News and features

The groundbreaking ANNIE experiment at Fermilab has seen its first neutrino events. This milestone heralds the start of an ambitious program in neutrino physics and detector technology development. It is also a cause for celebration by the international ANNIE collaboration, composed of groups from Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Scientists have begun filling the ICARUS detector at Fermilab with liquid argon, moving one step closer toward neutrino oscillation measurements and the potential discovery of sterile neutrinos.

Twenty-five years ago, scientists on the CDF and DZero particle physics experiments at Fermilab announced one of history’s biggest breakthroughs in particle physics: the discovery of the long-sought top quark. The collaborations on the two experiments jointly made the announcement on March 2, 1995, to much fanfare. We take a look back on this day in Fermilab history a quarter-century ago.

What if you want to capture an image of a process so fast that it looks blurry if the shutter is open for even a billionth of a second? This is the type of challenge scientists on experiments like CMS and ATLAS face as they study particle collisions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. An extremely fast new detector inside the CMS detector will allow physicists to get a sharper image of particle collisions.

One of the most difficult problems to overcome in developing a quantum computer is finding a way to maintain the lifespan of information held in quantum bits, called qubits. Researchers at Fermilab and Argonne National Laboratory are working to determine whether devices used in particle accelerators can help solve the problem. The team will run simulations on high-performance computers that will enable them to predict the lifespan of information held within these qubits using smaller versions of these devices, taking us one step closer to the age of quantum computing.

The pre-excavation phase involves the reopening, rehabilitation and reinforcement of infrastructure created for gold mining operations decades ago.

Scientists of the Fermilab experiment MicroBooNE have published the results of a search for a type of hidden neutrino — much heavier than Standard Model neutrinos — that could be produced by Fermilab’s accelerators. These heavy neutrinos are expected to have longer travel times to the MicroBooNE detector than the ordinary neutrinos. This search is the first of its kind performed in a liquid-argon time projection chamber, a type of particle detector. MicroBooNE scientists have used their data to publish constraints on the existence of such heavy neutrinos.

In an educational turning of the tables, first- through fifth-graders evaluated Fermilab scientists’ abilities to illuminate and educate at their school’s first reverse science fair. Three competing groups of scientists demoed neutrino detection, muon precession and particle acceleration in fun, accessible ways, and the elementary school students got to decide who received the blue ribbon.

Fermilab has lost one of its giants. Award-winning engineer and physicist Alvin Tollestrup, who played an instrumental role in developing the Tevatron as the world’s leading high-energy physics accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and founding member of the Collider Detector at Fermilab collaboration, died on Feb. 9 of cancer. He was 95.

There are a lot of things scientists don’t know about dark matter: Can we catch it in a detector? Can we make it in a lab? What kinds of particles is it made of? Is it made of more than one kind of particle? Is it even made of particles at all? Still, although scientists have yet to find the spooky stuff, they aren’t completely in the dark.