From Live Science, Aug. 19, 2019: The international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab, is first in this list of important upcoming neutrino experiments. Both the Fermilab accelerator complex and the giant underground detector will enable scientists to study perhaps the most underrated particles known to humankind.
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Karen Uhlenbeck’s pioneering work marries math with physics. Her work in the field of mathematical physics has earned her numerous honors and awards, including the 1988 Noether Lecture award, the National Medal of Science in 2001, and the 2007 Steele Prize for a Seminal Contribution to Mathematical Research from the American Mathematical Society. A MacArthur fellow, she is also the first woman to win the Abel Prize in its 17-year history.
From SDPB Radio, July 26, 2019: Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer’s full interview for “Morning Fill-Up” is now available on the South Dakota Public Broadcasting site. In the 58-minute recording, Lockyer discusses neutrinos, the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility and Sanford Underground Research Facility and his own journey in science.
An Italian experiment has a 20-year signal of what could be dark matter—and scientists are embarking on their most promising efforts yet to confirm or refute its results. For more than two decades, DAMA has observed a regularly changing signal that its operators think comes from our planet’s movements through the “halo” of dark matter suffusing the Milky Way galaxy.
From Texas Tech Today, Aug. 5, 2019: Texas Tech physicists have been looking for dark matter at the CMS experiment at CERN and studying neutrinos.
From Science News, Aug. 8, 2019: It’s a news flashback. Science News excerpts a bit on the Fermilab Bubble Chamber from their August 16, 1969, issue. “Use by visitors is expected to be especially large at the National Accelerator Laboratory now under construction at Batavia, Ill…. NAL staff and consultants agree that the laboratory will need a large bubble chamber, and it now plans to build one in collaboration with Brookhaven National Laboratory.”
From Science, Aug. 8, 2019: Fermilab physicists are resurrecting a massive particle detector by lowering it into a tomblike pit and embalming it with a chilly fluid. In August, workers eased two gleaming silver tanks bigger than shipping containers, the two halves of the detector, into a concrete-lined hole. Hauled from Europe two years ago, ICARUS will soon start a second life seeking perhaps the strangest particles physicists have dreamed up, oddballs called sterile neutrinos.
Our world is governed by general relativity, which sees gravity as the effects of massive objects warping space-time. The world of particle physics, on the other hand, envisions all forces as mediated by force-carrying particles — and ignores gravity entirely. This year’s Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to three theorists who proposed a way to marry these contradictory descriptions: with a theory called “supergravity.”
From The University of Arizona News, Aug. 1, 2019: The University of Arizona touts two members of the Dark Energy Survey who received DOE awards.