Scientists Have Been Hunting This Elusive Particle for a Decade. It Doesn’t Exist

A groundbreaking experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which will probe a narrow, previously unexplored region of mass where some scientists believe dark matter lurks, is one step closer to taking experimental data.

The Matter-wave Atomic Gradiometer Interferometric Sensor experiment — also called MAGIS-100 — is a collaboration that also includes Stanford University, Northwestern University and eight other research institutions in the U.S. and the U.K. The interferometer will occupy a 100-meter shaft at Fermilab used years ago for accessing underground experiments. Once constructed, MAGIS-100 will be the world’s largest vertical atom interferometer.

The project has reached an important milestone — construction is complete on a laser lab that will contain the infrastructure to generate high-power laser beams used to operate the interferometer.  Construction began in 2023.

“Finishing the laser lab marks completion of our first major project construction.”

“Finishing the laser lab marks completion of our first major project construction,” said Jim Kowalkowski, MAGIS-100 project manager. “Now we’re moving experimental equipment into the laser lab; we’re doing a lot of testing; we’re characterizing different components to understand any problems and correct them if we can. A lot has to happen.”

In the experiment, strontium atom clouds colder than outer space will be dropped into the 100-meter shaft enclosing the interferometer. Carefully timed laser pulses work like beam splitters and mirrors for the atoms, splitting each cloud into two separate paths and then bringing them back together. Similar to what occurs when two rocks are thrown into a pool and the waves interfere with each other, any disturbance in one path will show up as an interference pattern on a camera lens.

The interferometer will be incredibly precise, capable of detecting extremely small changes in gravitational fields that could detect difficult-to-observe phenomena, such as the presence of dark matter or gravitational waves. Scientists hope to use it to tease out ultralight dark matter by stimulating interactions between theorized particles of dark matter (axions), and regular matter (electrons or light).  But before the experiment can begin to discover new physics phenomena, there is much work to do. The research team must now begin to set up and test the intricate laser systems that will feed the rest of the experiment.

The making of the world’s largest interferometer

The laser lab is fully enclosed to prevent light leakage, and a sophisticated laser safety interlock system is being built to control access to the room to prevent any accidental exposure. Before it can operate, Fermilab must certify the interlock system meets national laser safety criteria.

A sturdy tower redirects a tuned laser beam from optical tables that hold the main laser system to a transport tube running to the shaft that will hold a vertically mounted interferometer. Here, an optical telescope redirects and focuses the laser light so it is the right size and position to interact with the strontium atoms, all contained within a vacuum.  

Three atom sources, being constructed by a group at Stanford University, will be placed at the top, middle and bottom of the interferometer. These devices will produce strontium atom clouds near absolute zero —negative 273.15 degrees Celsius. Special electrical fields will shuttle these clouds to an area where they are thrown upward and allowed to fall the length of the shaft. From there, the interferometry beams from the laser lab, directed by special timing systems, will take over, striking the clouds and causing them to split and rejoin the paths of the free-falling atoms. Imaging cameras throughout the interferometer will be used to record their behavior.

Considering the optics

Now the painstaking process to study and characterize the full experiment environment begins. A team led by Tim Kovachy from Northwestern University is leading exploration into how each component is affected by outside sources — for example, how vibrations from the ground and building equipment contribute to fluctuations in the laser beam trajectory.

“The alignment of each component must be extremely accurate.”

“The alignment of each component must be extremely accurate,” said Dylan Temples, a researcher at Fermilab who works on MAGIS-100. “Even small vibrations or strain in the table on which the elements are set up might lead to noise or interference that could seriously impact the experiment.”

The team must ensure any interesting signals they observe are correctly attributed to actual physics phenomena, not from unknown sources that can masquerade as good observations. In addition, knowing about these unexpected negative effects allows them to adjust, ensuring everything is properly aligned and works as expected before the experiment runs.

