News at work

The reimagined event will bring five days of family-friendly physics fun from the lab to the living room.

As the liaison between Fermilab and the Department of Energy Office of Science, Verhaagen will work to enable the laboratory mission and ensure work is accomplished safely and within DOE requirements.

For all of us, 2020 has been an interesting year full of unique challenges and unique opportunities. The Education and Public Engagement Office has used this time of change to focus on broadening the national and international reach of our efforts via new, virtual opportunities. In this column, I’d like to feature some of the highlights of the past year.

Although astrophysicist Dan Bauer’s career has taken him around the country, and through some of the universe’s biggest questions, he’ll finish where he started — at Fermilab. After a total of 21 years as a Fermilab employee, Bauer is retiring, and his last day is Jan. 28.

In November, the Fermilab Users Executive Committee welcomed new members who will serve in the 2020-22 term. The Fermilab community is invited to meet the new folks at the UEC’s first-ever virtual Meet & Greet, co-hosted with the Fermilab Student and Postdoc Association, on Friday, Jan. 22.

Fermilab guest composer David Ibbett composes electrosymphonic music, a fusion of classical and electronic styles. He visited Fermilab in January 2020 to learn more about neutrino research at the lab and started working on his first neutrino-inspired compositions. In this lecture, he presents the results of his work, with a guest appearance by neutrino scientist Bonnie Fleming.

The ATLAS collaboration has begun to publish likelihood functions, information that will allow researchers to better understand and use their experiment’s data in future analyses.

The international collaboration, including Fermilab, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, NOIRLab and others, releases a massive, public collection of astronomical data and calibrated images from six years of surveys. This data release is one of the largest astronomical catalogs issued to date.

Once the most popular framework for physics beyond the Standard Model, supersymmetry is facing a reckoning — but many researchers are not giving up on it yet.

Fermilab scientists and engineers are developing a machine learning platform to help run Fermilab’s accelerator complex alongside a fast-response machine learning application for accelerating particle beams. The programs will work in tandem to boost efficiency and energy conservation in Fermilab accelerators.

High-intensity particle beams enable researchers to probe rare physics phenomena. A proposed technique called optical stochastic cooling could achieve brighter beams 10,000 times faster than current technology allows. A proof-of-principle experiment to demonstrate OSC has begun at Fermilab’s Integrable Optics Test Accelerator.

Workshops around the world train science teachers to incorporate particle physics into their classrooms.