After speaking to his adviser, Bob Svoboda at University of California, Davis, about the exciting science potential of DUNE, Gardiner recalled, “I became a neutrino person and never looked back.” He joined Fermilab in 2018, bringing a unique background in neutron simulations to the study of some of the most elusive particles in the universe.

This career track recently earned Gardiner a Department of Energy Early Career Award, which provides funding to explore the low-energy research potential of DUNE. While the experiment is primarily designed for high-energy beam physics, Gardiner is advocating for its use as an unusual kind of telescope. Rather than collecting rays of light to study the universe, DUNE will be sensitive to ghostly low-energy neutrinos coming from outer space, including those from the Sun, supernovae, black holes and possibly dark matter.

“Even though DUNE is designed for beam physics, you can go way lower in energy, and it still performs,” Gardiner said. He believes his specific background allows him to make a “unique contribution due to my career trajectory,” taking him from neutrons to neutrinos.

The technical heart of this research involves upgrading a computer simulation code called MARLEY, or Model of Argon Reaction Low Energy Yields. Because neutrinos interact so weakly with ordinary matter, they are not directly visible in detectors. Instead, physicists must look for extremely rare collisions between neutrinos and atomic nuclei. Like a subatomic version of a car crash investigation, the tracks left by particles coming out of each collision provide clues about what originally happened. To put these puzzle pieces back together, scientists rely on detailed simulations of the collision physics, which is where MARLEY becomes essential.  Results from these simulations will help researchers tell the difference between uninteresting noise, low-energy cosmic neutrinos and potential signals from undiscovered new particles. The ultimate goal of this work is to push the boundaries of physics. “My hope is that as a result of this project, we are thinking about new physics beyond the Standard Model,” Gardiner said.

He also emphasized science opportunities going far beyond the microscopic world. “Neutrinos reveal the inner workings of stars to us, whether it’s the core of our own Sun or the first moments of a supernova explosion,” Gardiner said. By refining the models used to interpret neutrino interactions, he is helping to open a wider view of the distant universe. “DUNE is a new window to the cosmos,” he said. “It gives us a new way of seeing into a hidden world where all kinds of crazy stuff might be going on.”

The DOE funding ensures that low-energy neutrino research may expand our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of the universe through the unparalleled sensitivity of the DUNE detectors.

But finding this elusive material is easier said than done. For one thing, nobody knows exactly what dark matter is made of, so the range of particle masses and their signal frequencies is incredibly broad. Also, dark matter interacts infrequently with ordinary matter and light. To observe it, scientists rely on extremely sensitive detectors to capture very weak signals produced by dark matter particles.

In a study published in Physical Review Letters, scientists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, University of Chicago, Stanford University and New York University used a state-of-the-art detector to speed up the search for one theorized dark matter particle — the dark photon — with unprecedented precision. If it exists, the dark photon would be distantly related to the photon, a visible particle of light.

Their research is enabled by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Quantum Information Science Enabled Discovery program, which partners Fermilab and university scientists to advance quantum sensor development for future high-energy physics experiments.

“Fermilab’s longstanding expertise in designing and building ultrasensitive, low-noise electronics makes it the ideal place to further this technology for next-generation quantum science research like dark matter searches,” said Aaron Chou, a scientist at Fermilab who worked on the study.

The dark photon resides in a narrow frequency band, which means to see its signal a radio-like detector must be carefully tuned to its exact frequency. Scientists developed this detector to be capable of capturing weak signals from dark photons by placing an electrically-tunable instrument called a superconducting quantum interference device — or SQUID — inside a three-dimensional microwave cavity. The device’s superconductance means it has no resistance to energy and can therefore pick up even the faintest signals, such as those from a dark photon.

Key to the detector’s ability to speed up the search for a tiny signal in a broad range of frequencies is flux tuning, which uses electricity to tune the device instead of manually.  

“Rather than physically turning a dial to a specific frequency like with a radio, we apply electromagnetic flux to the SQUID, precisely controlling its ability to oppose changes in electricity flowing through it,” said Fang Zhao, a former Fermilab postdoctoral researcher who led the study.

Somewhat like an electronic pendulum, this flux essentially changes how quickly or slowly the device moves. The microwave cavity is coupled to the SQUID, so changes in the SQUID correspondingly changes the speed of the cavity, allowing it to “listen to” different frequencies.

“Without the ability to electrically tune its frequency, you would have to build billions of detectors to capture the signal,” said Ziqian Li, a former University of Chicago graduate student who also worked on the study. “In contrast, we can build a few flux-tunable detectors and place them at various frequencies, enabling capture of possible signals much faster than before.”