“We have already made initial measurements of the mechanical resonances of the tower in the laser lab, which inform us how the tower will respond to vibrations,” said Kovachy.

In parallel to optics system testing, researchers are starting to test the 17-foot sections that will comprise the 100-meter vacuum tower, within which the vacuum pressure is extremely low, similar to that on the moon. Each section must be magnetically and electromagnetically insulated to prevent environmental signal interference. The welding process for the stainless-steel sheets used for the vacuum tubes can magnetize material along the seam, creating potential noise that could alter measurements during the experiment. Researchers use special measuring devices to locate these unwanted magnetic fields.  

As the laser lab setup continues over the next year, construction will begin to prepare the shaft for installations of the vacuum tube sections and atom sources. Plans are to deliver the atom sources  Stanford University is building in late 2026 and install them, along with the vacuum tube modules in 2027. 

Installation of the MAGIS-100 experiment is currently on track to conclude at the end of 2027, along with some early data-taking. Commissioning is planned to begin in 2028.

Groundbreaking work by a joint team from the Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center, hosted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and NYU Langone Health was recognized as one of the top 10 submissions in the National Institutes of Health Quantum Computing Challenge.

The team, called QuantuMRI, developed a quantum algorithm to simulate how human tissue responds during MRI scans, paving the way for more accurate and efficient medical imaging technologies. QuantuMRI received a $10,000 award and advanced to the challenge’s second phase, where finalists will further test and demonstrate their solutions for clinical and biomedical use cases.

“This achievement reflects the kind of innovation we aim to foster through DOE-supported quantum research.”

“It’s inspiring to see a team like Fermilab-NYU bring bold, cross-disciplinary thinking to such an important area of biomedical research,” said Zachary Goff-Eldredge, program manager in the Department of Energy’s Office of High Energy Physics. “This achievement reflects the kind of innovation we aim to foster through DOE-supported quantum research. I’m excited to see how their work continues to evolve throughout the NIH challenge and how it might ultimately shape the future of medical imaging.”

MRI scans offer detailed, non-invasive views of soft tissues for medical diagnoses. The technology relies on intrinsic magnetic moments that atoms in the human tissues possess. These atoms interact with an external magnetic field and enable the detection of local features of the tissue.  

Quantitative MRI, or qMRI, goes a step further by measuring how the relaxation times of the local magnetic moments are influenced by biophysical tissue properties — offering clinicians deeper insights into subtle changes in tissue composition and making it easier to detect and characterize changes that may not be visible with traditional methods.

The challenge? Simulating these complex tissue behaviors requires significant computational resources as researchers aim for greater resolution and accuracy. The Fermilab-NYU team aims to leverage quantum computing to advance qMRI by enabling fast, high-resolution estimates of multiple tissue properties that are highly accurate and reproducible.

NYU first joined the SQMS collaboration in 2022 with a plan to explore a new method for analyzing MRI scans. The collaboration reflects a growing interdisciplinary effort to bridge physics, computer science, and medicine — combining the SQMS Center’s expertise in quantum systems with NYU Langone’s clinical insight and leadership in imaging research.

As the NIH challenge continues, the Fermilab-NYU team will build on this early success, aiming to deliver scalable, high-resolution and reproducible qMRI tools that could ultimately enhance patient care and diagnostics across a wide range of conditions. Currently, the team is engaged in the second stage of the competition. The NIH Quantum Computing Challenge concludes in the fall of 2027.

Four outstanding researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory were presented 2025 Universities Research Association Honorary Awards during a ceremony at Fermilab earlier this year. URA is a consortium of over 90 leading research-oriented universities, primarily in the United States, and also in Italy and the United Kingdom.

“This year’s awardees remind us that science thrives when brilliant minds come together with persistence and purpose, laying the groundwork for future generations.”

“Each of these awards tells a story of discovery, commitment and collaboration,” said John Mester, URA President and CEO. “Celebrating researchers at every career stage honors their extraordinary contributions to Fermilab’s mission and highlights their essential role in advancing U.S. scientific leadership. This year’s awardees remind us that science thrives when brilliant minds come together with persistence and purpose, laying the groundwork for future generations.”

