Jelena Berenc named 2025 Fermi Forward Discovery Group Guest Artist  

Jelena Berenc is an artist known for using bold pen strokes and detailed pencil shading to explore the idea of quantum fluctuations in spacetime. This year, she will bring her vision to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory as the 2025 Fermi Forward Discovery Group Guest Artist.

The Guest Artist program fosters collaboration between scientists and artists to help the public gain more understanding about cutting-edge research at Fermilab. The program is funded by Fermi Forward Discovery Group, which manages and operates Fermilab on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy.

During her time at the laboratory, Berenc will team up with scientists to create art based on their research. The pieces she creates will be shown in art displays for public viewing at the laboratory.

“Connecting science to art helps spread awareness of Fermilab’s research to a wider community,” said Natalie Johnson, head of Fermilab’s Office of Education and Public Engagement. “Looking at physics research through different perspectives can make the science more accessible, with the ultimate goal of inspiring young people to pursue STEM careers.”

Berenc wants to learn more about virtual particles, theorized to be tiny fluctuations in the fields that make up all physical matter. She will collaborate with researchers at Fermilab who have studied these particles through the Muon g-2 experiment.

 “Scientific concepts expressed through a visual language help audiences understand the fundamental rules of the universe,” said Berenc.

Berenc brings with her years of experience collaborating with STEM researchers and institutions. Berenc recently curated an art show in Chicago that featured installations from both artists and experts in fields that included mathematics, physics, astrophysics and biology.  

Berenc’s art curation expertise makes her uniquely equipped to organize an art exposition that showcases the art created in collaboration with Fermilab researchers.

“I was captivated by the duality in Berenc’s work,” said Georgia Schwender, the visual arts coordinator at Fermilab and manager of the guest artist program. “She takes concepts and explores their complexity with precision. Her thought process, visual language and creative journey are deeply compelling.”  

Berenc’s self-described art method, information realism, guides her creative process.

“Using this process, I don’t allow my feelings or beliefs to inform the art,” said Berenc. “Instead, I use the information in front of me.”  

An example of her method is her piece “Book of Knowledge,” a 1,000-page book filled with 500,000 tiny marks, she calls bits. The bits make up only 4% of the pages, while the other 96% is blank, symbolizing how much scientists may still not understand about the fundamental structure of the universe. 

“As America’s premier particle accelerator laboratory, our goal is to understand the fundamental particles that make up our universe and the forces that govern their behavior,” said Schwender. “To make our discoveries more accessible, it’s important to present the material in ways that allow everyone to appreciate the significance of the work.”

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. Fermi Forward Discovery Group manages Fermilab for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov and follow us on social media. 

More than 100 participants gathered at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory for the 2025 CMS Data Analysis School — an immersive, hands-on program to train the next generation of physicists for the CMS experiment. The event was hosted earlier this year by the LHC Physics Center, or LPC, at Fermilab, and brought new members of the CMS collaboration together for an intense week of lectures, hands-on exercises and a group competition.

The CMS experiment is one of the major particle detectors at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and the school featured a rigorous curriculum aimed at familiarizing participants with the physics, detector technology, software and data analysis of the experiment. Sixty-four students, primarily new graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, along with 46 facilitators and nine lecturers participated in this year’s data analysis school. The facilitators included volunteers from the CMS experiment and this year’s LPC Distinguished Researchers, who provided invaluable mentorship throughout the week.

The program combined lectures and practical exercises to offer a deep dive into particle physics analysis. Twelve short exercises focused on specific aspects of the CMS experiment, such as particle identification and reconstruction. In addition, participants engaged in seven longer exercises, each tackling complex analyses like top quark measurements and searches for new long-lived particles. The exercises were designed to equip attendees with the essential skills needed to work with large data sets.

As part of the program’s concluding activities, seven student groups presented their analyses to a panel of senior CMS collaborators. These presentations were judged based on the quality of the analysis, teamwork and presentation skills. Each group’s performance was assessed by a distinguished panel of senior CMS researchers.

Guest speakers from across the physics community offered lectures and insights throughout the week. Among the presenters were interim Fermilab Director Young-Kee Kim, Fermilab Deputy Director for Science and Technology Bonnie Fleming, CMS collaboration Spokesperson Gautier Hamel de Monchenault and additional experts in particle physics, including Tulika Bose, Eliana Gianfelice-Wendt, Lindsey Gray, Frank Hartmann, Gordan Krnjaic, Corrinne Mills and Isobel Ojalvo.

Corrinne Mills, a long-time collaborator with CMS, shared her thoughts on the significance of the event. “The data analysis school is an excellent opportunity not only to get up to speed quickly on CMS analysis, but also to meet other students and collaborators on the experiment,” Mills said. “I actually went through the data analysis school as a student when I first came to CMS as a new assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and it was a great experience.”

The school also covered key topics such as the CMS publication process, how to present results to a scientifically literate audience, and how to handle tough questions about the details. During one of the school’s lunches, members of the Fermilab Accelerator Division joined students and facilitators to answer questions about the laboratory and its research.

The 2025 CMS Data Analysis School was organized by outgoing LPC co-coordinators Kevin Black and Bo Jayatilaka, along with current LPC co-coordinator Isobel Ojalvo and incoming LPC coordinator Jim Hirschauer. The school’s success was made possible by the dedicated efforts of CMS LPC support staff: Gabriele Benelli of Brown University, Marguerite Tonjes of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and David Yu of the University of Nebraska.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. Fermi Forward Discovery Group manages Fermilab for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov and follow us on social media.

