News

The USCMS collaboration has received approval from the Department of Energy to move forward with final planning for upgrades to the giant CMS particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The upgrades will enable it to take clearer, more precise images of particle events emerging from the upcoming High-Luminosity LHC, whose collision rate will get a 10-fold boost compared to the collider’s design value when it comes online in 2027.

Continuing the yearly induction of a new artist-in-residence each year, Fermilab is welcoming a pair of artists and the lab’s first guest composer to the lab in 2020.

For the first time, a team of scientists has used the orientation of light left over from the early universe to detect gravitational lensing from galaxy clusters – the bending of light around these massive objects. Using gravitational lensing data taken by the South Pole Telescope and the Dark Energy Camera, Fermilab scientist Brad Benson and colleagues have demonstrated a new way to “weigh” galaxy clusters and ultimately shed light on dark matter, dark energy and other mysteries of the cosmos.

Fermilab scientists have reached the lowest temperature ever achieved at Fermilab, testing a refrigerator for the SuperCDMS dark matter experiment. The fridge, which operates at close to absolute zero, is now one step closer toward installation at SNOLAB in Canada.

The Institute of Electric and Electronic Engineers names Fermilab scientist Vladimir Shiltsev an IEEE fellow. The honor is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest.

Fermilab scientist Joel Butler has been elected vice chair of its Executive Committee. He will begin as vice chair on Jan. 1, 2020, rotating to chair-elect in 2021 and chair in 2022.

The American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields has given its 2019 Early Career Instrumentation Award to two scientists on the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab. Ana Amelia Machado and Ettore Segreto, both of the University of Campinas in Brazil, are recognized for inventing and developing a photon sensor that is currently a baseline technology for the DUNE particle detector.

Spack, a software package management tool, was recognized with an R&D 100 Award in November. Developed for high-performance computing applications, Spack is used as an end-to-end development tool within the high-energy physics community. Fermilab is a contributor to Spack, whose initial development was led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Grab your cocoa or pumpkin spice — as today we examine what’s naughty and nice.

Scientists on Fermilab’s MicroBooNE experiment have measured neutrino interactions on argon with unprecedented statistics and precision using data on the resultant muons — in particular, the muon’s momentum and angle. The experiment features the first liquid-argon time projection chamber with the resolution and statistics to carry out such a measurement. Researchers will use the result to improve simulations of neutrino interactions. These improvements are important for neutrino experiments in general, including the Short-Baseline Neutrino program experiments and the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, both hosted by Fermilab.