Doctoral Thesis Award — Gray Putnam

The URA Honorary Doctoral Thesis Award was presented to Gray Putnam, a Lederman Science Fellow at Fermilab, whose dissertation described the data taking, processing, calibration and analysis that led to the first complete physics result of the ICARUS experiment at Fermilab.

As part of Fermilab’s Short-Baseline Neutrino program, ICARUS is a liquid-argon time projection chamber, or LArTPC, that detects neutrinos produced by the Fermilab accelerator complex. LArTPCs consist of a tank of liquid argon containing a high-voltage cathode plane across from a set of anode detector planes. Charged particles traveling through the liquid argon ionize argon atoms, liberating electrons, and an electric field applied to the system causes these electrons to drift toward the anode planes.

“We detect those ionization electrons, and that detection forms the actual image,” said Putnam. “They’re wonderfully visual. That’s my favorite thing about working with this technology — you can actually see everything that the particles do, which is rare in particle physics.”

As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Putnam helped calibrate ICARUS by refining the LArTPC, likening it to correcting lens distortion in a camera. Just as a camera’s lens alters how objects appear, Putnam explained, the way ionization signals are detected in a LArTPC can distort particle tracks.

Initially, there was a mismatch between simulated and real data in ICARUS, leading to an incorrect representation of the detector’s behavior. So, Putnam developed a tuning procedure to address this, and the real data and simulations came back into alignment. With the detector properly calibrated, the entire physics program for ICARUS was enabled.

In the award citation, URA specifically praised Putnam’s “pioneering work to understand and quantify novel effects” in LArTPCs, which will be vital for current and future experiments.

Early Career Award — James Mott

Fermilab scientist James Mott received this year’s URA Honorary Early Career Award “for his leadership and scientific contributions to the Muon g-2 experiment,” one of Fermilab’s most notable particle physics experiments.

Muon g-2 measured the wobble of a subatomic particle called the muon, which is similar to the electron but about 200 times its mass. Theoretical physicists created predictions of its wobble, known as the magnetic moment of the muon, and experimental physicists made measurements to test if the values agreed.

In June, the Muon g-2 collaboration published their third and final measurement of the magnetic moment, which agreed with their previous measurements and surpassed their targeted precision.

Mott began working on Muon g-2 when he became a postdoctoral researcher at Boston University in 2014. At that time, Muon g-2 at Fermilab was ramping up, and Mott was in an ideal place to jump onboard.

Mott ended up leading the design effort for electronics for the experiment’s tracker system. He stayed involved for its prototyping, installation, commissioning and operation. As the tracker installation began in 2016, Mott became based at Fermilab full time.

By the time Muon g-2 started taking data in 2018, Mott had built up vast knowledge in different areas of the experiment. During the first physics data-taking run, Run 1, he participated in the analyses of the data and assisted with corrections to the beam dynamics. “I kind of dipped my toe in quite a lot of different analysis areas,” he said. In 2020, Mott officially joined Fermilab as a Wilson Fellow.

For Runs 2 and 3 of the experiment, Mott was the analysis coordinator. “The second unblinding, for me personally, was really important,” he said. “That was my baby. The relief when that one agreed with our previous result was really powerful.”

That leadership during Runs 2 and 3, as well as his contributions to beam dynamics corrections, earned Mott the URA Honorary Early Career Award.

Today, Mott continues contributing as a reviewer for the collaboration’s next analysis and is transitioning to another muon experiment at Fermilab — Mu2e — ensuring lessons from Muon g-2 are passed along.

Tollestrup Award for Postdoctoral Research — Lauren Yates

Lauren Yates, a newly minted assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame, received the 2025 URA Honorary Tollestrup Award for Postdoctoral Research for her work on the Short-Baseline Near Detector, or SBND.

