In the news

As excavation of the underground facilities for DUNE nears completion, crews are now working on laying concrete floors and spraying shotcrete on the walls of the caverns. The next priority is to prepare the south cavern for cryostat erection by installing sprinklers, fire alarms, an elevator, and overhead cranes

The CMS collaboration announced the observation of two photons creating two tau leptons in proton–proton collisions. This is the first time this process has been seen in proton–proton collisions using the precise capabilities of the CMS detector. It is also the most precise measurement of the tau’s anomalous magnetic moment and offers a new way to constrain the existence of new physics.

Rigging crews at SURF are performing a series of tests using a large wooden model L-beam built to the same scale as one of the huge steel components that arrived in South Dakota in January after being shipped from Spain. The tests are being done in anticipation of lowering the real thing down the shaft to the underground 4850 level.

Physicists at the University of Texas at Arlington are building portions of the first two detectors for DUNE that will be installed underground in South Dakota. The UTA team will construct 100 modules for the first detector and all 200 of the modules for the second detector.

The Tachyon Project of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been awarded a five-year grant from the U.S. DOE HEP to model, simulate and validate the transport, transmission and analysis of particle physics data using extreme-scale computing systems, AI and ML techniques. Tachyon will utilize data and information from Fermilab to model the entire distributed infrastructure required to transmit and analyze data from DUNE to the computing facilities at the Argonne in near real time.

A research team as part of the the Dark Energy Survey collaboration used artificial intelligence to research dark energy more precisely from a map of dark and visible matter in the Universe covering the last seven billion years. The new AI technique allowed researchers to use much more information from the maps than would be possible with the previous method.

Researchers at Fermilab are building a prototype electron beam accelerator that integrates four emerging accelerator technologies. This more efficient accelerator system could be used for industrially for sterilizing medical equipment and large facilities that use other technologies.

The Science and Technology Facilities Council has built an ISO Class 4 cleanroom at the Fermilab to accommodate cryomodules for the PIP-II particle accelerator.

Fermilab looking for Lead area and southwest SD people who would like to join the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility/Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment team. There are a series of hiring events planned to meet with those interested in being part of DUNE including the Lead Employment Expo, which will be held at the Sanford Lab Homestake Visitor’s Center on April 16.

Physicists from Syracuse University are part of the more than 1,400 scientists that make up the DUNE collaboration. The Syracuse team were involved in the development and testing of the first detector’s components, helping finalize the design and testing plans of the anode plane assemblies. The team also researched and developed light sensors for the first detector’s module and investigated how adding small amounts of the element xenon could improve their performance.