Conventional tunable detectors require mechanically changing the shape of a cavity by physically exerting force or adding mechanical parts inside connected circuits. This poses a challenge because qubit-based detectors require ultracold temperatures to function properly, and extreme cold can cause these parts to seize and break. In addition, mechanical parts emit a lot of heat, which creates noise in the cavity, obscuring signals and decreasing the ability to read and understand the quantum information stored inside the detector.

But use of flux tuning not only enables rapid frequency scanning, it also generates very little heat. This overcomes a major challenge for dark matter searches — preserving coherence. Quantum coherence, says Zhao, is what makes these sensors so precise.

“It’s a fundamental requirement for quantum devices to be protected from anything like heat or noise that might obscure such fragile signals and preserve them long enough for us to detect them.”  

The scientists scanned a relatively large frequency range of 22-megahertz over three days. During this time, they were able to speed up the scanning rate by at least a factor of 20 over mechanical tuning methods. While their search did not turn up any dark photons, they were able to build on previous studies at multiple institutions and narrow the frequency range where dark matter can exist.

“What we’re really trying to do is to build a detector that is more sensitive than anybody else has ever made before; we did that,” said Chou. “We also showed that the detector was compatible with the qubit-based signal readout that we use for dark matter searches and that everything was integrated and everything just worked. It laid the foundation for larger dark matter searches.”

The current detector is very simple, with one cavity and one tunable device — the SQUID. However, work is underway to scale up this technology. Researchers could combine 10, 50 or even more cavities, each covering a different frequency range, with a single tunable element and simultaneously scan a 50 times wider range.

“While there is more work to do to improve scaling, we know now we can use the same detection technique to allow us to detect a large range of the dark photon within a few days, and then the full coverage search of the dark photon is within our reach,” said Li.

Ćiprijanović’s project aims to address a problem that she encountered almost a decade ago when she first started dabbling with AI in her research: the domain shift problem. The problem occurs when a machine learning model is trained on one dataset but is tested or deployed on data that comes from somewhere else; since the model only learned patterns from the training data, its performance often drops when the data changes.

The domain shift problem is persistent in high-energy physics research. Scientists often use simulations to train their AI models, but computational constraints, approximations and unknown physics create unavoidable differences between simulations and real data. This means simulation-trained AI models may perform poorly when they are applied to experimental data.

“Trying to solve this would help the high-energy physics community in general,” said Ćiprijanović.

So Ćiprijanović wants to create a universal AI analysis framework to bridge the gap between simulated and real data. “The main deliverable of this project is going to be a software package that is general and broad and easy to use for all communities,” she said. “You can just plug in your own dataset, easily choose the type of AI model that you want to train and a downstream task that you want to solve.”

While she plans to start with cosmological data — since that is her scientific home — Ćiprijanović also intends to test her project on collider and neutrino physics.

“I really do want to make a software framework that will be used across different high-energy physics frontiers,” she said.

The framework will have a modular structure and a number of data, model and task options to enable broad scientific use and solutions to any high-energy physics domain-shift problem.

Fermilab is uniquely positioned to support this project, said Ćiprijanović. The lab’s science and computing capabilities will enable the creation of a universal AI analysis framework that will work with a vast range of high-energy physics research needs and coding standards.

“We will need to find people to test out the code and give us inputs from cosmic and from neutrinos and from the collider world,” said Ćiprijanović. “Luckily, at Fermilab, we have experts from all these frontiers! Fermilab is the place to do this.”

Since 2010, the highly competitive DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Program has distributed funding annually to support outstanding early career scientists at universities, national laboratories and Office of Science user facilities.

Cardwell and his colleagues on the CMS experiment are currently tackling a similar problem. The CMS experiment records the tracks and properties of subatomic particles created by the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. As it stands, physicists get a picture of all the particles produced in a collision, but they have insufficiently detailed information about when the particles were produced or how fast they were traveling, making it difficult to tell them apart.

That’s why CMS scientists are building a new detector that will let them watch particle collisions as they unfold, with 30-picosecond (0.00000000003 second) accuracy.

“In 30 picoseconds, light moves about one centimeter,” said Chris Neu, a professor at the University of Virginia. “We’re talking about measuring the time of arrival of very fast objects with a very high precision.”

Some scientists suspect that rare and massive particles that take a long time to decay could move more slowly than lighter, more common particles. This means that when they do finally decay, their “daughter particles” will be a step behind. The difference would be tiny; a photo finish after a race that is only four feet long. But scientists hope that a precise “stopwatch” detector will help them tell the difference.

