Public

Meet a physicist who ran away to join the circus.

From Ceska Televize (Czech Republic TV-right click to translate the page to English), June 6: A delegation from the Czech Republic visited Fermilab last week in which the scientific collaboration between Fermilab and the Czech Republic on DUNE was highlighted by Fermilab director Lia Merminga. See highlights of the delegation’s tour and interviews with Lia and Fermilab scientist Jaroslav Zalesak.

A postdoc on the PIP-II project, Pathak works on beam dynamics and also enjoys riding his bike around Fermilab and admiring the blue sky of the Illinois prairieland.

From PBS Space Time, May 25, 2022: Fermilab scientists spent almost a decade recording collisions in the Tevatron collider and another ten years analyzing data finding the W boson’s mass seems to be 0.01 percent heavier than expected. Now, understanding why the particle has mass puts the current Standard Model to the test.

From MSN (Spain), May 26, 2022: A series of precise measurements of well-known ordinary particles and processes have threatened to shake our understanding of physics from the Muon g-2 and W boson Fermilab announcements . Now the LHC is preparing to operate at a higher energy level and intensity than ever before, there is a chance that new particles are produced through even rarer processes or are hidden under backgrounds that we have not yet unearthed.

The CDF experiment at Fermilab measured the mass of the W boson and came up with an answer that no one expected.

From Nature Italy May 20, 2022: CDF co-spokesperson Giorgio Chiarelli tells the story of how Italy contributed to the measurement of the W boson mass, opening a door on new physics. For more than 10 years after the Tevatron detector at Fermilab produced the last crashes between protons and antiprotons, the collaboration announced the most precise measure of the W boson mass ever achieved.

Black physicists say efforts to recruit and retain more Black students must concentrate on challenges they face at both Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Primarily White Institutions.

From the Nature Briefing, May 13, 2022: Based on data recorded with the CDF II detector at Fermilab between 2002 and 2011 at the Tevatron, the collaboration reconstructed more than 4 million W boson candidates through their decays into an electron or muon accompanied by the respective neutrino. The CDF Collaboration stated their result “suggests the possibility of improvements to the standard model calculation or of extensions to it”.

Astronomers have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. This result provides overwhelming evidence that the object is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the center of most galaxies.