Fermilab features

Fermilab scientist Robert Ainsworth has won a $2.5 million Department of Energy Early Career Research Award to study different ways of ensuring stability in high-intensity proton beams. By studying how certain types of beam instabilities emerge and evolve under different conditions, his team can help sharpen scientists’ methods for correcting them or avoiding them to begin with.

Fans of Fermilab know that our scientists are experts in the weird realm of quantum physics. In recent years, they’ve been harnessing the strange properties of the quantum world to develop game-changing technologies in quantum computing, quantum sensors and quantum communication. Learn more about the burgeoning area of quantum information science and how Fermilab is advancing this exciting field.

Fermilab scientists have broken their own world record for an accelerator magnet. In June, their demonstrator steering dipole magnet achieved a 14.5-tesla field, surpassing the field strength of their 14.1-tesla magnet, which set a record in 2019. This magnet test shows that scientists and engineers can address the demanding requirements for a future particle collider under discussion in the particle physics community.

Scientists have begun operating the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, to create a 3-D map of over 30 million galaxies and quasars that will help them understand the nature of dark energy. The new instrument is the most advanced of its kind, with 5,000 robotic positioners that will enable scientists to gather more than 20 times more data than previous surveys. Researchers at Fermilab helped develop the software that will direct these positioners to focus on galaxies several billion light-years away and are currently in the process of fine-tuning the programs used before the last round of testing later this year.

Fermilab’s popular outreach program for high school students, started in 1980, takes full advantage of modern technology to reach a broader audience. Recordings now are available online.

On June 19, scientists at the CMS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider published their 1,000th paper. The monumental achievement reflects an incomparable contribution to humanity’s understanding of the universe — and it’s just the beginning.