In the news

From CNN, Feb. 4, 2021: Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln contextualizes a recent signal that some think may be a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence, explaining the hubbub around the recent a transmission originating from Proxima Centauri. With hope for hearing such a signal one day and pride for humanity’s legacy of looking skyward, Lincoln cautions against reading too much into this transmission, which hasn’t yet been vetted with scientific review.

From Universe Today, Feb. 3, 2021: Recent published results from the Dark Energy Survey point to intracluster light — feeble light from rogue stars that don’t belong to a galaxy — as a potential pathway to measure dark matter. Fermilab scientist Yuanyuan Zhang contextualizes the findings.

From Data Center Knowledge, Feb. 3, 2021: That Fermilab and partners achieved sustained, high-fidelity quantum teleportation has big implications in many fields. Fermilab scientist, Panagiotis Spentzouris talks about what the results could mean for the future of data centers.

From Chicago Tribune, Feb. 3, 2021: Fermilab’s Family Open House is a popular annual event in the Chicagoland area. This year, it’s virtual. Amanda Early, education program leader, discusses the programming that the virtual event will bring to classrooms and homes around the world.

From Super Interessante, Jan. 31, 2021: A team of researchers from Fermilab and the National Observatory in Brazil used the light of solitary stars to calculate the mass of some of the largest structures in the cosmos — galaxy clusters. In addition to taking the most detailed measurement ever published of intracluster light, the team’s new method of measurement can help further investigate dark matter.

From University of Birmingham, Jan. 13, 2021: Fermilab will take part in an international collaboration, led by Cardiff University, on quantum-enhanced interferometry for new physics. The project’s four table-top experiments may help explore new parameter spaces of photon-dark matter interaction, and seek answers to the long-standing question at the heart of modern science: How can gravity be united with the other fundamental forces?

From Yale University, Jan. 22, 2021: For his new piece of music, “MicroBooNE,” David Ibbett, Fermilab’s first composer-in-residence, collaborated with physics professor Bonnie Fleming through a series of discussions about the science behind the experiment that inspired the composition. The neutrino-inspired piece premiered on Dec. 8, 2020, as part of the Fermilab Arts and Lectures Series.

From University of Strathclyde-Glasgow, Jan. 13, 2021: Fermilab will take part in an international collaboration, led by Cardiff University, on quantum-enhanced interferometry for new physics. The project’s four table-top experiments may help explore new parameter spaces of photon-dark matter interaction, and seek answers to the long-standing question at the heart of modern science: How can gravity be united with the other fundamental forces?

From New Scientist, Jan. 25, 2021: The Big Bang left us the universe — and a major set of mysteries around antimatter, dark matter, dark energy, and cosmic inflation. While the Large Hadron Collider looks at what the laws of physics were like a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, Dan Hooper, head of theoretical astrophysics at Fermilab, thinks the answers to these puzzles may depend on better understanding that first fraction of a second — even closer to the universe’s beginning.

From Big Think, Jan. 10, 2021: The quantum breakthrough Fermilab and its partners made in teleporting qubits over a fiber-optic network more than 27 miles highlights how close — and how far — modern science is from sci fi.