Fermilab’s Liz Sexton-Kennedy talks to Symmetry about her lifelong drive to learn and how it led to her current role as chief information officer for Fermilab. Jim Daley spoke to Sexton-Kennedy about her experiences in STEM, her career at Fermilab and a bit about herself.
From Slate, Jan. 31, 2019: In science, lack of discovery can be just as instructive as discovery. Finding out that there are no particles where we had hoped tells us about the distance between human imagination and the real world. It can operate as a motivation to expand our vision of what the real world is like at scales that are totally unintuitive.
From IEEE Spectrum, Jan. 30, 2019: If realized, the Future Circular Collider will produce magnetic fields nearly twice as strong as the LHC and accelerate particles to unprecedented energies of 100 teraelectron volts, compared to the Large Hadron Collider’s energies of 13 TeV. Whereas the magnetic system at the LHC can achieve strengths of 8.3 teslas, the FCC system would be able to achieve 16 T.
The MINERvA neutrino experiment has a new crime scene investigation technique, one that takes a hard look at the traces that particles leave before fleeing the scene. Researchers used a new technique in a recent MINERvA neutrino investigation. And the new insights they gained on the workings of nuclear effects can help other neutrino experiments.
From Chicago Tribune, Jan. 30, 2019: Think of it as a Physics Party. A big one. The popular Fermilab Family Open House is back with a bang from 1 to 5 p.m. Feb. 10 at Fermilab. The lab wants visitors to gain a better understanding of all the exciting things happening at Fermilab and a general appreciation for STEM fields and research.
From Scientific American, Jan. 30, 2019: Fermilab scientist Antonella Palmonese weighs in on a new method of determining the Hubble constant. The method uses data taken from the Fermilab-hosted Dark Energy Survey.
From Nature Reviews Physics, Jan. 28, 2019: The Dark Energy Survey completed its six-year-mission to map more than 300 million distant galaxies; however, an equally arduous task — analyzing the acquired 50 terabytes of data with a view to understanding the expansion of the universe — is just beginning.
Scientists on the ArgoNeuT experiment have developed a method that enables them to better distinguish the tracks that particles leave behind in liquid argon, as well as a way to better differentiate between signals and background. And thanks to the software’s great performance, ArgoNeuT will aid larger neutrino experiments in their quest to understand the nature of the subtle neutrino.
From APS’s Physics, Jan. 29, 2019: On Jan. 9, a handful of researchers with the Dark Energy Survey — one of the most ambitious attempts to probe the dynamics of the universe’s expansion — headed to the control room of Chile’s Blanco Telescope. For one last time, they opened the white telescope’s dome. From their perch overlooking the red Andean Mountains, they set up for a night of observing the southern sky.
Physicists often find thrifty, ingenious ways to reuse equipment and resources. What do you do about an 800-ton magnet originally used to discover new particles? Send it off on a months-long journey via truck, train and ship halfway across the world to detect oscillating particles called neutrinos, of course. It’s all part of the vast recycling network of the physics community.