“We’ll be able to see if any particles are habitually arriving late,” Cardwell said. “That is inherently interesting.”

Turning ripples into tsunamis

The new timing detector consists of two parts: a barrel equipped with roughly 10,000 crystal sensors, and end caps coated with hair-thin silicon wafers. While silicon sensors are common inside CMS, this new detector has a special gain layer that amplifies the signal before it is read out.

“A small signal is like a tiny ripple on the surface of the water, and it gets lost among the little waves around it, so it’s hard to tell exactly when it arrived,” said Artur Apresyan, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. “The gain layer turns the small signal into a fast-moving tsunami that stands out clearly from the background, making its arrival time very clear. This amplification feature is not present in other CMS detectors; it’s a new design specifically for timing detectors.”

Currently, scientists at Fermilab are building and testing the sensors and support structures in collaboration with their national and international partners.

“The work on the end cap timing detector at Fermilab has been a unique possibility for many junior researchers to participate in the design and construction of a novel kind of detector,” Apresyan said. “These kinds of opportunities are very rare in such large and advanced experiments, and Fermilab provides an exceptional opportunity to allow newcomers to join and learn cutting-edge detector technologies and their applications.”

Unveiling the dark sector

Once the finished detector is installed inside CMS, scientists hope that it will help them separate fast-moving particles from slow-moving dark matter, a mysterious class of particles that are only visible through their gravitational pull.

“Dark matter is as good as discovered in the sense that we know it’s there,” said Tevong You, a theorist at King’s College London. “The problem is that none of the Standard Model particles that we know of can account for the properties of dark matter.”

According to You, many theoretical models predict that — in addition to the stable dark matter particles — there could be an entire universe of dark sector particles that might have properties similar to the known particles of the Standard Model.

“Dark matter is very stable, but we also know that stable particles like protons are just a small subset of all visible particles,” You said. “Maybe dark matter is just one small part of an extended dark sector that is full of long-lived particles that can decay into visible matter.”

According to Cardwell, the LHC could be producing dark matter. These dark matter particles would eat up a lot of kinetic energy from the proton-proton collisions and turn it into mass via Einstein’s equation, E = mc². “This means they have less energy to go fast,” Cardwell said.

When these dark matter particles decay into visible matter, the resulting daughter particles would be lagging behind everything else produced during the collision. This is where the timing detector comes into play.

“If we can measure the time those particles are arriving, we can figure out if they came from a particle that moved a little slower before decaying,” Cardwell said.

Pinpointing exceptional events

The new timing detector will also give scientists a much clearer view of what exactly is happening when bunches of protons collide inside the LHC.

“Right now in CMS, we send something like 100 billion protons through 100 billion protons 40 million times a second,” Cardwell said.

Every time two bunches of protons cross, about 70 collide. Currently, scientists use the spatial coordinates of the smaller particles produced by the collisions to connect the dots and figure out which particles came from what collisions. But spatial orientation alone won’t be enough when scientists turn on the High-Luminosity LHC, which will increase the collision rate by up to a factor of five.

“When there are so many collisions, many of them will literally be at the same point in space,” Cardwell said. “But the collisions don’t all happen at the same time; they’re actually spread out over around 200 picoseconds. With a really, really precise timing detector, 200 picoseconds can suddenly become a very long time; I can slice that 200 picoseconds into a bunch of individual frames.”

These frames will allow scientists to disentangle the messy LHC collisions and pinpoint rare and exceptional events.

“The cool thing about this detector is that it will make everything CMS does better,” Cardwell said. “If we are searching for dark matter, if we are measuring the properties of the Higgs boson, if we’re doing anything at all, the quality of every measurement will increase.”

As a theorist, You is excited about this new timing detector because it will open new avenues for research.

“The best bet for a spectacular discovery at the LHC is through developing new types of searches and new ways of sifting through the data,” You said.

With expertise in high-energy physics, advanced computing, accelerator and quantum technologies, and microelectronics design, Fermilab is well-equipped to be a central contributor to the Genesis Mission’s goals. Deploying AI to make particle accelerators adaptive and autonomous will propel innovations in medicine, materials and energy. Simultaneously, advancing next-generation microelectronics will serve to secure U.S. technological leadership, economic prosperity and national security.

“The Genesis Mission represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform how America does science,” Fermilab Director Norbert Holtkamp said. “By combining AI, advanced computing and the capabilities of the national laboratories, we can accelerate discovery while strengthening the scientific infrastructure that underpins U.S. leadership in particle physics and beyond. Fermilab is proud to help drive this national effort.”

