News

A sourdough family started at Fermilab by a graduate student visiting from Texas A&M has continued to expand and flourish.

Fermilab takes its popular STEM Career Expo to the web. This year the annual event, an opportunity for high school students to hear from more than two dozen STEM professionals about their careers, is offered as five recorded panel discussions now available on the Fermilab website. Students can learn how neutrino physicists, bioinformatics scientists, actuaries and others got to where they are and hear from people who work jobs in fields that students might pursue in the coming years.

As with all first responders across the nation, the Fermilab Fire Department stands ready to act should they be called upon to help with a COVID-19 incident in the areas surrounding the suburban Illinois laboratory.

Physicist Cristiano Galbiati shifted focus from the search for dark matter to the shortage of ventilators for COVID-19 patients. The collaboration he began created an easy-to-manufacture ventilator in less than two months.

Hector Carranza Jr. of the University of Texas at Arlington has received the prestigious Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research award, or SCGSR, to conduct his research at Fermilab. DOE awarded the fellowship to 62 students from U.S. universities. He will work on light-mass dark matter searches at the ICARUS neutrino experiment.

More than a dozen Fermilab volunteers have helped design, test and finalize the Mechanical Ventilator Milano, a low-cost ventilator to help in the midst of device shortages caused by COVID-19.

The detector for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment will collect massive amounts of data from star-born and terrestrial neutrinos. A single supernova burst could provide as much as 100 terabytes of data. A worldwide network of computers will provide the infrastructure and bandwidth to help store and analyze it. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, scientists are writing software to mine the data – to better understand supernovae and the evolution of our universe.

Hard to believe you can play pool with neutrinos, but certain neutrino events are closer to the game than you think. These special interactions involve a neutrino — famously elusive — striking a particle inside a nucleus like a billiard ball. MINERvA scientists study the dynamics of this subatomic ricochet to learn about the neutrino that triggered the collision. Now they have measured the probability of these quasielastic interactions using Fermilab’s medium-energy neutrino beam. Such measurements are important for current and future neutrino experiments.

On April 28, baby bison season officially began. The first calf of the year was born in the late morning, and mother and baby are doing well. Fermilab is expecting between 12 and 14 new calves this spring.