The Fermilab Holometer has reached its design luminosity, building up more than 1 kilowatt of infrared laser power stored in a 40-meter-long Michelson interferometer. This light intensity corresponds to more than 10 billion trillion photons per second hitting the interferometer optics. It also allows scientists to measure the optics’ positions to a resolution 1,000 times smaller than the size of a proton.

On Nov. 15 at 8 p.m., five of Fermilab’s best and brightest will duke it out in the Fermilab Arts and Lecture Series Physics Slam 2013. The event is similar to a poetry slam – each of the five physicists will get 1 0 minutes to explain a complex scientific concept to the audience in the most clear and entertaining way possible.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today awarded the Nobel Prize in physics to theorists Peter Higgs and Francois Englert to recognize their work developing the theory of what is now known as the Higgs field, which gives elementary particles mass. U.S. scientists played a significant role in advancing the theory and in discovering the particle that proves the existence of the Higgs field, the Higgs boson.

Fermilab is looking for volunteers to help with its annual prairie seed harvest. Two harvest events are planned, on Saturday, Oct. 5 and Saturday, Nov. 2, beginning at 10 a.m. Fermilab’s site hosts 1,000 acres of restored native prairie land, and each year community members pitch in to help collect seeds from those native plants.

On Aug. 31, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) officially began. Scientists on the survey team will systematically map one-eighth of the sky (5000 square degrees) in unprecedented detail. The start of the survey is the culmination of 10 years of planning, building and testing by scientists from 25 institutions in six countries.

After a quarter of a century of searching, physicists have discovered a rare particle decay that gives them an indirect way to test models of new physics.

For the past month, a 50-foot-wide circular electromagnet has been on a fantastic journey between two U.S. Department of Energy national labs: Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. On Friday, July 26, that voyage is expected to conclude. Fermilab is planning a party to celebrate the ring’s safe arrival, and everyone’s invited.

The U.S. LHC Accelerator Research Program (LARP) has successfully tested a powerful superconducting quadrupole magnet that will play a key role in developing a new beam focusing system for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Nigel Lockyer, director of Canada’s TRIUMF laboratory for particle and nuclear physics and a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of British Columbia, has been selected to become the next director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

How do you move a 50-foot-wide, circular electromagnet from Long Island to the Chicago suburbs in one piece without flexing or twisting it? Very, very carefully.