lindseya, Author at News

What is a photon?

An illustration of lots of yellow dots on a light pink background. Some have rainbows or smiley faces on them. One has lines coming out it that make it look star-like. One dot is shiny and red. In the center, there is a white dot. Some glare appears to emanate from the white dot.

Quanta of light called photons are the smallest possible packets of electromagnetic energy. Learn the history behind how scientists came to understand photons — and what these particles have shown us (and might show us) they can do.

Classical composer David Biedenbender named Fermilab’s 2021 guest composer

A man with close-cut brown hair and beard wears blue glasses and smiles at camera. In the background, blurred mountains, valley and sky.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has selected David Biedenbender as its 2021-22 guest composer. The program, now in its second year, provides a composer the opportunity to interpret Fermilab research through music and celebrate the relationship between art and science. Biedenbender has a history of creating music inspired by physics.

Visual artist Mare Hirsch named 2021 Fermilab artist-in-residence

A woman with shoulder length brown hair sits on a stone wall.

Fermilab has selected California-based visual artist Mare Hirsch as its 2021-22 artist-in-residence. The program, now in its seventh year, connects physics and art. Hirsch, who uses computer models and coding for her art, will draw on her data visualization background to make Fermilab science more accessible and intriguing to the public.

Fermilab’s Jay Theilacker wins award for technical contributions, leadership from Cryogenic Engineering Conference

The Cryogenic Engineering Conference has awarded Jay Theilacker the 2021 Samuel C. Collins Award. Theilacker is the Cryogenic Sector head in the Applied Physics and Superconducting Technology Division at Fermilab.

A minute with Aleksandra Ćiprijanović, astrophysicist

Whether in Serbia or Chicago, Fermilab postdoctoral researcher Aleksandra Ćiprijanović is working to unlock the secrets of the night sky. As a member of the Deep Skies Lab, an international collaboration of physicists, she’s figuring out how to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to better handle the huge amounts of data needed for discovery science.

The other particle detector

An illustration. I person stands inside a giant, hollow gold cube and sends a signal using a device to another device on the left side of the screen that is close up and held in a hand. The close-up device says "counting" and has some numbers. In the bottom right-hand corner, it says LBNF/DUNE.

When studying mysterious subatomic particles, researchers at SURF in South Dakota use a different kind of particle detector, particle counters, to prevent run-of-the-mill dust particles from creating background noise and obscuring results.

Physicists achieve significant improvement in spotting accelerator-produced neutrinos in a cosmic haystack

Three vertical planes of sense wires stand in the center of this 3D chart that shows on the left how particles flying through the detector create electrons that drift to the sense wires of the detector, and on the right shows electric signals – the waveforms – that these wires will collect as a function of time. To the left, an incoming neutrino travels through the liquid argon of the time projection chamber, and it eventually splits into two charged particles that knock loose electrons in the liquid. To the right of the sense wires, waveforms are shown for the Y plane and the V plane.

Ground-breaking image reconstruction and analysis algorithms developed for surface-based MicroBooNE detector filter out cosmic ray tracks to pinpoint elusive neutrino interactions with unprecedented clarity.

A strong force for inclusion

A woman opens a window from the outside and faces in. She has a brown bob and is wearing dark rectangualr glasses and light-colored earrings. In the background behind her, a starry sky. Waves come out from behind her and enter into the room. On the left, a purple, space-like wave. On the right a rainbow wave and a wave that has stripes the colors of the trans flag, blue, pink and white.

Elena Long’s search for community as a trans scientist put her at the forefront of LGBT+ advocacy in physics.

Einstein’s garden: translating physics into Blackfoot

A piece of ledger paper runs perpendicularly with an ornate, old-fashioned script font, with names and notes. At the top (on the right-hand side of the illustration), the date is 1889. A large button of yellow and blue thin concentric circles with two button holes in the middle overlays the text in the center of paper.

Sharon Yellowfly has been preserving and expanding the Blackfoot language by translating the announcements of LIGO’s universe-bending discoveries.

2 Fermilab scientists receive DOE Early Career Research Awards

On the left, Portrait of a woman smiling beside a microscope in front of a purple background. Her right hand sits on a table and is holding a chip. She wears a mustard-colored floral hijab and fuschia top. On the right, Portrait of a man with dark curly hair and a short beard and mustache wearing glasses, a brown corduroy jacket, a red and blue plaid shirt. His hands are interlaced on the table in front of him. In the lower left corner, the keyboard of a laptop peeks out. He is in front of a starry background.

The DOE’s Office of Science has selected two Fermilab scientists to receive the 2021 DOE Early Career Research Award, now in its 12th year. Farah Fahim and Brian Nord have received the prestigious award, which is designed to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during the crucial early years.