In the news

From Kane County Chronicle, Feb. 13, 2020: Award-winning engineer and physicist Alvin Tollestrup, who played an instrumental role in developing the Tevatron as the world’s leading high-energy physics accelerator at Fermilab and founding member of the CDF collaboration, died on Feb. 9 of cancer. He was 95.

From WBUR’s Here & Now, Feb. 12, 2020: The United States will soon have its first new particle collider in decades. Earlier this year, the Department of Energy announced that Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, will be home to the Electron-Ion Collider, which will investigate what’s inside two subatomic particles: protons and neutrons. DOE Undersecretary for Science Paul Dabbar mentions the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.

From Naperville Community Television, Feb. 10, 2020: Fermilab opened its doors once again for their 16th annual Family Open House. The free event aims to teach the community about physics while having fun doing it, which is one reason people decided to come out. The crowd of around 2,500 people met Fermilab scientists and engineers to get a closer look into the world of physics. Creating that scientific spark in the younger generation is one of the laboratory’s goals. Watch the two-minute segment.

From The Beacon-News, Feb. 9, 2020: Fermilab’s Family Open House was a day dedicated to discovering the wonders of science as the lab offered its 16th annual open house event, which organizers said was again geared toward “sharing science with our neighbors” as well as opening young minds to career possibilities.

From UChicago News, Feb. 6, 2020: Fermilab and University of Chicago scientist Brad Benson and colleagues use a different method to calculate the masses of distant galaxies: the polarization, or orientation, of the light left over from the moments after the Big Bang. In doing so, they demonstrate how to “weigh” galaxy clusters using light from the earliest moments of the universe — a new method that could help shed light on dark matter, dark energy and other mysteries of the cosmos.

From Kane County Chronicle, Feb. 5, 2020: Some people might think that Fermilab physicists are unapproachable eggheads, probing the deepest mysteries of science from their secluded laboratories without personal lives or connections to the rest of humanity. At their first reverse science fair, students at J.B. Nelson Elementary found out Fermilab scientists are just like everyone else — they aren’t geniuses. They just like science a lot.

From Inside Science, Feb. 5, 2020: The next generation of particle physics just got a whole lot closer. Scientists at the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment have developed a revolutionary new process that, for the first time, makes a muon particle collider within reach. Fermilab scientist Vladimir Shiltsev comments on how muon ionization cooling is a linchpin in demonstrating the technical feasibility of muon colliders.

From Science News, Feb. 5, 2020: A new experiment raises prospects for building a particle accelerator that collides particles called muons, which could lead to smashups of higher energies than any engineered before. Fermilab scientist Vladimir Shiltsev comments on how scientists with the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment, or MICE, have cooled a beam of muons, a necessary part of preparing the particles for use in a collider, the team reports online Feb. 5 in Nature.

From Scientific American, Feb. 5, 2020: The best-laid plans of MICE and muons did not go awry: Physicists at the International Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment, or MICE, collaboration have achieved their years-long goal of quickly sapping energy from muons. The results are the first demonstration of ionization cooling, a technique which could allow researchers to control muons for future collider applications — an epochal achievement, according to Fermilab physicist Vladimir Shiltsev.