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The American Physical Society recently honored six researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory with awards for their outstanding contributions to their scientific fields.

Founded in 1899, APS is a professional organization representing more than 50,000 members worldwide and is dedicated to advancing physics research, science policy, education and public engagement. Each year, APS bestows a broad range of prizes, awards and medals to recognize exceptional achievements across the physics community — from early-career scientists to leading established researchers.

APS honors at Fermilab were awarded to:

Joel Butler — W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics

Elena Pinetti — Henry Primakoff Award for Early-Career Particle Physics

APS Fellows

Four Fermilab scientists were named 2025 APS Fellows. Fellowship is an elite distinction awarded each year to no more than one-half of 1% of current APS members. The APS Fellowship program recognizes members who have made advances in physics through original research and publication or made significant, innovative contributions in the application of physics to science and technology. The full listing of fellows may be viewed on the APS website.

Anadi Canepa — Division of Particles and Fields Fellowship

Victor Daniel Elvira — Forum on International Physics Fellowship

Matthew Toups — Division of Particles and Fields Fellowship

Herman White — Forum on Physics and Society Fellowship

Each year at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the guest artist and composer program, funded by Fermi Forward Discovery Group, facilitates creative collaborations with scientists and engineers to make Fermilab’s scientific exploration more accessible.

“I want to gather the data, see what’s interpreted from it and transfer that to a visual plane.”

When studying the universe at its smallest scales, researchers at Fermilab rely on massive detectors that translate unseeable subatomic particles into data that researchers can interpret. They use graphs, tables and charts to represent the signals from the detectors, but artists’ creative perspectives can present this science in imaginative and unexpected ways that resonate with the public.

“Music is the most abstract of the art forms; it takes place in time.”

In 2026, guest artist Eleftheria Lialios and guest composer Isaac Smith will bring their distinctly creative viewpoints to translate complex scientific concepts into immersive multisensory experiences.

A selection committee composed of Fermilab scientific staff and public engagement staff evaluates applicants to the program based on their creative and academic backgrounds and their enthusiasm for immersing themselves in Fermilab’s scientific work.

“Our artists and guest composers create works rooted in science that inspire and provoke thought,” said Georgia Schwender, Fermilab visual arts coordinator.

Eleftheria Lialios — Guest Artist

Isaac Smith — Guest Composer

Smith said he is particularly interested in how music can embody the joy, curiosity and wonder that scientists feel when exploring the unknown.

“The big thing I’m going to try to do initially is connect with the scientists,” Smith explained. “I aim to understand what they’re doing and what they’re excited about. I want to form a relationship with them and get my feet under me in terms of connecting with the scientific data.”

Lialios and Smith will work throughout the year, and in the latter half of 2026, the public will be able to experience their creations firsthand in Fermilab’s Wilson Hall.

The Mu2e experiment, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, reached an important milestone in November as the collaboration moved a key component of the experiment, called the tracker, across the Fermilab campus into Mu2e Hall.

“This is a major moment for Mu2e,” said Bob Bernstein, Mu2e co-spokesperson. “Soon, we’re going to be able to start looking at our first particle tracks from cosmic rays passing through all of our detectors.” 

Although the Standard Model of particle physics is scientists’ best explanation for how the universe works, it doesn’t account for phenomena like dark matter and dark energy. So, scientists are on the hunt for new physics. 

Subatomic particles called muons are in the same family as electrons: charged leptons. The Standard Model dictates that when a muon decays into an electron, two neutrinos are also produced. But physicists believe it’s possible that charged leptons convert directly into each other.  

Mu2e, as its name suggests, will be looking for the direct conversion of a muon into an electron without producing neutrinos. From previous experiments, scientists know that this hypothetical muon-to-electron conversion would be extremely rare. If the phenomenon occurs, it will happen less often than once every 1 trillion muon decays.

“And Mu2e is going to produce one muon for every grain of sand on Earth’s beaches, which is kind of an incomprehensible number of muons.”

“One of the keys to intensity frontier experiments is designing an experiment that enables us to look at a process very quickly and then repeat that billions, if not trillions of times,” said Brendan Kiburg, a project manager for the Mu2e tracker. “And Mu2e is going to produce one muon for every grain of sand on Earth’s beaches, which is kind of an incomprehensible number of muons.”

To handle so many muons, Mu2e has a unique, sinuous design. Three magnets make up the body of the experiment. The first magnet is called the production solenoid. This is where the muons are produced. The transport solenoid then delivers those muons into the detector solenoid that will hold Mu2e’s subdetectors. There, the muons encounter an aluminum target where they are stopped, captured and potentially undergo this hypothetical muon-to-electron conversion. The secondary particles produced will then encounter the first subdetector, called the tracker.

“The Mu2e tracker is an interesting construction because we didn’t want to have any mass on the inside of the tracker to interfere with the particles we’re trying to detect,” said Kiburg.

This design also helps the experiment weed out particles at the wrong energies.

As an electron enters the detector solenoid, the magnetic field will force the particle to spiral. If an electron has too low a momentum, the spiral is too tight, and it will never encounter the tracker, leaving the subdetector without ever interacting. But a higher momentum particle, which is more likely to be within the desired energy range, can spiral into the heart of the detector and produce a signal.

To complement the tracker, another subdetector, called the calorimeter, is installed downstream in the detector solenoid. While the tracker will have the precision to measure the momentum of the signal, the calorimeter will check its energy and timing, allowing the collaboration to definitively identify the particle as an electron. The calorimeter will also be an important step in cleaning up the particle tracks identified by the tracker.

The third subdetector is the cosmic ray veto that surrounds the detector solenoids and, as its name implies, helps identify cosmic ray tracks before they enter the tracker and calorimeter so that they can be easily eliminated.

“Thanks to this sophisticated detection system, we can beautifully reconstruct the candidate particle’s momentum,” said Stefano Miscetti, Mu2e co-spokesperson. “So, if we say this event is just an electron, there will be no doubt that we saw just an electron.”

Now that the tracker has joined the calorimeter and cosmic ray veto at the Mu2e Hall, the experiment can begin integrating the three subdetectors together to be read out by Mu2e’s data acquisition system.

At that point, the experiment will be able to start testing the ensemble of detectors with cosmic rays. This will enable the collaboration to calibrate the signals from the subdetectors before the beam is sent to the detector. “Mu2e is one of the most exciting experiments to start looking for new physics in the muon sector,” said Miscetti. “We have been working on this system for more than 10 years, and now we finally see the experiment taking shape.”