Our world is governed by general relativity, which sees gravity as the effects of massive objects warping space-time. The world of particle physics, on the other hand, envisions all forces as mediated by force-carrying particles — and ignores gravity entirely. This year’s Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to three theorists who proposed a way to marry these contradictory descriptions: with a theory called “supergravity.”
From The University of Arizona News, Aug. 1, 2019: The University of Arizona touts two members of the Dark Energy Survey who received DOE awards.
The award is designed to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during the crucial early years, when many scientists do their most formative work.
Nord and a University of Chicago scientist will apply the tools of artificial intelligence to accelerate discovery by automating the design and execution of cosmic experiments. The grant is part of an initiative to provide seed funding for collaborative projects in AI and quantum science between the university, Fermilab and Argonne National Laboratory.
On July 15 in Ghent, Belgium, the European Physical Society formally presented the CDF and DZero collaborations with the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize “for the discovery of the top quark and the detailed measurement of its properties.”
Giaccone’s research focuses on particle accelerator cavities — the structures that transfer energy to particle beams as the beams race through them. She and her team use plasma to process the inner surface of the cavities in order to remove contaminations. This new technique results in a better-performing accelerator. Her work was recently recognized at the International Conference on RF Superconductivity.
The DOE Project Leadership Institute has recognized Lari and her capstone project teammates for for their outstanding case study analysis with the 2018 Capstone Project Award.
From UChicago News, July 25, 2019: The University of Chicago is seeding promising projects with Argonne National Laboratory and Fermilab in the emerging fields of artificial intelligence and quantum science.
Fermilab scientist Brian Nord is one of the grant recipients.
Postdoc Guillermo Fernandez Moroni is recognized for his outstanding work on the SENSEI experiment at Fermilab. Dark matter experiments are quite sensitive to unwanted background noise, and Moroni found a way to limit this noise for SENSEI, increasing the sensitivity of the experiment by a factor of a thousand, making it the most sensitive of its kind in the world.
Dhuley and his team at the Illinois Accelerator Research Center have received the William E. Gifford Award for their work on cryocooling acceleration cavities. Their research on cryocooler-based systems is paving the way for compact particle accelerators that can operate at ultracold temperatures without complicated cooling infrastructure.