Through these initiatives and more, Fermilab will help tackle ambitious, world-shaping challenges — and it comes to this work prepared. The lab brings decades of experience navigating complex challenges through large-scale collaborations with national laboratory partners, academia and industry.

“We’re also excited for what AI can mean for our operations at Fermilab,” Holtkamp added. “I believe AI can dramatically enhance the quality and efficiency for work across the laboratory. Not only will Fermilab help drive DOE’s Genesis Mission, but I believe Fermilab can also serve as a strong example in how AI can benefit the operations of the full U.S. national lab complex.” 

Advancing accelerator science

Fermilab will contribute to a seven-lab collaboration known as the Multi-Office particle Accelerator Team, or MOAT. The initiative focuses on using AI to advance accelerator science by supporting more efficient operations and streamlined accelerator research and development. These efforts are expected to shorten commissioning timelines and reduce operating costs while extending the benefits of accelerator technology to a wider range of industry partners.

Speeding up chip design

One of Fermilab’s flagship contributions is AXESS, shorthand for Accelerating eXtreme Environment Specs-to-Silicon. This ambitious project aims to revolutionize custom microelectronics chip design for specialized scientific applications. Fermilab already has deep experience in creating chips that can function in extreme environments, such as cryogenic temperatures or intense radiation. By using AI to compress the design process from months to minutes, AXESS will significantly boost national competitiveness and speed up the pace of innovation.

Supporting American Science Cloud

The lab is also providing the Fermi Data Platform to support the emerging American Science Cloud. Fermilab is leveraging its extensive experience in handling the massive amounts of data created by particle collisions to provide large-scale data storage to the Genesis Mission. This infrastructure will enable researchers from across scientific disciplines to access the datasets needed to accelerate their own discoveries, effectively turning decades of physics data into a national resource.

Quickening theoretical calculations

Fermilab’s work in Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics, or Lattice QCD, will strengthen a multi-lab effort called FemtoMind. Lattice QCD is the framework physicists use to understand the strong force that binds subatomic quarks together to form protons. By applying agentic AI to quicken these complex calculations and uncover new patterns in computer simulations that probe physics at the proton scale, FemtoMind will deepen our understanding of the matter that makes up everything we see around us.

Creating AI-ready data representations

Fermilab will also contribute to the TREASURE initiative, which aims to make vast datasets more accessible for groundbreaking research. This program standardizes data from both current and retired particle colliders, including the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the Tevatron at Fermilab, to create AI-ready representations of physics data for cross-experiment analysis. TREASURE will also convert research papers, datasets and code into user-friendly forms that can be trusted by scientists as they search for physics beyond the Standard Model.

Applying AI to astronomy

Fermilab’s contributions to the Genesis Mission will extend to astrophysics through the AI Universe effort. Researchers plan to apply advanced uncertainty-quantification methods to a state-of-the-art AI model trained on more than 200 million astronomical observations. This work provides astrophysicists with the tools necessary to make more precise predictions and identify meaningful patterns within large-scale astronomy datasets.

Connecting expertise

“AI is most powerful when it connects expertise across domains and institutions,” said Nhan Tran, head of AI coordination at Fermilab. “Through the Genesis Mission, we can integrate data, tools and expertise from all 17 national labs, creating a unified AI ecosystem that accelerates breakthroughs far beyond what any single lab could achieve.”

As the Genesis Mission mobilizes the full power of the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, Fermilab is uniquely positioned to make vital contributions toward solving the nation’s most pressing scientific challenges. From supercharging microelectronics design and enhancing particle accelerator R&D to transforming data analysis, the lab is helping drive the next wave of American innovation and discovery science.

Newbold is currently executive director of national laboratories at the Science and Technology Facilities Council in the United Kingdom, and prior to that he served as STFC’s director of particle physics.

He has been involved with DUNE since 2015, working on the data acquisition system and the production of accelerator and detector components provided by the U.K. Newbold will co-lead the project in its next stages of development, which include the installation and commissioning of the DUNE far detectors at the Sandford Underground Research Facility, production of the near detectors and preparations for the first scientific data and publications.

“It’s a huge privilege to be elected to the leadership of DUNE,” Newbold said. “After more than a decade of work, the next two years will be crucial for the experiment, as we enter the final stages of detector construction and installation and look towards the excitement of our first scientific results. I look forward to working with scientists, institutes and agencies worldwide to ensure the continued success of the program.”

Newbold’s tenure as DUNE co-spokesperson begins in early April, and he will serve in that role for two years.

