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This year there were many major advances in our understanding of the Universe, including in the areas of particle physics and astrophysics. Included in this line-up are stories from DESI, LHC, The James Webb Space Telescope and more.

University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos has been named one of this year’s winners of the Enrico Fermi Presidential Award—one of the most prestigious science and technology honors bestowed by the U.S. government.

Chicago leaders are backing a new quantum computing campus in South Chicago that will create job pipelines. Fermilab’s Natalie Johnson, head of education and public engagement, is among those working on creating career and educational pipelines for locals.

Jefferson Lab successfully tested the first niobium-tin alloy cryomodule, a prototype section of particle accelerator, that is capable of accelerating electrons to energies exceeding 10 million electron-Volts.
Senior scientist Grigory Eremeev led the project and a Fermilab team leveraged the lab’s Nb3Sn coating facility, SRF cavity processing and testing infrastructure.

The NOvA collaboration presented findings at the Neutrino conference in Milan in June 2024 with results that are likely to be evidence of a new phenomenon. With twice the data, the team of NOvA physicists are comparing muon neutrino and antineutrino oscillations to determine the mass hierarchy.

Neutrino physics is one of the most promising fields of research to unravel the mysteries of the Universe. This includes the future Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment led by Fermilab to study the behavior of neutrinos.

Some friendly competition between the CMS and ATLAS experiments led up to the first discovery of entanglement at the Large Hadron Collider.

A newly published white paper outlines the next 10 years of global research into the behavior of neutrinos that could explain why the universe has more matter than antimatter. One of those neutrino projects is DUNE, the most ambitious neutrino research project led by Fermilab. The paper was an ambitious undertaking of the more than 170 contributors from 118 organizations and was a result of Snowmass 2021/2022.

The Chicago Plan Commission approved plans to transform a former steel mill site into a cutting-edge quantum computing park known as the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park. PsiQuantum will construct the large facility, aiming to develop a one-million-qubit utility-scale quantum computer. The park will be affiliated with the University of Illinois but will also have partners including Fermilab, Argonne, the Chicago Quantum Exchange and many Chicago universities.

The Chicago Plan Commission approved plans for a quantum computing research park on the vacant U.S. Steel South Works site, advancing a project that could transform Chicago’s South Side into a national technology hub. The park will be managed by a University of Illinois-led organization in partnership with Argonne National Laboratory, Fermilab and other regional institutions.