Yates completed her doctoral research on MicroBooNE, part of the trio of detectors in Fermilab’s Short-Baseline Neutrino Program along with ICARUS and SBND. She said she was happy to participate in MicroBooNE’s data analyses but wanted a chance to help build a detector from the ground up. So when it was time for her postdoctoral research at Fermilab, Yates leapt at the chance to join SBND, bringing lessons learned from MicroBooNE to the commissioning of this new detector.

Like ICARUS, the Short-Baseline Near Detector is a liquid-argon time projection chamber: a tank of liquid argon with a high voltage that causes ionized electrons to drift toward the detection plane. SBND requires 100 kilovolts — the equivalent voltage of approximately 8,000 car batteries.

“The whole detector is inside the cryostat, but you can’t put your high-voltage power supply inside the cryostat,” said Yates.

To get the high voltage from the outside power supply into the detector, physicists needed a piece of equipment called a high-voltage feed-through. Yates said it took several months of testing feed-throughs before they finally found one that worked. The day they got the cathode to 100 kilovolts for the first time is one of Yates’s favorite memories from SBND.

At the same time the feed-throughs were being tested, Yates was coordinating SBND’s commissioning. She compared a detector’s commissioning to turning on a car for the first time — except it’s a brand new, one-of-a-kind car that was assembled from scratch and built with parts fabricated by many teams working separately.

“Watching the car just mosey down the driveway for the first time is very exciting,” said Yates. “We got to watch it go from that to doing 60 on the highway with confidence.”

In all, it took nine months to commission SBND. Yates pointed out they had a relatively large team, with up to 50 people contributing much of their time at the busiest point.

“There’s half a dozen or so different subsystems of the detector. For the detector to really, truly fully work, they all have to be coordinated, and they all independently have to achieve certain milestones,” said Yates. “Then everything has to work together to achieve other milestones.”

For her contributions to SBND’s high-voltage system and her leadership of the SBND detector commissioning, Yates received this year’s Tollestrup Award. “I was stunned in the end at how everyone worked so hard, and things really worked out, even though there were serious challenges,” she said.

Engineering Award — Chris Jensen

Chris Jensen began his long career at Fermilab in January 1990 in the same group he is part of today: the Power Electronics Systems Department within the Accelerator Directorate. His first task at Fermilab was to design a pulse-power system for the Main Injector beamline. With a pulse-power system, energy is accumulated and stored over a long period of time and then delivered in short bursts. One use of pulse power in particle accelerators is to transfer particles from one accelerator to another.

For his first 25 years at Fermilab, Jensen worked on everything pulse-power. He designed systems for the Fermilab’s powerful Tevatron accelerator and the European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser Facility in Germany.

Then, in 2016, Jensen was appointed director of the Power Electronics Systems Department. At the time, his group was working on the horn power supply for the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility, or LBNF. When some colleagues retired, Jensen took over as lead engineer of the project, drawing on his experience from working on the Neutrinos at the Main Injector, or NuMI, and the Booster Neutrino Beam horn power supplies.

The LBNF horn system is a series of pulsed magnetic devices that will focus the beam of secondary particles that make neutrinos. Without the horns, LBNF would generate way fewer neutrinos for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. So, ensuring the power supply is robust and reliable is necessary for the success of Fermilab’s flagship experiment.

Because the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility horn system is designed to last 30 years, it must be tested thoroughly. Once installed and operational, accessing and repairing the system is neither easy nor practical. And if a faulty power supply caused any of the horns to fail, it would take a long time to replace them. Jensen and his team have been testing the power supply prototype over the last year, identifying and fixing the parts that need attention. They are now in production for a power supply to test individual LBNF horns before they are installed in the final system.

“This is really the culmination of years of work,” said Jensen. “Design started at least 10 years ago, and now it’s finally coming to fruition. The hard part is not the design, it’s making it work.”

