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Experiments at Fermilab and other laboratories are investigating neutrino oscillations in detail to discover the physics beyond the Standard Model.

This year, the NSF is awarding grants to fund research on the development of bright beams at the University of Chicago and Northern Illinois University at a level of $680,000 and $560,000, respectively, for a three-year period.

Scientists from Fermilab and more than 45 institutions around the world have teamed up to design a program to catch this hypothetical neutrino in the act. The program, called the Short-Baseline Neutrino program, makes use of a trio of detectors positioned along one of Fermilab’s neutrino beams.

Imagine an instrument that can measure motions a billion times smaller than an atom that last a millionth of a second. Fermilab’s Holometer is currently the only machine with the ability to take these very precise measurements of space and time, and recently collected data has improved the limits on theories about exotic objects from the early universe.

The Fermilab Holometer has reached its design luminosity, building up more than 1 kilowatt of infrared laser power stored in a 40-meter-long Michelson interferometer. This light intensity corresponds to more than 10 billion trillion photons per second hitting the interferometer optics. It also allows scientists to measure the optics’ positions to a resolution 1,000 times smaller than the size of a proton.