An accelerator known as a muon collider could revolutionize particle physics—if it can be built. The December 2023 P5 report calls for R&D on a muon collider, stating, “This is our muon shot.” A muon collider could fit on the campus of Fermilab, enabling the U.S. to reclaim the lead in the continuing competition for the highest energy collider.

A new economic impact study shows the growing positive effects on economies in the U.S. through operations conducted by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. In Illinois and South Dakota, positive ripple effects from Fermilab spending contributed $1.6 billion in economic output during fiscal year 2022 and supported 7,242 jobs.

As excavation of the underground facilities for DUNE nears completion, crews are now working on laying concrete floors and spraying shotcrete on the walls of the caverns. The next priority is to prepare the south cavern for cryostat erection by installing sprinklers, fire alarms, an elevator, and overhead cranes

The CMS collaboration announced the observation of two photons creating two tau leptons in proton–proton collisions. This is the first time this process has been seen in proton–proton collisions using the precise capabilities of the CMS detector. It is also the most precise measurement of the tau’s anomalous magnetic moment and offers a new way to constrain the existence of new physics.

Fermilab’s 2024 Inventor Recognition Ceremony celebrated patents and ideas from Fermilab employees with notable guests. In 2023, 12 new patents were issued with 16 inventors associated with those patents working at Fermilab.

Rigging crews at SURF are performing a series of tests using a large wooden model L-beam built to the same scale as one of the huge steel components that arrived in South Dakota in January after being shipped from Spain. The tests are being done in anticipation of lowering the real thing down the shaft to the underground 4850 level.

Physicists at the University of Texas at Arlington are building portions of the first two detectors for DUNE that will be installed underground in South Dakota. The UTA team will construct 100 modules for the first detector and all 200 of the modules for the second detector.

The Tachyon Project of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been awarded a five-year grant from the U.S. DOE HEP to model, simulate and validate the transport, transmission and analysis of particle physics data using extreme-scale computing systems, AI and ML techniques. Tachyon will utilize data and information from Fermilab to model the entire distributed infrastructure required to transmit and analyze data from DUNE to the computing facilities at the Argonne in near real time.

The funded research areas include state-of-the-art technologies for detecting dark matter; 3D integrated sensors to process tiny, ultrafast signals with high precision; and powerful, compact electron-beam accelerators for industrial use.

A research team as part of the the Dark Energy Survey collaboration used artificial intelligence to research dark energy more precisely from a map of dark and visible matter in the Universe covering the last seven billion years. The new AI technique allowed researchers to use much more information from the maps than would be possible with the previous method.