A window of opportunity: Physicists test titanium target windows for particle beam
Fermilab is currently upgrading its accelerator complex to produce the world’s most powerful beam of high-energy neutrinos. To generate these particles, the accelerators will send an intense beam of protons traveling near the speed of light through a maze of particle accelerator components before passing through metallic “windows” and colliding with a stationary target. Researchers are testing the endurance of windows made of a titanium alloy, exposing samples to high-intensity proton beams to see how well the material will perform.
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.
SENSEI gets quiet
A good dark matter detector has a lot in common with a good teleconference setup: You need a sensitive microphone and a quiet room. The SENSEI experiment has demonstrated world-leading sensitivity and the low background needed for an effective search for low-mass dark matter.
Now complete, telescope instrument is poised to begin its search for answers about dark energy
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, which will map millions of galaxies in 3-D, reaches final milestone toward its startup.
The sourdough starter physics family
A sourdough family started at Fermilab by a graduate student visiting from Texas A&M has continued to expand and flourish.
Mammoths, mastodons and the fruit they left behind at Fermilab
If you live in the Chicago suburbs and have ever taken a walk on the Fermilab hike-and-bike trail along Batavia Road, you’ve probably noticed large trees with long, slender bean pods, which — even after they fall to the ground — are ignored by wildlife. Not that long ago, mammoths, mastodons and giant ground sloths roamed the Fermilab grounds and feasted on these bean pods, along with the fruit of two additional species that still can be found growing on site.
High school students: Hear from professionals at Fermilab Online STEM Career Expo
Fermilab takes its popular STEM Career Expo to the web. This year the annual event, an opportunity for high school students to hear from more than two dozen STEM professionals about their careers, is offered as five recorded panel discussions now available on the Fermilab website. Students can learn how neutrino physicists, bioinformatics scientists, actuaries and others got to where they are and hear from people who work jobs in fields that students might pursue in the coming years.
Fermilab in the news
From The Great Courses Daily, June 2, 2020: Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln writes about modern science: how it is a process for fitting facts into some interconnected whole, for a bigger picture, why it’s an extremely powerful tool and the different terms for the meaning of basic scientific methods.
From Physics Today, June 1, 2020: Somewhere in the laws of physics, particles must be allowed to behave differently from their antiparticles. If they weren’t, the universe would contain equal amounts of matter and antimatter, all the particles and antiparticles would promptly annihilate one another, and none of us would exist. Fermilab’s NOvA neutrino experiment and the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab, are pinning down CP violation, the property that could explain the imbalance.
From Physics Today, June 1, 2020: Fermilab’s Chris Quigg and University of Chicago’s Mel Shochet recount the extraordinary career of Fermilab physicist and National Medal of Technology recipient Alvin Tollestrup, who died on Feb. 9.