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Engineers at Fermilab have shown that sometimes, to reshape the metal heart of a particle accelerator, what you need is a balloon. The new, patented technique is a novel solution to a problem that affects an essential component of accelerators: superconducting cavities.

For years, U.S. institutions have been working to upgrade the hardware in the behemoth CMS particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider, enabling it to profit fully from the LHC’s increasing collision energy and intensity. With CD-4 approval, the Department of Energy formally recognized that the USCMS collaboration, managed by Fermilab, met every stated goal of the upgrade program — on time and under budget.

In science, making data open means making available, free of charge, the observations or other information collected in a scientific study for the purpose of allowing other researchers to examine it for themselves, either to verify it or to conduct new analyses. There are barriers to making scientific data open, but doing so has already contributed to scientific progress.

The first major superconducting section of the PIP-II accelerator has come to Fermilab: the first of 23 cryomodules for the future accelerator. The cryomodules’ job is to get the lab’s powerful proton beam up and moving, sending it to higher and higher energies, approaching the speed of light. This first cryomodule also represents a successful joint effort between Argonne National Laboratory and Fermilab to design and produce a critical accelerator component for the future heart of Fermilab.