In the news

DOE has awarded a $1.9 million grant to Northern Illinois University and the Illinois Institute of Technology for the training of next-generation workers in accelerator science and technology. The program will cover student tuition costs for two years and fund paid research assistantships at Fermilab and Argonne. Physics professors Michael Syphers and Philippe Piot, both experts in particle accelerator research and technology, are leading the effort at NIU.

From DOE, Dec. 2, 2019: in a bipartisan vote of 70-15, the United States Senate confirmed Dan Brouillette to be the 15th U.S. secretary of energy. An official swearing in will take place at a later date. Prior to confirmation, Acting Secretary Brouillette served as the deputy secretary of energy under Secretary Rick Perry.

From WTTW’s Chicago Tonight, Nov. 25, 2019: Fermilab scientist Dan Hooper spends his time contemplating the biggest mystery of all: how the universe came to be. In this 7-minute television segment, he outlines four big fundamental puzzles stumping cosmologists right now. He also explains these mysteries in his book “At the Edge of Time: Exploring the Mysteries of our Universe’s First Seconds.”

From Gizmodo, Nov. 25, 2019: The oldest particle accelerator at CERN, home to the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, is celebrating its 60th birthday. It’s still running. The Proton Synchrotron accelerated its first protons on Nov. 24, 1959. It was the world’s highest-energy accelerator when it first began running.

From The Mac Observer, Nov. 25, 2019: In this 30-minute podcast episode, Fermilab scientist Dan Hooper recounts how he caught the astrophysics bug as an undergraduate, landed a postdoc position at Oxford and was later hired at Fermilab. He chats about his interest in the interface between particle physics and cosmology, dark matter and what neutrinos can tell us about the early universe.

From University of Bristol, Nov. 21, 2019: The University of Bristol will receive up to £1.1 million to research matter and antimatter as part of DUNE, a global science experiment hosted by Fermilab that will inform the debate about why the universe survived the Big Bang.

From the University of Warwick, Nov. 21, 2019: The University of Warwick has received over £900,000 to provide essential contributions to the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab, which aims to answer fundamental questions about our universe. The investment from UK Research and Innovations’ Science and Technology Facilities Council is a four-year construction grant to 13 educational institutions and to STFC’s Rutherford Appleton and Daresbury laboratories.

From the University of Birmingham, Nov. 21, 2019: The UK has made a new, multimillion-pound investment in the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, a global science project hosted by Fermilab that brings together the scientific communities of the UK and 31 countries from Asia, Europe and the Americas to build the world’s most advanced neutrino observatory.

From Smithsonian.com, Nov. 20, 2019: Two research teams have announced that they detected record-breaking gamma ray bursts — powerful outbursts in a distant galaxy that produced photons with high enough energies to be detected by ground-based telescopes for the first time. Fermilab scientist Dan Hooper weighs in on results.

From DOE, Nov. 20, 2019: Fermilab scientist Antonella Palmese is quoted in this article on scientists’ efforts to get to the bottom of the nature of dark energy. These efforts include the Dark Energy Survey, hosted by Fermilab, and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, on which Fermilab scientists are collaborators.