“I would like to extend my thanks to Sergio Bertolucci for his leadership as co-spokesperson over the last four years. During this time, the collaboration reached several important milestones, and Sergio played a key role in shaping DUNE to reach this point,” said Sowjanya Gollapinni, current DUNE co-spokesperson. “Dave is an excellent physicist, and he brings extensive scientific management and leadership experience. I welcome Dave into his new role and look forward to working with him as we enter into a critical construction phase for DUNE.”

The DUNE collaboration consists of an international team of more than 1,500 scientists and engineers from more than 35 countries and CERN.

DUNE consists of two state-of-the-art particle detectors that will be housed in the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility. A smaller detector will be located at Fermilab in Illinois, and a much larger one will be constructed a mile beneath the surface at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. The South Dakota detector will be the largest of its type ever built and will use 70,000 tons of liquid argon and advanced technology to record neutrino interactions with unprecedented precision.

The experiment will be powered by Fermilab’s Proton Improvement Plan II. Currently under construction at Fermilab, PIP-II will produce the world’s most intense high-energy neutrino beam on its journey from Illinois to the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment in South Dakota.

In 2024, DUNE achieved a major milestone with the completion of excavation for the underground lab space in South Dakota. Since that time, crews have been hard at work outfitting the space with infrastructure to support the experiment, such as electricity, water and networking capabilities. Cryostat construction will begin this year as the project enters its third and final phase.

DUNE is expected to begin collecting data in 2029.

After preparing his lunch — usually a sandwich or leftovers — and driving to his workplace near Sudbury, Canada, the Fermilab senior scientist dons 15 pounds of safety gear. Like a city commuter catching his subway, Nguyen and 30 to 40 other workers must be ready to leave on schedule at 6:30 a.m. Unlike a subway, however, their mass transit is an elevator, known to miners as a cage, that takes them more than a mile below Earth’s surface in four minutes.

“I think there is a light inside, but they don’t turn it on, so we descend the shaft in darkness,” said Lauren Hsu, a scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, who has made this trip many times before. “They have to fit as many people into it as possible, so we are crammed in shoulder to shoulder. The cage descends so quickly that if you don’t swallow frequently on the descent, your ears will hurt from the pressure change.”

None of them will be back to the surface for another 10 hours. “If you go underground and you’re missing one critical screw, it can change your plans for the whole day,” said Hsu.

One of the world’s deepest laboratories, SNOLAB is a 6,000-square-yard underground space for experiments and supporting infrastructure. In a network of underground caverns originally carved out for a nickel mine, SNOLAB experiments are shielded from cosmic rays that could produce false positives in the detectors.

As a class-2000 clean room, SNOLAB can have no more than 2,000 particles per cubic foot of air, so the experiments are additionally protected from trace radioactivity originating in common materials such as dirt. These factors make SNOLAB ideal for studying rare phenomena like dark matter or neutrino oscillations. Its namesake experiment is the Nobel Prize-winning Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, or SNO, which has since been upgraded to SNO+.

Today, SNOLAB hosts a number of neutrino and astroparticle physics experiments, one of which is the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, or SuperCDMS. Along with the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment and the Fermilab-hosted Axion Dark Matter eXperiment-Gen2, SuperCDMS SNOLAB is a second generation dark matter search experiment. It is jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, with SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory serving as the lead laboratory.

After a timeline adjustment due to the COVID-19 pandemic, SuperCDMS’s installation, with the exception of its shielding, was completed last year. The collaboration just successfully cooled the experiment to the temperature required for the superconducting detectors to become operational, a temperature colder than outer space. Science-quality data taking is on schedule to start in mid-2026.

For Hsu, who has been part of CDMS efforts since 2007 when she was a postdoc at Fermilab, and Nguyen, who joined SuperCDMS in 2024, it’s a thrilling time. After recent retirements, they are now the only Fermilab representatives working on its installation, though Fermilab has been involved since the 1990s.

The predecessor to SuperCDMS was the Fermilab-led CDMS at the Soudan Underground Laboratory. After some minor upgrades, it became SuperCDMS Soudan, and operations ended in 2015. Three years later, SuperCDMS SNOLAB — an even bigger upgrade to CDMS — was approved for construction.

Today, the SuperCDMS collaboration has over 100 members from 25 institutions in North America, Europe and Asia. Member institutions contribute different pieces of the experiment, from the shielding, detectors and cold hardware to the background studies, reconstruction software, simulations and more.

