In the news

From The Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2020: The network, which uses quantum principles to more securely transmit data, could be functional in about a decade. Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago established in February a quantum network of 52 miles’ worth of entangled photons running on unused telecom fiber in the Chicago suburbs. In about a year, the network is expected to be connected to Fermilab, creating an 80-mile quantum internet test bed.

From CERN Courier, July 23, 2020: Fermilab scientists Steve Brice and Sam Zeller and University of Minnesota scientist Marvin Marshak authored this article on the Neutrino 2020 conference, in which 4,350 people from every continent, including Antarctica, participated. The online program, hosted by Fermilab and the University of Minnesota comprised eight half-days over two weeks, four poster sessions with both web-based and virtual-reality displays, and the use of the Slack platform for speaker questions and ongoing discussions.

From University of Wisconsin, July 21, 2020: The Institute for Hybrid Quantum Architectures and Networks has been named a National Science Foundation Quantum Leap Challenge Institute. HQAN’s partnerships include Fermilab. The five-year, $25 million institute helps establishes the Midwest region as a major hub of quantum science.

From New Scientist, July 15, 2020: Two sets of measurements to estimate the rate of expansion of the universe — described by the Hubble constant — conflict with one another, which may be a sign that our basic understanding of the cosmos is wrong. Two new attempts by astronomers to solve this problem have complicated things further. Fermilab scientist Antonella Palmese and her colleagues have used measurements of gravitational waves to calculate an independent value of the Hubble constant.

From Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July 15, 2020: An eyewitness excerpt from Fermilab founding director Robert Wilson is one many offered in this new retelling of the Trinity test, woven entirely from words that more than a dozen of the project’s protagonists first published in the Bulletin.

From CERN Courier, July 7, 2020: A new generation of accelerator and reactor experiments is opening an era of high-precision neutrino measurements to tackle questions such as leptonic CP violation, the mass hierarchy and the possibility of a fourth “sterile” neutrino. These include the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab, and Fermilab’s NOvA and Short-Baseline Neutrino programs.

From Science, July 7, 2020: Spending panels in the U.S. House of Representatives have begun voting on bills to fund the government, and a few of them made use of an emergency mechanism to beef up research budgets. The national laboratories funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science is a big winner, receiving a one-time boost of $6.25 billion next year under a plan approved by a House spending panel, including funding for the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility hosted by Fermilab.

From CERN Courier, July 7, 2020: Fermilab scientist Boris Kayser Texplains how neutrino physicists are now closing in on a crucial piece of evidence in a most convoluted detective story: the unknown origin of the matter–antimatter asymmetry observed in the universe.

From the Chicago Quantum Exchange, July 7, 2020: The Chicago Quantum Exchange has added to its community seven new corporate partners in computing, technology and finance that are working to bring about and primed to take advantage of the coming quantum revolution. These new industry partners are Intel, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Quantum Design, Qubitekk, Rigetti Computing, and Zurich Instruments. The Chicago Quantum Exchange is anchored by the University of Chicago, Fermilab, Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and it includes the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northwestern University.

From Department of Energy, July 6, 2020: DOE announces $132 million in funding for 64 university research awards on a range of topics in high-energy physics to advance knowledge of how the universe works at its most fundamental level. Projects include experimental work on neutrinos at Fermilab, the search for dark matter, studies of the nature of dark energy and the expansion of the universe with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and and investigation of the Higgs boson from data collected at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland.