Top news

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.

Postdoc Guillermo Fernandez Moroni is recognized for his outstanding work on the SENSEI experiment at Fermilab. Dark matter experiments are quite sensitive to unwanted background noise, and Moroni found a way to limit this noise for SENSEI, increasing the sensitivity of the experiment by a factor of a thousand, making it the most sensitive of its kind in the world.

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.

When teaching a physics lab how to be more LGBTQ+ inclusive, workshop presenters decided to lead with the science.

Jean Reising works with Fermilab computing and helps people with content management systems, including websites and digital signage. She is active in Fermilab’s Spectrum Group, which builds awareness and provides resources for the LGBTQ+ community. Reising also has a degree in culinary arts. When she’s not working, she can be found cooking or reading about cooking.

In his doctoral thesis, Todd details a method for data analysis in a way that minimizes a source of bias in some particle physics experiments. By analyzing information from two distant detectors simultaneously rather than sequentially, he incorporated the lack of precision knowledge in both detectors. A University of Cincinnati graduate, Todd used data from Fermilab’s MINOS and MINOS+ experiments, and his analysis can be applied in other neutrino research as well.

The Universities Research Association recognizes Fermilab scientist Laura Fields for her contributions to the field of accelerator-based neutrino physics. She co-leads the MINERvA experiment, which is making measurements necessary for tuning models of neutrino interactions used in ongoing and future neutrino experiments, and helped design a new focusing system for Fermilab’s LBNF neutrino beam.