News

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.

Latin American institutions are instrumental in creating photon detectors for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.

From Washington University’s The Source, Oct. 23, 2019: The Department of Energy has awarded new funding to boost research on dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up an astounding 85% of the matter in the universe. The Axion Dark Matter eXperiment is one of the fund’s recipients, and a number of Washington University scientists are collaborating on the project.

From Gizmodo, Oct. 23, 2019: Ahead lies a whole frontier in particle physics of grand unsolved mysteries, including why there’s more matter than antimatter in the universe, what the true identity of dark matter and dark energy is, or how the strange, ultraweak neutrino particles ended up so ghostly. The Fermilab-hosted DUNE and Muon g-2 experiments are among those looking for answers.

Maria Teresa Dova has been instrumental in bringing scientists in Argentina new opportunities to participate in particle physics and astrophysics experiments, including one that co-discovered the Higgs boson.

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.

Feeling left out of some traditional paths to community in particle physics, a group of Latin American researchers created their own way to connect.

From UChicago News, Oct. 18, 2019: The Department of Energy has honored University of Chicago scientists Josh Frieman, also of Fermilab, and Ian Foster, also of Argonne National Laboratory, for their transformative research and scientific leadership, selecting them as part of its inaugural Office of Science Distinguished Scientist Fellowship program. Frieman was listed for “pioneering advances in the science of dark energy and cosmic acceleration, including leading the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-II Supernova Survey, co-founding the Dark Energy Survey and service as its director.”

From MIT Technology Review, Oct. 21, 2019: We’ve seen ripples in space-time only when the universe’s biggest events occur. Now there might be a way to spot them ahead of time. MAGIS-100 is a project designed to see whether shooting frozen atoms with lasers can be used to observe ultrasensitive signals that might be stretching through space-time. If successful, it could help usher in a new era of “atom interferometry” that could reveal some of the secrets of gravitational waves, dark matter, quantum mechanics, and other heady topics.

Ground-based experiments designed to study the cosmic microwave background have gotten larger and more sophisticated over time. Now, nearly 200 scientists who have up until this point worked on different competing CMB experiments have joined forces to propose a fourth-generation experiment, the largest ground-based one yet, called CMB-S4.