“It’s like assembling a very intricate jigsaw puzzle where you have each piece made by a different person,” said Hsu, “and you expect it all to fit together perfectly the first time you try to put it together.” But before assembling a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces need to be in one place.

When the cage arrives underground, Nguyen and his colleagues must “tag in” — hang up their personal tags in a designated area to indicate who is underground. At the end of the day, they’ll remove their tags to ensure everyone knows who came back out.

Down here, Nguyen and the others always travel in groups flanked by guides: one leading and one behind. It is hot and dark, and everyone wears a headlamp. Together, they walk about a kilometer to the cavern that contains SNOLAB. Now they can finally remove the safety gear, take a shower and get dressed for the clean room — donning clean lab coveralls, hair nets, hard hats, safety glasses and safety boots — and eat breakfast in the underground kitchen. At last, they can enter the clean room and begin their eight-hour day of work.

For Nguyen and the half-dozen SuperCDMS collaborators typically with him, that has meant assembling and installing the latest dark matter direct-detection experiment.

Dark matter is the name given to a mysterious substance that makes up 85% of matter in the universe. It doesn’t interact with any kind of light and only interacts with gravity, so astrophysicists only know dark matter exists because we can observe its influence on normal matter.

In theory, dark matter particles are permeating Earth constantly — we just have to figure out a way to detect them. Physicists have approached the dark matter search with a variety of methods and types of experiments. As a direct-detection experiment, SuperCDMS looks for signals caused by dark matter particles themselves.

SuperCDMS is sensitive to so-called “light dark matter” — dark matter particles about the mass of a mass of a proton. It uses 10-centimeter-diameter silicon and germanium crystals that are photolithographically patterned with sensors. Scientists believe dark matter particles will scatter off the nuclei in the crystals and produce a type of vibration called a phonon.

The first phase of the cryogenic system takes the brunt of the heat load, cooling SuperCDMS from room temperature to 50 kelvin, about minus 370 degrees Fahrenheit. The next stage lowers the temperature from 50 kelvin to 4 kelvin, which is minus 452 degrees Fahrenheit, and the final stage brings it down to the goal of 0.02 kelvin — less than minus 459.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Fermilab led the design and fabrication of the cryogenic system, the warm electronics and associated infrastructure, and the calibration system, which was designed and built by Hsu. Fermilab also contributed the seismic platform on which the entire experiment stands. The platform is supported by springs that absorb the shock from a seismic event, somewhat like the suspension system of a car.

All these systems had to be brought down, piece by piece, into SNOLAB via the lone elevator. “Ideally what you would want to do is assemble your whole experiment on the surface and then just plop it down there,” said Hsu. “But the cage is very small, so we have to bring everything down piecemeal and put it together underground.”

To protect the integrity of the clean room, practically everything brought in must be cleaned to SNOLAB’s standards. Throughout the day, the lab space is vacuumed and cleaned frequently. And no one can return to the surface until the scheduled 4:30 p.m. cage ride up.

Despite the challenges, that time underground is incredibly rewarding. “The best part is meeting new people, making friends along the way, working as a team. It makes the day go faster,” said Nguyen. “Everyone is having a good time making progress. It’s a lot of fun.”

Last fall, SuperCDMS completed the installation of the cryogenic system and safety and operational checks. They then began the test of the cryogenic system, known as cooldown.

“It’s an unforgiving technology,” said Nguyen, who is the lead on the first stage of the cryogenic system, the 50-kelvin cooler. “If something doesn’t work, you don’t reach the ultimate 20 millikelvin.”

With cooldown completed, the collaboration is beginning to add voltage to the detectors to start measuring background and noise signals. They are aiming to start collecting publication-quality data later this year.

If dark matter exists in the form that SuperCDMS thinks it does, “the expected interaction rate is extremely low, said Hsu. “This is what we call a rare event search. If we’re lucky enough to even see a signal, we don’t expect to see more than a few events per year for our entire experiment.”

And when they do make a detection, SuperCDMS will ideally confirm this with signals from other dark matter experiments, like LUX-ZEPLIN.

In the end, the physicists are all excited to see the experiment function as designed, take good data, and hopefully make a detection. Basically, “I want to see us discover dark matter,” said Nguyen.

It would be quite a reward for those 4:30 a.m. wake-ups and long workdays.

The showcase was organized by the United Kingdom’s funding agency, UK Research and Innovation, or UKRI, to highlight the strength and outcomes of scientific partnerships between the U.K. and the United States. The event also provided opportunities for participants to engage with key stakeholders involved in research and innovation.

