News at work

In 1999, Nature published the first demonstration of a superconducting quantum bit, or qubit, a feat that relied on trillions of atoms operating in nearly perfect synchrony so that their collective, macroscopic, quantum state was either in 0, 1, or any desired complex superposition of the two. Chad Rigetti, CEO and founder of Rigetti Computing, will give insight into their efforts as a full-stack quantum computing start-up that has provided 24/7 cloud access to quantum processors since 2017. 

The Dark Energy Survey has delivered dark energy constraints combining information from four of its primary cosmological probes for the first time, an approach that may help design other experiments into cosmic acceleration.

Meet the comic-creating, triathlete, Hufflepuff physicist who’s also the new head of Fermilab’s Office of Education and Public Outreach.

The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, which announced the first image of a supermassive black hole in April, has won the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Fermilab scientists Bradford Benson and Alexandra Rahlin are among a large group of scientists who share the prize for their contributions to the achievement.

Join us on Wednesday, Sept. 25, at 6 p.m. at the Pritzker Auditorium in Chicago for a special event celebrating the life and legacy of Leon Lederman and looking forward to the future of particle physics. Presented by the Chicago Council on Science and Technology and Fermilab, in conjunction with the the Chicago Public Library, the program will include presentations, a question-and-answer panel with physicists and a miniature physics slam featuring students from IMSA.

Esquivel is one of 125 women from across the United States who will serve as high-profile role models for middle school girls through the AAAS IF/THEN® Ambassador Program. The program highlights women in STEM who contribute to the many fields influenced by science, technology, engineering and math.

The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest particle accelerator, known mostly for its discovery of the Higgs boson. The LHC will run for another two decades and will collect an enormous amount of data. In this 11-minute video, Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln explains how Fermilab is heavily involved in the upgrades required to make both the accelerator and the CMS detector a physics discovery powerhouse for the foreseeable future.

An extraordinary and brilliant scientist and passionate advocate for bringing science to the public, Simone Marcocci will be missed as a talented and dedicated physicist, wonderful co-worker and dear friend.

Working on hardware doesn’t come easily to all physicists, but Francesca Ricci-Tam has learned that what matters most is a willingness to put in the practice.

Future particle colliders will need strong magnets to steer high-energy particle beams as they travel close to the speed of light on their circular path. A group at Fermilab has achieved a record field strength of 14.1 teslas for a particle accelerator steering magnet, breaking the 11-year record.

Żurek shares her experiences at the 2019 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting —from a blimp flight with Ada E. Yonath, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009, to a panel discussion she participated in with three Nobel laureates about navigating a career path in science.

The Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, has taken a significant step to participate in the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab. Fermilab and the university have signed an agreement to jointly appoint an internationally renowned researcher who will strengthen the experimental particle physics research program at JGU Mainz and advance a German contribution to DUNE. This is the first Fermilab joint agreement with a university in Germany.