When scientists begin taking data with the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment in the mid-2020s, they’ll be able to peer 13.8 billion years into the past and address one of the biggest unanswered questions in physics: Why is there more matter than antimatter? To do this, they’ll send a beam of neutrinos on an 800-mile journey from Fermilab to Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. To detect neutrinos, researchers at several DOE national laboratories, including Fermilab, are developing integrated electronic circuitry that can operate in DUNE’s detectors — at temperatures around minus 200 degrees Celsius. They plan to submit their designs this summer.

From Nature Physics, April 6, 2020: The Physics Beyond Colliders study was launched three years ago to explore the future physics projects below the high-energy frontier, including explorations of the dark sector and precision measurements of strongly interacting processes. The methodology employed to compare the reach of those projects has raised interest in the collider, neutrino and nonaccelerator communities.

The ADMX experiment trains scientists to deal with real signals—by creating fake ones.

From Quanta Magazine, March 30, 2020: Three progressively heavier copies of each type of matter particle exist, and no one knows why. A new paper by Steven Weinberg takes a stab at explaining the pattern, and summarizes a paper by Fermilab scientists Bogdan Dobrescu and Patrick Fox on the spread of the particles’ masses.

From Nature Physics, April 2020: Fermilab scientist Pushpa Bhat and her University of Melbourne scientist Geoffrey Taylor discuss particle physics experiments in the United States and Asia and how interest in the development of next-generation colliders has been rekindled.

From Semiconductor Engineering, April 6, 2020: Fermilab, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have built an enormous superconducting magnet — one of 16 — that will be used in the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator project at CERN in Europe.

From Physics World, April 3, 2020: A collaboration that includes Fermilab scientists is exploring how quantum computing could be used to analyze the vast amount of data produced by experiments on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The researchers have shown that a “quantum support vector machine” can help physicists make sense out of the huge amounts of information generated at CERN.

Just like we orbit the sun and the moon orbits us, the Milky Way has satellite galaxies with their own satellites. Drawing from data on those galactic neighbors, a new model suggests the Milky Way should have an additional 100 or so very faint satellite galaxies awaiting discovery.

From Astronomy, March 31, 2020: Astronomers have discovered 139 new minor planets orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune by searching through data from the Dark Energy Survey, which is led by Fermilab. The new method for spotting small worlds is expected to reveal many thousands of distant objects in coming years — meaning these first hundred or so are likely just the tip of the iceberg.

From Physics Today, April 1, 2020: Fermilab scientist Vladimir Shiltsev provides a rundown of the advances that the particle accelerator community has made in increasing beam energy, power, luminosity and brilliance and summarizes the breakthroughs and discoveries that lie ahead for the field of beam physics.