Jensen has been in the Power Electronics Systems Department — though the group’s name has evolved over the years — for his entire Fermilab career. Two years ago, he became deputy department head, and he is now looking forward to letting others lead new projects.

This year’s URA Honorary Engineering Award recognizes his “invaluable three-and-a-half-decade career as an expert in power electronics systems, culminating in his recent groundbreaking work proving a prototype power supply for the LBNF Horn Focusing System, a critical achievement for the DUNE experiment.”

“It’s really been a group effort, said Jensen. “I owe a lot of thanks to a lot of people. I received the award, but there have been a whole lot of people contributing.”

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is not only one of the world’s premier particle physics and accelerator research facilities but also a key innovation hub for DOE in its goals of advancing cutting-edge fields that include quantum information science and artificial intelligence. Over the course of this year, Fermilab’s dedicated team of scientists, engineers, technicians and operations staff advanced the lab’s scientific mission through impactful new results, exciting collaborations and progress on essential projects that support its future as the neutrino research capital of the world.

Building the neutrino capital of the world

Fermilab is the host laboratory for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, the largest neutrino experiment ever undertaken. The DUNE collaboration has grown to more than 1,500 collaborators from more than 35 countries and seeks to answer some of the biggest questions about our universe by studying elusive particles called neutrinos. The DUNE far detectors will be installed in the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility a mile underground in new, massive caverns recently excavated in Lead, South Dakota, at the Sanford Underground Research Facility. With excavation finished, 2025 work centered on outfitting the underground research space with essential infrastructure such as power and utilities. This year, more than 3,000 tons of steel for DUNE’s far detectors arrived in South Dakota. An in-kind contribution from CERN, the steel will form the structures for the experiment’s cryostat modules that will house the far detectors, each measuring 216 feet long, 62 feet wide and 60 feet high.

The powerful neutrino beam for DUNE will be generated by a new 215-meter-long linear particle accelerator, which is currently being built at Fermilab by the Proton Improvement Plan-II project. Construction at the PIP-II site made important progress, and in January 2025, an essential piece of equipment, the PIP-II coldbox, arrived at Fermilab after a two-month voyage from France. It is now installed in the Cryogenic Plant Building on the PIP-II site in Batavia.

In October, the PIP-II collaboration received authorization for use and possession of the High-Bay Building, part of the in-progress Linac Complex. This allows the collaboration to begin installing accelerator components and support equipment, first focusing on components previously installed in the PIP-II Injector Test Facility. Soon, they will take on management of the linac tunnel, which will allow them to continue installing technical components like the cryogenic transfer line, radiofrequency waveguides and related infrastructure.

Producing exciting new results on the Intensity Frontier

In 2025, Fermilab researchers presented impactful new science results, and their work was published in more than 540 scientific papers in highly respected journals. As a vivid example of Fermilab’s scientific leadership, this year brought the long-awaited third and final measurement of the muon magnetic anomaly by the Fermilab Muon g-2 collaboration. Released in June, the result agrees with their published results from 2021 and 2023 but with a much better precision of 127 parts per billion, making it the world’s most precise measurement of the muon magnetic anomaly. While there are still disagreements about the predicted value among theorists, this experimental measurement is a tremendous achievement of precision. It also marks an end to the Muon g-2 experiment’s main analysis — though scientists will perform more analyses with the data, including measuring a property of the muon called the electric dipole moment and testing a fundamental property of physical laws known as charge, parity and time-reversal symmetry.

Along with the Muon g-2 results, Fermilab advanced a variety of particle physics research initiatives this year. Fermilab’s Short-Baseline Neutrino Program consists of three liquid-argon time projection chamber experiments — SBND, MicroBooNE and ICARUS — that use the Booster Neutrino Beam to study neutrino oscillation. SBND, the Short-Baseline Near Detector, now beginning its second year of operation, sees about 7,000 neutrinos per day — the largest sample of neutrino interactions in liquid argon in the world. The collaboration presented some of their initial data this year, and they aim to publish their first cross-section measurement in 2026.

