This award, totaling $2.5 million, will fund the development of a faster particle beam cooling method as well as the implementation of machine learning advancements to optimally control the system.
Fermilab features
Fermilab has been selected to lead one of five national centers to bring about transformational advances in quantum information science as a part of the U.S. National Quantum Initiative. The initiative provides the new Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center — based at Fermilab and comprising 20 partner institutions — $115 million over five years with the goal of building and deploying a beyond-state-of-the-art quantum computer based on superconducting technologies. The center will also develop new quantum sensors, which could lead to the discovery of the nature of dark matter and other elusive subatomic particles.
The international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment collaboration has published a paper about its capability for performing supernova physics. It details the kind of activity DUNE expects in the detector during a supernova burst, how DUNE will know once a supernova occurs and what physics DUNE will extract from the neutrinos. DUNE’s unique strength is its sensitivity to a particular type of neutrino called the electron neutrino, which will provide scientists with supernova data not available from any other experiment.
The Servant Leadership Award honors a professional SHPE member who exemplifies the ideals of servant leadership both in and outside the organization.
The skipper CCD instrument at the heart of scientist Javier Tiffenberg’s research shows promise for dark matter, neutrino detection and more. For the development of this forefront detector, Tiffenberg has won this year’s Universities Research Association Early Carer Award.
Postdoctoral scientist Adi Ashkenazi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has earned the Universities Research Association 2020 Tollestrup Award for her research into neutrinos, ghostly particles that can pass through solid matter at high speeds without slowing. Working with two different experiments, she and her collaborators hope to improve their simulations of neutrino interactions with atomic nuclei.
The MINOS+ and Daya Bay neutrino experiments combine results to produce most stringent test yet for the existence of sterile neutrinos.
Cornell University postdoc David Sweigart has won the 2020 URA Thesis Award for his dissertation analyzing the first year’s data from Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment. His efforts in analyzing the anomalous precession frequency of the muon could help confirm or challenge the Standard Model of particle physics.
Laura Fields has won an Early Career Research Award from the Department of Energy to help physicists better understand the composition of neutrino beams used by Fermilab experiments. Her work will help gather and validate results that could shed light on why the universe consists of something rather than nothing.
Scientists on the Dark Energy Survey have used observations of the smallest known galaxies to better understand dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up 85% of the matter in the universe. The smallest galaxies can contain hundreds to thousands of times more dark matter than normal visible matter, making them ideal laboratories for studying this mysterious substance. By performing a rigorous census of small galaxies surrounding our Milky Way, scientists on the Dark Energy Survey have been able to constrain the fundamental particle physics that governs dark matter.