Newsroom

These physics-themed jack-o’-lanterns come with extra brains.

The forthcoming Mu2e experiment at Fermilab will kidnap muons and trap them in aluminum atoms. But what exactly happens when you shoot a muon at an aluminum foil? While Mu2e is under construction, its scientists are already getting some valuable answers from a smaller accomplice: AlCap.

Symmetry sits down with Lindsay Olson as she wraps up a year of creating art inspired by particle physics.

Deep in the dense core of a black hole, protons and electrons are squeezed together to form neutrons, sending ghostly particles called neutrinos streaming out. Matter falls inward. In the textbook case, matter rebounds and erupts, leaving a neutron star. But sometimes, the supernova fails, and there’s no explosion; instead, a black hole is born. Scientists hope to use neutrino experiments to watch a black hole form.

Ghostlike subatomic particles called neutrinos could hold clues to some of the greatest scientific questions about our universe: What extragalactic events create ultra-high-energy cosmic rays? What happened in the first seconds following the big bang? What is dark matter made of?

Is it possible that these fundamental building blocks of atoms have a finite lifetime?

For physicists, seeing is not always believing.

Finding a small discrepancy in measurements of the properties of neutrinos could show us how they fit into the bigger picture. One of those properties is a parameter called theta13. Theta13 relates deeply to how neutrinos mix together, and it’s here that scientists have seen the faintest hint of disagreement from different experiments.

Experiments at Fermilab and other laboratories are investigating neutrino oscillations in detail to discover the physics beyond the Standard Model.

Hear about the history of the prairie on Sept. 30 and join in the annual prairie harvest on Oct. 3 and Nov. 7