In the news

From Sanford Underground Research Facility, Nov. 24, 2020: Another series of upgrades to the Ross Shaft is underway at the Sanford Underground Research Facility. Crews are working to outfit the shaft with new cage and skip conveyances and have replaced thousands of feet of hoist cables. The work prepares the Ross Shaft for its role as the main travel way for upcoming excavation and construction of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility to support the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, the world’s flagship neutrino experiment, which is hosted by Fermilab.

From Chicago Quantum Exchange, Nov. 23, 2020: The third annual Chicago Quantum Summit brought together more than 20 speakers from across the nation and attracted more than 1,000 attendees from 42 countries. This year’s summit comes on the heels of the announcement of five new Department of Energy National Quantum Information Science Research Centers, one of which is the Fermilab-led Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center. At the summit, each center director gave an overview of their quantum center or institute goals, which included building qubit technologies, developing algorithms for quantum computation, and creating new quantum devices.

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.

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.