From INFN, March 15, 2019: Si è tenuta oggi al Fermilab, negli Stati Uniti, la cerimonia di posa della prima pietra di uno dei più importanti progetti per il futuro della fisica, in cui l’Italia porta un contributo tecnologico e scientifico di primo piano. Si tratta del progetto PIP-II (Proton Improvement Plan II) per la realizzazione di un nuovo acceleratore lineare superconduttore, lungo 215 metri.

From ABC7, March 15, 2019: Fermilab broke ground on a new particle accelerator project Friday.
The new machine will power cutting-edge physics experiments for years to come by allowing scientists to study invisible particles called neutrinos, which may hold the key to cosmic mysteries.

The March 15 ceremony marks the start of work on PIP-II, a major new accelerator project at Fermilab. The PIP-II accelerator will power the long-term future of the laboratory’s research program, including the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.

What if you could accelerate particles to higher energies in only a few meters? This is the alluring potential of an up-and-coming technology called plasma wakefield acceleration. Scientists around the world are testing ways to further boost the power of particle accelerators while drastically shrinking their size.

From Discover, March 12, 2019: Fermilab, along with the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, is starting a new project called the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE. The goal is to track and study shadowy neutrinos like never before. Fermilab scientists Deborah Harris and Angela Fava discuss the experiment.

From Quanta Magazine, March 11, 2019: The latest AI algorithms are probing the evolution of galaxies, calculating quantum wave functions, discovering new chemical compounds and more. Is there anything that scientists do that can’t be automated? Fermilab scientist Brian Nord comments on using artificial neural networks to study the cosmos.

From CERN Courier, March 8, 2019: Newly published results from the MINOS+ experiment at Fermilab cast fresh doubts on the existence of the sterile neutrino — a hypothetical fourth neutrino flavor that would constitute physics beyond the Standard Model. MINOS+ studies how muon neutrinos oscillate into other neutrino flavors as a function of distance travelled.

From CNN, March 7, 2019: Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln tells the history of the start of the World Wide Web, which has its 30th anniversary this month. It started an unpublished manuscript by Tim Berners-Lee titled “Information Management: A Proposal,” was submitted to the publication office of CERN.

From Inside Science, March 6, 2019: Scientists may be able to look for dark matter in rocks that host minerals with which dark matter particles may have interacted. Fermilab scientist Dan Hooper is quoted in this article.

Scientists have proposed building the International Linear Collider, which would be the longest linear collider in the world, in the Kitakami mountains in the Iwate prefecture of northern Japan. Scientists had called on the Japanese government to come to a decision about whether they support hosting the ILC by today’s meeting of the International Committee for Future Accelerators. The Japanese government declined to stake a claim to hosting the ILC.