News at work

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.

Matter and antimatter particles can behave differently, but where these differences show up is still a puzzle. Scientists on the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider study much more subtle differences between matter particles and their antimatter equivalents. A recent analysis allowed them to revisit an old mystery — an asymmetry between asymmetries.

For all antiquity nobody knew what stars were. When Copernicus realized that the sun, not Earth, is the center of the universe, the stars were placed on a far distant giant sphere. Some thought they might be holes through which shone the light of heaven. Copernicus, who was nineteen when Columbus first sailed across the Atlantic, started the Scientific Revolution, followed by Galileo and Newton, and the Age of Discovery began.

The MicroBooNE neutrino experiment at Fermilab has published a new measurement that helps paint a more detailed portrait of the neutrino. This measurement more precisely targets one of the processes arising from the interaction of a neutrino with an atomic nucleus, one with a fancy name: charged-current quasielastic scattering.

The U.S. Department of Energy has formally approved the scope, schedule and cost of the PIP-II project at Fermilab. The PIP-II accelerator will become the heart of Fermilab’s upgraded accelerator complex, delivering more powerful proton beams to the lab’s experiments and enabling deeper probes of the fundamental constituents of the universe.