UKRI solicited success stories from its portfolio of funded projects, ultimately selecting seven research teams to honor with the Pioneering UK-US Breakthroughs Award. Peter McIntosh and Ed Cavanagh, leaders of the PIP-II team from UKRI’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, or STFC, received the award for their work on PIP-II cryomodules and superconducting radio-frequency technology.

PIP-II is the first particle accelerator built in the U.S. with significant contributions from international partners. In addition to the U.K. and U.S., institutions in France, India, Italy and Poland are delivering components and contributing their expertise and capabilities in superconducting radio-frequency and associated technologies to construct this beyond-state-of-the-art accelerator.

By accelerating protons at up to 800 million electronvolts, PIP-II will power Fermilab’s Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, a massive new neutrino experiment being built at the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility in South Dakota.

The PIP-II linac will comprise five different types of superconducting radio-frequency cryomodules — with 23 cryomodules in total — over its 215-meter length. The U.K. team is contributing three complete high-beta 650-megahertz cryomodules, which will be the last stage of the linear accelerator. Designed by Fermilab, these cryomodules are 10 meters long and contain six niobium cavities and intricate supporting systems.

UKRI’s involvement in PIP-II was borne out of the U.K. government’s investment of £79 million in LBNF/DUNE. As well as supporting the project, building the superconducting radio-frequency cryomodules needed for PIP-II allowed them to develop their own infrastructure and workforce.

“For the past 15 years, this has been a goal we’ve steadily worked toward,” said McIntosh, director of the STFC Accelerator Science and Technology Centre. “Through gradual growth and development, we’ve strengthened our capabilities and the PIP‑II project is now enabling us to move much closer to delivering complete, large‑scale, fully integrated SRF systems for the first time. It positions us extremely well to meet the UK’s future needs and firmly establishes ASTeC as a national Centre of Excellence in SRF.”

The opportunity to build and test components for PIP-II has multiplier effects for international collaborators, who gain expertise in accelerator technology that can be applied in their home countries, including the U.K.

For example, to support PIP-II, STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory was upgraded with specialized facilities, including a cavity test bunker, high-pressure rinse and clean rooms. They have established new specifications and procedures to ensure full compliance in preparing and assembling all PIP-II cryomodule sub-systems. These investments now enable teams at Daresbury to conduct SRF cavity and cryomodule preparation and qualification processes not previously possible in the U.K. — and now position the country as a serious contributor to the global particle accelerator complex.

“Neither country could have delivered these outcomes alone,” said Fermilab director Norbert Holtkamp. “Combining America’s scientific experience with the U.K.’s engineering agility is accelerating capability development and sharpening our collective technological leadership.”

In addition, partnerships with industry enabled the U.K.’s first domestically manufactured superconducting accelerating structures. This translates directly to future opportunities across medical imaging, radioisotope production security, quantum computing and future accelerator programs.

Furthermore, more than 40 apprentices and five graduates have been trained on PIP-II technology at Daresbury, strengthening the U.K. advanced-engineering talent pipeline.

“We deeply value international collaboration, and the work of our partners around the globe is a key to advancing our science here in America,” said Regina Rameika, associate director for the Office of High Energy Physics at the DOE Office of Science. “The contributions from the U.K. team are powering the future of neutrino science.”

The CMS experiment is one of the primary particle detectors at the Large Hadron Collider and was one of two detectors used to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson in 2012. The LHC Physics Center at Fermilab, commonly referred to as LPC, serves as a resource and physics analysis hub, primarily for the 700 U.S. physicists working in the international CMS collaboration.

The school’s rigorous curriculum covers physics, detector technology, computing, software and data analysis. This year’s session included 48 students — primarily graduate students with a small number of undergraduates — along with 48 facilitators and 11 lecturers. Facilitators included volunteers from the CMS experiment and the 2026 LPC Distinguished Researchers.

Innovations in artificial intelligence and analysis

The program combined traditional lectures with exercises in statistics, particle reconstruction, event simulation and machine learning. While machine learning has been a staple of the curriculum since 2019, this year featured a special demonstration of agentic AI used to simulate high-energy physics particle events.

During the latter half of the week, the focus shifted to an intensive group project. Teams of 10 students each completed all aspects of a full CMS analysis in just three days. The session culminated in a friendly competition where a panel of senior CMS researchers assessed each group’s technical understanding, teamwork and presentation skills.

