How do you build a ship in a bottle? Everything necessary to construct the enormous Fermilab-hosted international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment must fit down a narrow, mile-deep shaft cut through solid rock. Contractors have started the months-long process of disassembling excavation equipment and lowering it underground.
From the University of Chicago, May 21, 2021: Long-time University of Chicago professor of astronomy and astrophysics, Richard Kron created the Sloan Digital Sky Survey which set the stage for the Dark Energy Survey. Although he is retiring this year after 40 years of mapping the universe, he plans on staying on as director of the Dark Energy Survey.
The ICARUS detector, part of Fermilab’s Short-Baseline Neutrino Program, will officially start its hunt for elusive sterile neutrinos this fall. The international collaboration led by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia successfully brought the detector online and is now collecting test data and making final improvements.
From RECCOM Magazine (Italy), May 17, 2021: Dan Hooper talks about the possible existence of another universe. Physicists believe the Big Bang created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early history of the universe – but they can’t explain how antimatter vanished. Perhaps it is not and it resides isolated in some remote regions of our universe.
From Forbes, May 18, 2021: Fermilab’s Don Lincoln explains the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment, in Germany that has improved our understanding of the mass of this insubstantial denizen of the microcosm.
Fermilab scientists are developing one of the most cold-tolerant robots ever made so they can monitor the interiors of particle detectors. The project has already garnered some interest from engineers at other research institutions, including NASA.
In Drift: Art and Dark Matter, pieces by four artists-in-residence dig deep into the underground laboratory.
From Wired, May 18, 2021: So imagine the excitement on April 7, when more than 200 physicists from seven countries convened on a Zoom call for a kind of nonexplosive gender-reveal party. What was to be disclosed was not a baby’s sex but the fate of particle physics.
From the Black Hills Pioneer, May 17, 2021 Activities at the Sanford Lab to have significant benefits for over the next decade as the construction of DUNE continues.
From Smithsonian Magazine, May 13, 2021: A group of scientists say the phenomenon could indicate dark matter speeding through our world at more than 300 miles a second. Fermilab’s Dan Hooper is quoted in this story about the study of flashes seen in ordinary lightning storms showing evidence of super-dense chunks of dark matter as they zip through our atmosphere.