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One day in 2017, the idea to detect particles that had potentially been escaping the LHC for years unnoticed by the gigantic detectors suddenly became feasible. The story of the latest experiment approved for installation at the Large Hadron Collider starts with a theorist and a question about dark matter.

The American Physical Society has recognized Fermilab and Northern Illinois University physicist Philippe Piot for his outstanding contributions as a referee for APS journals. APS’s highly selective Outstanding Referee program annually recognizes about 150 of the roughly 71,000 currently active referees.

Fermilab engineers and technicians stand by a magnet coil made for the High-Luminosity LHC. Photo: Reidar Hahn

The U.S. Department of Energy has approved the scope, cost and schedule for the U.S. LHC Accelerator Upgrade Project and has given the first approval for the purchase of materials. This project brings together scientists, engineers and technicians from national laboratories — such as Fermilab, Brookhaven, Berkeley, SLAC and Jefferson labs — to develop two cutting-edge technologies to advance the future of both the Large Hadron Collider and broader collider research.

Given the popularity of our first article about physics concepts with deceptively common names, Symmetry is back with 10 more seemingly normal words that mean something different in a science context. Some of this science sounds awfully familiar.

Research has shown that the presence of trees and woody vegetation in grasslands can significantly reduce the area occupied by grassland birds. To maximize usable habitat in the Eola grasslands at Fermilab, the first step is to clear the open fields of woody vegetation and trees. FNA received this grant to support the first phase of the project and hire a contractor to remove trees from this area.

Fermilab engineer Ryan Rivera receives the consortium’s Young Alumni Leadership Award. GEM’s mission is to enhance the value of the nation’s human capital by increasing the participation of underrepresented groups at the master’s and doctoral levels in engineering and science. A GEM alumnus, Rivera is recognized for his influence, commitment and passion in creating better opportunities for underrepresented groups in STEM-related fields.

One sprinkle of sand at a time, two artists have recreated the moment a particle passed through a detector 30 years earlier. Their piece, a bright blue and white sculpture of tracks of microscopic bubbles in a bubble chamber, was inspired by the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of the sand mandala. To find the perfect bubble chamber image to recreate, they scrolled through hundreds of these photographs in the archive at Fermilab.