MicroBooNE has been working to find evidence for a fourth neutrino — the sterile neutrino, which could explain anomalous behavior observed by prior experiments. Shortly after celebrating the 10th anniversary of its start of operations, MicroBooNE published a new result in Nature on Dec. 3 that ruled out the possibility of a single sterile neutrino with 95% certainty. This achievement may compel physicists to look elsewhere to solve one of the neutrinos’ many mysteries.

The far detector for the SBN Program, ICARUS, celebrated five continuous years of data collection. Over the past year, the collaboration published and produced various analyses about physics beyond the Standard Model, dark matter candidates, neutrino cross-sections, the performance of the detector, and more.

All three detectors contribute to the development of particle detection technology for DUNE, and in 2025, the Booster Neutrino Beam itself achieved record-breaking beam delivery.

Elsewhere on the Fermilab site and beyond, the NuMI Off-axis ν_e Appearance experiment, or NOvA, is a long-baseline neutrino experiment studying a phenomenon called neutrino oscillation. In October, the NOvA collaboration published joint results with Japan’s T2K collaboration in Nature. This initial analysis provides some of the most precise neutrino-oscillation measurements in the field, adding to physicists’ knowledge about the particles and paving the way for DUNE and other future and current neutrino experiments.

In November, researchers at Fermilab moved the final subdetector for the Mu2e experiment into the experiment hall, marking a major step forward for the collaboration. Once completed, Mu2e will search for a rare muon conversion that may unlock evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model.

Advancing the Energy Frontier on an international scale

As the host institution for U.S. scientists working on the CMS experiment at the CERN international particle physics laboratory, Fermilab had the opportunity to contribute to another record-breaking year for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world.

This year, CMS recorded a total integrated luminosity — the number of particles colliding in an area at a time — of nearly 500 inverse femtobarns, far surpassing expectations. Fermilab’s CMS team was essential to enabling the recording of this data. The CMS collaboration produced an updated suite of the most precise measurement of the Higgs boson’s properties and new limits on its self-coupling. The LHC is undergoing a major upgrade to become the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider. Several components for this are being developed, assembled and tested by the HL-LHC Accelerator Upgrade Project, a consortium of U.S. national laboratories and institutions that includes Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Fermilab. Among the components are four quadrupole accelerator magnets that Fermilab shipped to CERN earlier this year. These quadrupoles weigh 25 tons each and contain everything needed to focus the proton beams that will pass through their cores.

Making strides toward solving mysteries of the universe

Fermilab has eyes on the skies with DESI, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, an international experiment managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Fermilab contributed key components to DESI, aiding in the exploration of the far reaches of the universe. In 2025, the DESI collaboration published new results and released the largest 3D map of the universe yet. The results found that combining the DESI data with other experiments shows signs that the impact of dark energy may be weakening over time — and the model of how the universe works may need an update.

Meanwhile, in October, data from the Fermilab-led Dark Energy Survey found that the current model of the universe is still the best description of what we observe. The new results were from a study led by University of Chicago scientists in which they cataloged the universe by mapping huge clusters of galaxies. The DES collaboration expects to announce updated cosmology results early in 2026.

Recently, Fermilab scientists finished installing the dark-matter experiment SuperCDMS at SNOLAB, a 6,000-square-yard underground space in an active nickel mine in Sudbury, Canada. Hosted by SLAC National Laboratory, SuperCDMS has more than 100 members from 25 institutions in North America, Europe and Asia. After they finish this current period of cooling and testing, the collaboration aims to start collecting data in early 2026.

Fermilab also completed construction of its laser laboratory for the world’s largest vertical atom interferometer, called MAGIS-100. With the goal of discovering new physics, the research space will house state-of-the-art lasers for a quantum sensing device capable of seeing the tiniest signals emanating from the farthest reaches of the universe.

