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Imagine a particle. What comes to mind? If you aren’t a theoretical particle physicist, chances are you picture a tiny ball, bobbing in space. But that’s not quite correct. One way to prove it: Try to imagine that tiny ball as a particle with no mass. If a particle has no mass, how can it exist?

As president, Frieman will oversee the affairs and business of the esteemed organization. More than 1,000 scientists every year visit the center to explore new research in physics, astrophysics and related fields.

Right now could be considered one of the best — and most uncertain — times in theoretical physics. That’s what Symmetry heard in interviews with 10 junior faculty in the field. They talk about what keeps them up at night, their favorite places to think and how they explain their jobs to nonscientists.

Major deliveries in June set the stage for the next phase of work on LUX-ZEPLIN project, led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A Fermilab group is responsible for implementing key parts of the critical systems that handle the xenon in the detector.

It took three sky surveys to prepare for a new project that will create the largest 3-D map of the universe’s galaxies and glean new insights about the universe’s accelerating expansion. This Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument project will explore this expansion, driven by a mysterious property known as dark energy, in great detail. The surveys, which wrapped up in March, have amassed images of more than 1 billion galaxies and are essential in selecting celestial objects to target with DESI, now under construction in Arizona.

Particle accelerators are some of the most complicated machines in science. In today’s more autonomous era of self-driving cars and vacuuming robots, efforts are going strong to automate different aspects of the operation of accelerators, and the next generation of particle accelerators promises to be more automated than ever. Scientists are working on ways to run them with a diminishing amount of direction from humans.

For over two decades, Spanish institutions have been collaborating with Fermilab. From the Tevatron era to the lab’s current neutrino experiments, Spain has made important contributions.

Word fans, rejoice! Symmetry is back with another list of 10 common words that take on a new meaning when spoken by scientists. Take these physics words for a spin.

In particle accelerators, the greater a beam’s intensity, the more opportunities there are to study particle interactions. One way to increase the intensity is to merge two beams with a technique called slip-stacking. However, when combining them, the beams’ interaction may cause instability. A Fermilab scientist has created a successful model of the fraught dynamics of two particle beams in close contact, leading to smoother sailing in this area of particle acceleration.

The U.S. Department of Energy has announced $75 million in funding for 66 university research awards on a range of topics in high-energy physics to advance knowledge of how the universe works at its most fundamental level. The projects involve scientists at 51 U.S. institutions of higher learning across the nation and include both experimental and theoretical research into such topics as the Higgs boson, neutrinos, dark matter, dark energy and the search for new physics.