Fermilab takes its popular STEM Career Expo to the web. This year the annual event, an opportunity for high school students to hear from more than two dozen STEM professionals about their careers, is offered as five recorded panel discussions now available on the Fermilab website. Students can learn how neutrino physicists, bioinformatics scientists, actuaries and others got to where they are and hear from people who work jobs in fields that students might pursue in the coming years.
More than a dozen Fermilab volunteers have helped design, test and finalize the Mechanical Ventilator Milano, a low-cost ventilator to help in the midst of device shortages caused by COVID-19.
Fermilab, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have achieved a milestone in magnet technology. Earlier this year, their new magnet reached the highest field strength ever recorded for an accelerator focusing magnet. It will also be the first niobium-tin quadrupole magnet to operate in a particle accelerator — in this case, the future High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
This year’s events will feature the Great Neutrino Hunt, the Mr. Freeze Cryogenics Show, live physics demonstrations, a physics carnival developed and presented by local high school students, tours of the Linear Accelerator Gallery and the Muon g-2 experiment, and a driving tour of the site.
Today Fermilab announces the launch of the Fermilab Quantum Institute, which will bring all of the lab’s quantum science and technology projects under one umbrella. This new enterprise signals Fermilab’s commitment to this burgeoning field, working alongside scientific institutions and industry partners from around the world. The laboratory will use particle physics expertise to kick-start quantum technology for computing, sensors, simulations and communication.
With a ceremony held today, Fermilab joined with its international partners to break ground on a new beamline that will help scientists learn more about ghostly particles called neutrinos. The beamline is part of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, which will house the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, an international endeavor to build and operate the world’s most advanced experiment to study neutrinos.
The cryostat for Berkeley Lab’s LUX-ZEPLIN experiment — the largest direct-detection dark matter experiment in the U.S. — is successfully moved to its research cavern. This final journey of LZ’s central detector on Oct. 21 to its resting place in a custom-built research cavern required extensive planning and involved two test moves of a “dummy” detector to ensure its safe delivery.
Berkeley Lab’s Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument aimed its robotic array of 5,000 fiber-optic “eyes” at the night sky Oct. 22 to capture the first images showing its unique view of galaxy light. It was the first test DESI with its nearly complete complement of components. Fermilab contributed key elements to DESI, including the corrector barrel, hexapod, cage and CCDs. Fermilab also provided the online databases used for data acquisition and the software for the instrument’s robotic positioners.
What keeps galaxies from flying apart? What is the invisible mass that bends light in space? For now, we’re calling it dark matter, and this Oct. 31, laboratories around the world are shining a light on the search for it. Dark Matter Day events include live webcasts with researchers, dark matter scavenger hunts and a Reddit AMA.
On Thursday, Oct. 17, from approximately 9 p.m. to midnight, Fermilab and the Kane County Sheriff’s Office will conduct live-gunfire tests of Fermilab’s on-site gunfire detection system. These tests will be conducted safely, using bullet traps – no live rounds will be fired into the air or into the ground, and there will be no danger to the public or wildlife. However, the sound of gunfire may be heard in neighborhoods near Fermilab on Thursday evening.