Leading the way in quantum and AI research

Fermilab is the home of the Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center, one of five research centers DOE funds as part of a national initiative to develop and deploy the world’s most powerful quantum computers and sensors. In November, DOE renewed SQMS funding for another five years — a momentous achievement for the center and for Fermilab.

SQMS made important research contributions in its fifth year. These achievements included groundbreaking demonstrations of superconducting coupled systems with impressively longer lifetimes that open the path to more powerful qudit-based quantum computers; advancing the understanding of defects and disorder that lead to variations in the performance of quantum devices; new approaches for quantum arithmetic that could facilitate the use of quantum computers in medicine; and new methods for experimental modeling that result in improved limits on the question of quantum mechanics behaving nonlinearly.

In December, Fermilab and SQMS hosted Exploring the Quantum Universe – a Fermilab Quantum Symposium. The event attracted over 600 attendees representing more than 100 different organizations. The two-day event brought together leaders from across the global quantum community to reflect on recent progress and outline next steps for the field.

Since 2020, SQMS researchers have produced 306 publications and 10 patent applications. SQMS now has 43 collaborating institutions, including new industrial partners.

Fermilab is involved in more quantum research beyond SQMS. At Fermilab’s NEXUS laboratory — the Northwestern Experimental Underground Site — researchers measured correlated charge noise in superconducting qubits underground for the first time. Their results, published in Nature in November, will inform future dark matter detection research and provide invaluable insights into how to optimize quantum sensors by reducing background noise.

To harness the power of artificial intelligence and ensure that AI advances are incorporated efficiently, Fermilab inaugurated the AI Coordination Office. This cross‑laboratory team serves as the central hub for strategic planning, mapping AI opportunities to scientific and operational priorities while aligning them with DOE’s objectives. It also aims to bring state-of-the-art tools to Fermilab staff and tailor them for high-energy physics‑specific use cases.

In November, DOE announced the Genesis Mission, an initiative that links the national laboratories with industry and academia to harness frontier AI and quantum science. Fermilab is primed to play an important role, both as a creator of cutting‑edge AI methods and as a steward of the high‑energy physics mission.

And Fermilab is already leveraging artificial intelligence to drive greater efficiency and productivity across both scientific research and day-to-day operations. Fermilab delivered a number of high‑impact AI achievements, including tools and techniques for intelligent sensing, AI-ready datasets for particle collision data, AI tools for accelerator operations, new ML-accelerated models to speed up simulations of CMS and accelerator systems, and more.

In 2025, the lab continued participation in the Tachyon Project, which will model the entire distributed infrastructure required to transmit and analyze data from DUNE to the computing facilities at Fermilab and Argonne National Laboratory in near real-time. The goal is to develop end-to-end models, using artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, of the data paths used by current neutrino experiments and apply those models to develop data paths and workflows for DUNE.

Making breakthroughs in emerging technologies

In November, DOE announced a partnership between Fermilab and the company Qblox, under which Qblox will coordinate manufacturing, distribution and support for the Quantum Instrumentation Control Kit, or QICK, to advance U.S. quantum research and workforce development. Originally developed at Fermilab, QICK is an open-source platform for managing quantum readouts and controls. It plays a critical role in synchronizing quantum processors and sensors, making it a foundational technology for the growing quantum ecosystem.

Also in November, Fermilab installed a major piece of a new facility called MAGNet Environment Simulator, or MAGNES, that can support efforts to harness fusion energy. MAGNES will test superconducting cables that could be used for a future fusion reactor, which, when cooled to extremely low temperatures, lose all electrical resistance and can carry very high currents essential for generating powerful magnetic fields. The facility’s fundamental magnet research will produce valuable insights into the electromagnetic and mechanical properties of superconducting magnets, advancing government, international and private fusion energy projects alike. Scientists expect MAGNES to become operational within the next few years.

