Physics books of 2018
Symmetry writer Mike Perricone presents his annual compilation of new popular science books related to particle physics and astrophysics. The array that Symmetry readers might have encountered in 2018 ranges from the philosophical to the whimsical.
Fermilab is America’s particle physics and accelerator laboratory. Our vision is to solve the mysteries of matter, energy, space and time for the benefit of all.
Top quark couture
The mentorship of a scientist on the CMS experiment meant everything to Evan Coleman, a former physics undergraduate at Brown University. What do you give a physicist who helped discover a fundamental particle and jump-started your science career? Something individual, artistic and science-themed.
LHC noir
A proton describes its final moments in the Large Hadron Collider. During its second run, between 2015 and 2018, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN collided about 16 million billion particle pairs. This 3-minute animation is the story of one of them.
U.S. Department of Energy and Italy’s Ministry of Education, Universities and Research to collaborate on particle accelerator construction at Fermilab
The agreement launches a multinational collaboration to build a powerful new accelerator at DOE’s Fermilab complex. Italy and its National Institute of Nuclear Physics will provide major contributions to the construction of the 176-meter-long superconducting particle accelerator that is the centerpiece of the PIP-II project.
LHC ends second season of data-taking
During the last four years, LHC scientists have filled in gaps in our knowledge and tested the boundaries of the Standard Model. Since the start of Run II in March 2015, they’ve recorded an incredible amount of data —five times more than the LHC produced in Run I. The accelerator produced approximately 16 million billion proton-proton collisions — about one collision for every ant currently living on Earth.
Joel Butler elected AAAS fellow
Butler was one of 416 AAAS members nominated this year as fellows by their peers. He was recognized for distinguished contributions to the field of experimental particle physics, particularly for pioneering experiments in heavy flavor physics, and the leadership of large international experimental collaborations. New fellows will be presented with an official certificate and a rosette pin on Saturday, Feb. 16, 2019, during the 2019 AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.
Fermilab in the news
From Futurism, Dec. 11, 2018: No matter how confident we are that it’s out there, dark matter continues to evade our brightest physicists. Now, yet another experiment designed to pick up on signs of dark matter’s presence has turned up nothing at all. Fermilab’s Dan Hooper comments on results from the COSINE-100 experiment.
From Berkeley Lab, Dec. 4, 2018: Key components of Berkeley Lab’s Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument are installed after months of planning, prep work. A team at Fermilab built the corrector, hexapod, and other top-end support structures. The structures are designed to align the lenses with an accuracy of tens of microns (millionths of a meter) – similar to the width of the thinnest human hair.
From Tech Princess, Dec. 5, 2018: L’Italia firma l’accordo internazionale di collaborazione scientifica e tecnologica con gli Stati Uniti per la realizzazione del PIP-II, un nuovo acceleratore lineare di protoni per l’esperimento DUNE