In the news

From Science News, August 15, 2022: W bosons are particles that transmit the weak force, which is responsible for certain types of radioactive decay. Last April, Fermilab researchers reported the W boson was more massive than predicted, hinting that something may be amiss with the standard model. Now a team of scientists with ATLAS at the LHC are reporting rare boson triplets which continues to test the standard model for any cracks.

From Big Think, August 13, 2022: After decades of research, astronomers cannot explain how and why galaxies exist. Fermilab’s Don Lincoln discusses the hypothesis of dark matter as the undiscovered form of matter to explain this galactic mystery.

From Techfragments, August 12, 2022: Jonathan Jarvis led a team of researchers who used the Integrable Optics Test Accelerator at Fermilab to demonstrate and explore a new kind of beam cooling technology. “Cooling” a beam reduces the random motion of the particles making the beam narrower and denser. Physicists could potentially use this new method to explore rare physics phenomena that help us understand our universe.

From Nature, Aug. 10, 2022: Scientists have successfully used a new technique at Fermilab’s Integrable Optics Test Accelerator
to cool a particle beam and make it denser. The new method may enable future experiments to create more particle collisions.

From Nature, Aug. 8, 2022: The accelerator would smash together this heavier version of the electron and, researchers hope, discover new particles.

From Science News, August 4, 2022: A proposed experiment called Windchime, will try something new: It will search for dark matter using the only force it is guaranteed to feel — gravity. Fermilab physicist Dan Hooper chimes in on what this experiment can mean to the study of dark matter.

From Phys.org, August 3, 2022: Fermilab’s NOvA experiment reports analysis on oscillation data delivering some of the most accurate estimates to date describing neutrino oscillations and providing important hints on two important aspects of neutrino physics—the ordering of neutrino masses and the degree of charge-parity (CP) violation. These results set the stage for the next generation of “long-baseline” experiments, like Hyper-K and DUNE, which will dramatically boost our ability to probe elusive aspects of neutrino physics.

From Yahoo News, July 31, 2022: Elliott Tanner is a student from Minnesota who at age 13 completed his bachelor of science in physics and and is continuing on to a Ph.D. program. At the University of Minnesota, he is working on simulation and analysis for the Short-Baseline Neutrino Program at Fermilab and he aspires to be a theoretical physicist and a physics professor in the near future.

From the Universities Research Association: Michael Dolce, a physics doctoral candidate at Tufts University, was awarded a stipend as part of the URA’s Fall 2020 Visiting Scholars Program to compare data collected between NOvA’s Near and Far detector. While on the VSP grant, Dolce worked alongside his sponsor Dr. Louise Suter, a NOvA expert and Fermilab scientist who provided him a direct line to the laboratory and valuable guidance.

From Caltech, July 28, 2022: Maria Spiropulu has been named co-chair of the National Academies’ Elementary particle physics committee. She will spearhead a new study to set a vision for the field of particle physics in the next decade and beyond called Elementary Particle Physics: Progress and Promise, or EPP-2024.