Distinguished speakers and lecturers

Guest speakers from across the physics community presented lectures and offered insights throughout the week. Among the presenters were Fermilab Director Norbert Holtkamp, Fermilab Deputy Director for Science and Technology Bonnie Fleming and CMS collaboration Spokesperson Anadi Canepa. Additional experts in particle physics included Paddy Fox, Jeffrey Eldred and Scarlet Norberg of Fermilab; Matteo Cremonesi of Carnegie Mellon University; Tova Holmes of the University of Tennessee; Christoph Paus of MIT; Alejandro Gómez Espinoza of Carnegie Mellon; and Isobel Ojalvo of Princeton.

Fostering collaboration

The school also featured activities intended to foster collaboration, including group meals, a banquet featuring a trivia contest and evening social gatherings at a Fermilab recreational facility. Despite an intense week of early mornings and late nights, students maintained their enthusiasm, beginning with insightful questions during the opening lectures and concluding with “drum rolls” as the winners of the friendly competition were announced.

LPC Distinguished Researcher and school lecturer Christoph Paus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology commented, “The event turned out to be a full success, with students learning lessons needed for graduate school, as well as making essential connections with their peers and some of the more senior members of the CMS collaboration. I highly recommend the event to any student who is just starting or has already been involved in CMS for a while.”

It’s here that a multi-institutional team of scientists took measurements of correlated charge noise in a chip comprised of multiple superconducting qubits for the first time.

As reported in Nature Communications, their work will help inform the design of future quantum-based particle physics detectors, as well as develop noise reduction strategies to reduce qubit errors and decoherence.

Superconducting qubits are a leading option for building quantum computers. However, they are sensitive to disturbances from their environment and can make errors. By understanding how electrical fluctuations called charge noise affect superconducting qubits, scientists can find ways to reduce these errors and improve quantum computers.

When an ionizing particle, like a cosmic ray or gamma ray passes through such a chip, it can create bursts of charge that can impact information stored in qubits. Scientists can directly measure these events because the qubits used in the study are incredibly sensitive to fluctuations in charge.

“Understanding whether a charge burst could affect multiple qubits as the charge moves through the chip — what researchers call correlated charge noise — is crucial to scientists who use quantum sensors to detect very faint signals that are possibly from dark matter, and to computer scientists, who are interested in correcting errors,” said Daniel Bowring, a scientist at Fermilab and organizer of this study.

This research is an extension of that conducted in 2019 by collaborators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In that study, scientists measured correlated charge noise on the Earth’s surface using the same chip comprised of four superconducting qubits. Among their findings were signals detected from both cosmic rays and gamma rays.

In the more recent study at Fermilab, scientists used the very same four-qubit chip and placed it in the underground NEXUS lab to block most cosmic rays. With a lead shield surrounding the dilution refrigerator that houses the qubit chip, they took measurements with the shield both open and closed to isolate and compare the effects of gamma radiation.

“Qubits are sensitive to different types of faint signals. If we want to use them as particle detectors, we need to be sure we can tell these signals apart from each other,” said Bowring.

More specifically, they wanted to see what effect making things as quiet as possible would have on the rate of charge bursts on qubits and whether these effects were correlated in multiple qubits.

When comparing measurements, scientists expected to find a marked decrease in charge bursts with the shield closed. They did find a reduction, though overall less than expected. Interestingly, they found that, even with the shield closed, some correlated charge noise was present, indicating the presence of some other source of background interference.

“That leads us to believe something else besides the known gamma radiation is causing charge bursts inside the shield,” said Grace Bratrud, a graduate researcher at Northwestern University and lead author of the study. “What that may be is still up for debate. That’s the big question.”

Several studies are planned to investigate the source of excess charge bursts.

“Maybe there’s some source close to the qubit that produces some gamma rays we don’t know about,” said Bratrud. “We want to look more closely at those materials to see if they could be producing some radioactivity.”

From the quantum computing side, they want to increase observation time to see whether any trapped charge in the substrate releases over a longer timeframe.  

In parallel, scientists want to repeat the study at NEXUS using a highly optimized qubit-based sensor developed by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory called a superconducting quasiparticle amplifying transmon, or SQUAT, to compare how each detection method handles different energy levels.

“These comparisons will lead to new designs where we purposely engineer the amount of response to the environment,” said study coauthor Enectali Figueroa-Feliciano, a professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University. “Having that control will lead to quantum devices optimized to minimize their environmental response for use in quantum computing applications. It will also allow us to maximize it for quantum sensing applications.”

The study was conducted with support from the Quantum Science Center. Collaborating institutions include: Fermilab, Illinois Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, Tufts University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Florida in Gainesville, Université Grenoble, University of Toronto, Université Paris-Saclay, and Wellesley College.