From The New York Times, Nov. 23, 2020: It might be possible, physicists say, but not anytime soon. And there’s no guarantee that we humans will understand the result. Fermilab Deputy Director of Research Joe Lykken is quoted in this piece on using artificial intelligence to discover laws of physics.
In the news
From the Illinois Institute of Technology, Nov. 23, 2020: The Illinois Institute of Technology has announced that it will designate a portion of 33rd Street that crosses through Mies Campus as Honorary Leon Lederman Way. The proposal was put forth by faculty members in the Department of Physics in honor of Nobel Prize-winning physicist and longtime Illinois Tech faculty member Leon Lederman, who died in 2018.
From Black Hills Pioneer, Nov. 17, 2020: Thyssen Mining Company, one of North America’s largest mining companies, has signed a three-year contract to excavate space for the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility at Sanford Lab in South Dakota. The company plans to bring about 110 jobs for miners, operators, mechanics, electricians, engineers, and managers. Thyssen Mining is currently preparing office space in Lead, as well as getting personnel lined up, contracting with local vendors, and preparing equipment for the project.
From Inside Science, Nov. 12, 2020: A recent experiment has created a one-way quantum network between two labs, reaching a milestone on the path to creating a quantum internet. Fermilab Deputy Director Joe Lykken weighs in.
From Bulgarisches Wirtschaftsblatt, Nov. 11, 2020: Während die Wissenschaftler im Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory des US-Energieministeriums auf die mit Spannung erwarteten ersten Ergebnisse des Muon g-2-Experiments warten, setzen die mitarbeitenden Wissenschaftler des Argonne National Laboratory des DOE weiterhin das einzigartige System ein, das das Magnetfeld im Experiment mit beispielloser Präzision abbildet.
From CERN Courier, Nov. 10, 2020: Established 30 years ago with a linear electron-positron collider in mind, the TESLA Technology Collaboration has played a major role in the development of superconducting radio-frequency cavities and related technologies for a wide variety of applications. The first decade of the 21st century saw the TTC broaden its reach, for example, gradually opening to the community working on proton superconducting cavities, such as the half-wave resonator string collaboratively developed at Argonne National Lab and now destined for use in PIP-II at Fermilab.
From Gizmodo, Nov. 10, 2020: Fermilab and University of Maryland scientist Dan Carney and a small group of scientists have begun work on a prototype they say could one day lead to a dark matter detector capable of pinpointing the minute gravitational pull of a particle we can neither see nor feel. The detector is simple in design, but the theory behind its construction amounts to a fundamental rethinking of the search for dark matter.
From Interactions.org, Nov. 9, 2020: Large-scale accelerator facilities around the world, such as Fermilab and the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex, send near-light-speed proton beams into pieces of material called a target. The collision produces other particles, which scientists study to learn the fundamental constituents of matter. The RaDIATE collaboration has published new results on a target material made of a titanium alloy, shedding light on how different titanium materials respond to collisions by powerful proton beams.
From Mining.com, Nov. 2, 2020: Three batches of 99.99% pure copper plates mined in Finland, rolled into plates in Germany, shipped across land and sea to Fermilab, and finally rushed into storage 100 meters underground are being used in an experiment to search for dark matter.
From Data Manager Online, Oct. 29, 2020: Nuovi amplificatori quantistici ultrasensibili in grado di migliorare la trasmissione di dati e qubit nei computer del futuro. Le attività che verranno sviluppate all’interno del progetto “Dart wars” hanno forti sinergie con il progetto americano “Sqms” (Superconducting quantum materials and systems center), guidato dall’italiana Anna Grassellino presso il Fermilab di Chicago, che ha recentemente ricevuto un finanziamento di 115 milioni di dollari dal Dipartimento dell’energia degli Stati Uniti, per sviluppare in cinque anni un computer quantistico d’avanguardia, dalle prestazioni e velocità di calcolo mai raggiunte finora.