News

Why hasn’t matter fallen apart over billions of years? The mystery might start with protons. Scientists continue to conduct experiments that have yet detected proton decay but discovering it would reveal new insights into the fundamental laws of nature.

The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science recently awarded the contract to manage and operate Fermilab to a consortium named Fermi Forward Discovery Group, LLC. It includes Amentum, a market leader in energy and environmental engineering solutions. Amentum has extensive experience in managing complex scientific facilities.

Journalists were recently invited to tour JUNO, a $300 million science facility designed to measure neutrinos. The U.S.-based DUNE project will also measure neutrinos. If JUNO explains the story of neutrino masses before DUNE comes online, the Fermilab-led project would then be able to measure the question differently and confirm JUNO’s results.

A team at Fermilab have built a prototype of a superconducting cryomodule for the Proton Improvement Plan II (PIP-II) project. The cryomodules will comprise the last section of the new linear accelerator, or linac, that will drive Fermilab’s new accelerator complex.

Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson, a theoretical physicist who made significant advancements in telecommunications, began her career at Fermilab after graduating from MIT.

Dr. Kevin J. Kelly, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University and a former postdoc at Fermilab, has been selected as the 2025 recipient of the American Physical Society’s Henry Primakoff Award for Early-Career Particle Physics in recognition of his contributions and promising career potential in fundamental particle physics and cosmology.

Illinois is poised to become a hub for quantum computing with investments from the the State of Illinois and the U.S. Department of Defense’s DARPA agency in a new QC campus. The Quantum Enterprise Zone will be a supportive environment for startups and entrepreneurs, offering access to resources, funding, and expertise. Fermilab and Argonne National Laboratories will also facilitate collaboration and knowledge transfer between academia and industry.

The UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) awarded Lancaster University £928,000 for the DUNE Anode Plane Assemblies project and £901,000 for the DUNE Reconstruction Software and Distributed Computing initiative. These projects form part of a wider UK DUNE collaboration that is providing significant effort in areas key to the success of the DUNE project.

The historic University of Chicago Accelerator Building will be taken down soon and the space will become a new, expanded building for engineering and science innovation. It once housed the cyclotron, designed by Enrico Fermi, and was the world’s most powerful particle accelerator using a 2,500-ton magnet to accelerate particles such as protons and nuclei. Read more about building and how the the cyclotron’s gigantic magnet was shipped off to become part of other experiments at what would later become Fermilab.

A successful test delivers DUNE steel beam a mile underground at Sanford Underground Research Lab in Lead, South Dakota.