Fermilab features

Typically, Fermilab employee Keenan Newton spends his days managing Fermilab’s main content management platforms and his nights and weekends as a volunteer firefighter. Now he’s arranged his schedule to serve the Illinois Emergency Management Agency, volunteering his personal time to help people during the current pandemic and responding to hazardous situations while based at the State Emergency Operations Center in Springfield.

Browse Fermilab’s many online resources to dive into the wonderful world of particle physics.

When scientists begin taking data with the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment in the mid-2020s, they’ll be able to peer 13.8 billion years into the past and address one of the biggest unanswered questions in physics: Why is there more matter than antimatter? To do this, they’ll send a beam of neutrinos on an 800-mile journey from Fermilab to Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. To detect neutrinos, researchers at several DOE national laboratories, including Fermilab, are developing integrated electronic circuitry that can operate in DUNE’s detectors — at temperatures around minus 200 degrees Celsius. They plan to submit their designs this summer.

Just like we orbit the sun and the moon orbits us, the Milky Way has satellite galaxies with their own satellites. Drawing from data on those galactic neighbors, a new model suggests the Milky Way should have an additional 100 or so very faint satellite galaxies awaiting discovery.

Missing March Madness? Let Fermilab fill a small part of the void created in these times of social distancing and shelter-in-place. Participate in Fermilab’s sendup of the NCAA tournament: March Magnets. Learn about eight different types of magnets used in particle physics, each with an example from a project or experiment in which Fermilab is a player. Then head over to the Fermilab Twitter feed on March 30 to participate in our March Magnets playoffs.

Accelerator magnets — how do they work? Depending on the number of poles a magnet has, it bends, shapes or shores up the stability of particle beams as they shoot at velocities close to the speed of light. Experts design magnets so they can wield the beam in just the right way to yield the physics they’re after. Here’s your primer on particle accelerator magnets.

Fermilab technology developed for particle accelerators offers a valuable opportunity to search for a hypothesized particle that would resemble a particle of light. These dark photons could help us understand the large part of our universe that we know is there but have yet to observe.

Under a new agreement, the University of Campinas and the São Paulo Research Foundation will play important roles in the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility and the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab.

The groundbreaking ANNIE experiment at Fermilab has seen its first neutrino events. This milestone heralds the start of an ambitious program in neutrino physics and detector technology development. It is also a cause for celebration by the international ANNIE collaboration, composed of groups from Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Scientists have begun filling the ICARUS detector at Fermilab with liquid argon, moving one step closer toward neutrino oscillation measurements and the potential discovery of sterile neutrinos.