In the news

A collaboration scientists working on the Broadband Reflector Experiment for Axion Detection recently released their first results in the search for dark matter. Although they did not find dark matter, they narrowed the constraints for where it might be and demonstrated a unique approach that may speed up the search for the mysterious substance, at relatively little space and cost.

The researchers identified the origin of discrepancies in recent predictions of the muon’s magnetic moment. Their findings could contribute to the investigation of dark matter and other aspects of the new physics.

With the most recent P5 report, particle physicists have come together to chart a course for the next decade which includes focus on the international DUNE experiment taking place at Fermilab and in Lead, South Dakota.

An accelerator known as a muon collider could revolutionize particle physics—if it can be built. The December 2023 P5 report calls for R&D on a muon collider, stating, “This is our muon shot.” A muon collider could fit on the campus of Fermilab, enabling the U.S. to reclaim the lead in the continuing competition for the highest energy collider.

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.