News at work

The Scientific Computing Services Quadrant had great success this year attracting a record number of interns to work on interesting projects. We’ve been working with more than 10 students from TARGET, the University Of Chicago, QuarkNet, SIST, CCI and Italian graduate student programs.

Carbon is necessary for all life. If the element carbon did not exist, scientists believe the universe would be sterile, no life anywhere. Among more than a hundred different chemical elements, only carbon has the atomic structure, with six electrons surrounding a nucleus with six protons, necessary to serve as the basis for such complex organisms. We take carbon for granted, but it is miraculous that it exists.

The International Neutrino Summer School was a whirlwind two weeks.

Karen Uhlenbeck’s pioneering work marries math with physics. Her work in the field of mathematical physics has earned her numerous honors and awards, including the 1988 Noether Lecture award, the National Medal of Science in 2001, and the 2007 Steele Prize for a Seminal Contribution to Mathematical Research from the American Mathematical Society. A MacArthur fellow, she is also the first woman to win the Abel Prize in its 17-year history.

A new machine learning technology tested by Fermilab scientists and collaborators can spot specific particle signatures among an ocean of LHC data in the blink of an eye, much faster than standard methods. Sophisticated and swift, its performance gives a glimpse into the game-changing role machine learning will play in making future discoveries in particle physics as data sets get bigger and more complex.