract to excavate the gigantic caverns for Fermilab’s Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility. Excavation crews will drill, blast and remove approximately 800,000 tons of rock to create the underground space for LBNF. When complete, the facility will house the enormous particle detector for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab.

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Magnets play a key role in looking for the direct transformation of muons into electrons, a theorized phenomenon that Fermilab's Mu2e experiment will hunt for when it comes online in 2023. In an important milestone, seven essential magnets have passed testing and been accepted for the construction of the experiment.

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Fermilab plays a key role in the Quantum Science Center, led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The center unites that Oak Ridge's powerhouse capabilities in supercomputing and materials science with Fermilab's world-class high-energy physics instrumentation and measurement expertise and facilities. Drawing on their experience building and operating experiments in cosmology and particle physics and in quantum information science, the Fermilab team is engaging in QSC efforts to develop novel, advanced quantum technologies.

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The NOvA experiment, best known for its measurements of neutrino oscillations using particle beams from Fermilab accelerators, has been turning its attention to measurements of cosmic phenomena. In a series of results, NOvA reports on neutrinos from supernovae, gravitational-wave events from black hole mergers, muons from cosmic rays, and its search for the elusive monopole.

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On Oct. 21, the PIP-II Injector Test Facility accelerated proton beam through its superconducting section for the first time.

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All summer long, progress on preparing the Fermilab site for the construction of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility has been proceeding at a healthy clip. Now, as summer winds down, that site prep is nearing completion.

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A precise calibration for measurements of electric current has long eluded scientists. Last year, the ampere was redefined based on the charge of a single electron. The next generation of charge-coupled devices, known as skipper CCDs, could provide the sensitivity needed to calibrate the new definition.

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Three students have received the prestigious Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research Fellowships to conduct their research at Fermilab. DOE awarded these fellowships to 52 students from U.S. universities.

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The red supergiant Betelgeuse is one of the best candidates for a nearby supernova in the coming decades. The star’s proximity to Earth would present a unique opportunity for studying the physics of supernovae and neutrinos. If Betelgeuse does explode, DUNE will be ready.

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Three Fermilab scientists have been selected 2020 fellows of the American Physical Society, a distinction awarded each year to no more than one-half of 1 percent of current APS members by their peers.

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Fermilab and partners in northern Illinois have established the region as a leader in particle accelerator science and technology. Few places in the world boast such concentrated effort in particle acceleration research, developing and building cutting-edge particle accelerators, and growing an accelerator-focused workforce.

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Fermilab scientists have implemented a cloud-based machine learning framework to handle data from the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Now they can begin to use graph neural networks to boost their pattern recognition abilities in the search for new particles.

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A physicist at the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics, Venanzoni will help prepare the Muon g-2 collaboration for its highly anticipated first scientific publication and work with partners to ensure a long life for the experiment, where scientists are searching for new particles emerging from the quantum foam that surrounds all matter.

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Scientists are testing the components and systems for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab, with other liquid-argon particle detectors. One such detector is ICEBERG, which is over 10,000 times smaller than DUNE will be. ICEBERG’s measurements are providing insight for future neutrino experiments.

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Widely recognized for his work in accelerator beam physics, Shiltsev is one of 361 individuals elected to Academia Europaea, which promotes a wider appreciation of the value of European scholarship and research.

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Humans and robots work together in a carefully choreographed dance to maintain peak production target performance in Mu2e’s search for new physics – direct muon-to-electron conversion.

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This award, totaling $2.5 million, will fund the development of a faster particle beam cooling method as well as the implementation of machine learning advancements to optimally control the system.