Honoring Fermilab’s past, inspiring the future

Fermilab closed out 2025 with a ceremony to officially name the Integrated Engineering Research Center in honor of the late Helen Edwards, a legendary physicist at Fermilab who oversaw construction of the Tevatron particle accelerator. The newly-named Helen Edwards Engineering Research Center is an 80,000-square-foot, multistory laboratory and office building adjacent to Fermilab’s iconic Wilson Hall. The new space is a collaborative laboratory where engineers, scientists and technicians tackle the technical challenges of particle physics and pioneer groundbreaking technologies.

Fermilab’s achievements reflect the lab’s enduring commitment to discovery, technological innovation and service to the scientific community. From advancing next-generation accelerators and quantum technologies to delivering groundbreaking physics results and pioneering AI and machine learning research, Fermilab continues to push the boundaries of knowledge and strengthen the foundation for the discoveries of tomorrow.

The Department of Energy’s Office of High Energy Physics recommitted $8 million to fund Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s job retention program that provides opportunities for U.S. military veterans. The recommitted funding over five years (fiscal years 2026-2030) is a substantial increase from the $2.35 million the office awarded for FY 2022-2025.

The Veteran Applied Laboratory Occupational Retraining program provides training and career opportunities to military veterans at the start of their civilian careers. This includes valuable hands-on training experiences and full-time technical career placement and security at Fermilab.

“The Department of Energy continues to support our nation’s veterans by recommitting to the VALOR program. The cutting-edge training and education veterans receive during their service, along with their commitment to teamwork, is a great transition to technical positions at the national labs,” said Gina Rameika, Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics at the Department of Energy.

The program expands opportunities for military veterans by providing multiple entry points for STEM-based technical learning and training that lead to consideration for full-time employment. Military veterans are offered 10-week paid internships and 6-month paid apprenticeships in a broad range of laboratory specializations that include, but are not limited to, fabricating, assembling, calibrating, operating, testing, repairing or modifying electronic or mechanical equipment, systems, devices and databases. Opportunities also exist to work in information technology, procurement, and in environmental, safety and health.

“The VALOR program was an incredible opportunity that helped me grow both professionally and personally,” said Anthony Ramirez. “Coming from an NJROTC background at East Aurora High School, I value structure, discipline, and teamwork. These qualities aligned well with Fermilab’s collaborative environment. I gained hands-on technical experience, mentorship and a clear direction for my future in STEM.”

Ramirez now works as a mechanical technician in the Accelerator Target Systems Division and is attending Waubonsee Community College with aspirations of becoming a mechanical engineer.

As an expanded way of reaching cadets and veterans early in their careers, Fermilab began reaching out to local high school ROTC cadets in 2022 to promote and amplify learning and career opportunities through multi-year summer internship experiences at the lab.

“Fermilab has a successful record of providing opportunities for military veterans and cadets and retaining them as full-time employees,” said Sandra Charles, Director of Workforce Pathways and Partnerships. “From 2022 to 2025, we hired 22 participants of the VALOR program. We are grateful to DOE for their continued support of this important program and look forward to expanding the success of VALOR in the coming years.”

For more information on VALOR, visit internships.fnal.gov/valor/

Interested parties are encouraged to apply at Fermilab jobs.

Launched in 2022, VALOR expanded Fermilab’s established VetTech internship program (initiated in 2016), deepening its commitment to U.S. military veterans. VALOR has since distinguished itself as a leader in workforce development, earning the HIRE Vets Gold Medallion Award from the U.S. Department of Labor in both 2019 (as VetTech) and 2024. This consistent recognition underscores VALOR’s effectiveness as a model for recruiting, training, hiring, and retaining military veterans and transitioning service members entering the civilian workforce. By leveraging veterans’ advanced technical skills and leadership experience, the program significantly contributes to Fermilab’s ability to address critical workforce challenges, including attrition, succession planning and the need for emerging technical talent. The high conversion rate of VALOR participants into long-term, high-impact roles within the laboratory amplifies the program’s strategic value, demonstrating the efficacy of veteran-centered pathways in meeting workforce and innovation goals.