Successful tests pave the way for Fermilab’s next-generation particle accelerator

Two women stand side by side looking at an image of a red vessel in front of a long science experiment that takes up the rest of the photo. The woman with gray hair, on the right, and the woman with long brown hair on the left both hold the document with both hands.

Successful tests pave the way for Fermilab’s next-generation particle accelerator

Fermilab feature

This spring testing wrapped up at the PIP-II Injector Test Facility, or PIP2IT. The successful outcome paves the way for the construction of PIP-II, a new particle accelerator that will power record-breaking neutrino beams and drive a broad physics research program at Fermilab for the next 50 years.

Photo of a dome-shaped building, likely an observatory, atop a mountain, which gold mist surrounds. Blue sky and silhouette of birds above.

Homebound astrophysicists miss mountaintops

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, travel bans and stay-at-home orders meant astrophysicists collaborating on the Dark Energy Survey needed to find a new way to conduct their observations using the Dark Energy Camera.

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Fermilab and INFN sign 3 arrangements

Fermilab feature

Fermilab signed three international arrangements in June with the National Institute for Nuclear Physics, known as INFN. The three arrangements are related to Fermilab’s Short Baseline Neutrino Program, the PIP-II particle accelerator and the EuPRAXIA advanced accelerator project.

Two hockey players that resemble rock-em-sock-em robot toys shake hands on a rink. The one on the left is red and has a dome for a torso with the number 18 on the sleeve. On the right, the player is blue, with Fermilab's Wilson Hall as the torso and 87 on the sleeve. It holds a hockey stick.

The odd(eron) couple

Symmetry feature

Scientists discovered a new particle by comparing data recorded at the Large Hadron Collider and the Tevatron.

A large box-like structure sits on a round platform. Behind it, a banner that says "DUNE." To the right, a man with short hair wears glasses, a face mask, blue surgical gloves, a blue shirt and brown pants.

DUNE prototype detector ArgonCube crosses the globe

Fermilab feature

The first module of the prototype pixel-based neutrino catcher developed for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment is on its way to Fermilab from the University of Bern.

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What is a photon?

photons

Symmetry feature

Quanta of light called photons are the smallest possible packets of electromagnetic energy. Learn the history behind how scientists came to understand photons — and what these particles have shown us (and might show us) they can do.

A minute with Aleksandra Ćiprijanović, astrophysicist

Fermilab feature

Whether in Serbia or Chicago, Fermilab postdoctoral researcher Aleksandra Ćiprijanović is working to unlock the secrets of the night sky. As a member of the Deep Skies Lab, an international collaboration of physicists, she’s figuring out how to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to better handle the huge amounts of data needed for discovery science.

Three vertical planes of sense wires stand in the center of this 3D chart that shows on the left how particles flying through the detector create electrons that drift to the sense wires of the detector, and on the right shows electric signals – the waveforms – that these wires will collect as a function of time. To the left, an incoming neutrino travels through the liquid argon of the time projection chamber, and it eventually splits into two charged particles that knock loose electrons in the liquid. To the right of the sense wires, waveforms are shown for the Y plane and the V plane.

Physicists achieve significant improvement in spotting accelerator-produced neutrinos in a cosmic haystack

Press release

Ground-breaking image reconstruction and analysis algorithms developed for surface-based MicroBooNE detector filter out cosmic ray tracks to pinpoint elusive neutrino interactions with unprecedented clarity.

Joint appointment at JGU and Fermilab: Alfons Weber is JGU’s new W3 Professor of Experimental Particle Physics

Press release

Alfons Weber has achieved full professorship teaching Experimental Particle Physics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. His joint appointment at JGU and Fermilab represents the expansion of PRISMA+ neutrino physics research program.

A starry night sky with purple diagonal stripe from lower left to upper right corner above an observatory lit up in bright red. A shadow of a building or facility is in the lower right corner.

Dark Energy Survey releases most precise look at the universe’s evolution

Press release

The Dark Energy Survey collaboration has created the largest ever maps of the distribution and shapes of galaxies, tracing both ordinary and dark matter in the universe out to a distance of over 7 billion light years. The analysis, which includes the first three years of data from the survey, is consistent with predictions from the current best model of the universe, the standard cosmological model. Nevertheless, there remain hints from DES and other experiments that matter in the current universe is a few percent less clumpy than predicted.

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