Senior scientist Sowjanya Gollapinni has been elected as the new co-spokesperson for the international neutrino project, the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Gollapinni, currently a scientist at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, will succeed Mary Bishai, an experimental particle physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, who co-led the collaboration since 2023. Gollapinni’s two-year term began April 1.  

“Mary has done a wonderful job leading the collaboration over the last two years and she will continue to contribute her uncommon skills and drive to the success of DUNE Phase-I and to the realization of DUNE Phase II,” said Sergio Bertolucci, co-spokesperson of DUNE and professor of physics at the University of Bologna in Italy. “I look forward to working with Sowjanya to establish DUNE as the best-in-class next generation neutrino experiment.”

DUNE is an international flagship experiment to unlock the mysteries of neutrinos. Fermilab is the host laboratory for DUNE, in partnership with funding agencies and more than 1,400 scientists and engineers from all over the globe. 

With a focus on neutrino research, Gollapinni has been involved with the DUNE collaboration since 2015, in several scientific and technical leadership roles. Before moving to Los Alamos, Gollapinni was a faculty at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s physics and astronomy department. 

“It’s a great privilege to have been elected as co-spokesperson, and I’m honored at the trust the collaboration has placed in me,” Gollapinni said. “The next two years will be a pivotal time for DUNE, and I look forward to taking DUNE to the next stages of development as the collaboration gets closer to making this project a reality.” 

She added “It will be a pleasure to work with Sergio. He has been critically involved in the experiment for a long time and has made foundational contributions to what we are now calling DUNE.”

Referencing the 2023 Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel report, Gollapinni added, “The P5 report could not have supported Phase-I and Phase-II of DUNE any stronger. My focus over the next two years will be successful execution of Phase-I and building a roadmap for Phase-II to realize the full scope of DUNE.” 

The infrastructure that will house DUNE is currently being built at two sites: Fermilab’s campus in Batavia, Illinois and a mile below the surface at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota. 

Last year, LBNF/DUNE achieved a major milestone with the completion of excavation for the colossal caverns that will house the experiment’s far detectors. Since that time, workers have begun installing conventional infrastructure, such as lighting, electricity and fire suppression equipment in the space one mile underground in Lead, South Dakota. 

DUNE is a science experiment, but it is also a collaboration that is made up of people. We need to ensure the collaborators are successful in their science and research, but also in their careers especially early career members.

On the collaborative nature of the experiment, Gollapinni said, “DUNE is very international. I value international partnerships and the commitments they bring to the table greatly. DUNE will not be possible without them.To me, DUNE would not have come this far if it were not for the incredible hard work and intellectual contributions of the people involved. So, the welfare of the collaboration is of paramount importance to me.” 

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, along with scientists and engineers at the computer chip manufacturer Diraq, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Chicago and Manchester University, have proposed the development of a quantum sensor made of quantum bits called spin qubits in silicon to probe beyond Standard Model physics. Diraq is a global leader in quantum computing technology on silicon, which is essential to the Quandarum project.

By placing many spin qubits together on a chip to form a sensor, the researchers seek to enable scientists to tease out even the faintest signals from the cosmos. Such a sensor could potentially be used to detect axions, hypothetical particles that some scientists believe comprise dark matter.

Led by Fermilab, the Quandarum project is one of 25 projects funded for a total of $71 million by the DOE program Quantum Information Science Enabled Discovery. The QuantISED program supports innovative research at national laboratories and universities that applies quantum technologies to use for fundamental science discovery.

With this award, researchers plan to develop a novel sensor, bringing together for the first time two specialized technologies: spin qubits in silicon and cryogenic “skipper” analog-to-digital converter circuits used for the readout of dark matter detectors.

Silicon spin-based quantum sensors can provide a powerful platform for testing theories around dark matter because they can exploit quantum interactions to increase sensitivity and explore the limits of what scientists understand about high-energy physics.

It’s all about the spin

Spin qubits store information in the direction of an electron’s spin, a property defined by quantum mechanics. The spin state of an electron is very sensitive to weak electromagnetic fields in the environment, allowing for extremely precise measurements.

“We can’t directly measure what the direction of the spin is, but we can measure small movements of charge because moving charge creates a change in the electric field which can be measured,” said Adam Quinn, Fermilab engineer and project principal investigator.

However, because electron spins are so small, densely packed, and sensitive to even the slightest disturbance, extracting information from spin qubits is quite difficult.

“The core challenge of this sensor is the readout, and the key to success is having the ability to read out information with minimal noise,” said Quinn.

To achieve this, Quinn and his fellow researchers are seeking new ways to use highly scaled readout techniques based on cryogenic application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, which would be co-designed using Diraq’s qubit sensor. ASICs are manufactured the same way as the chips that power most electronics today. However, they will use specialized design and layout techniques to achieve superior performance, particularly in extreme environments, such as in a cryogenic chamber.

The Fermilab team is building on prior work at Fermilab on the readout of skipper charge-coupled devices, or skipper CCDs. Engineers developed skipper CCDs to increase the readout accuracy by overcoming noise. By using an action called skipping to move the charge back and forth multiple times, skipper devices enable a more precise measurement at the single-electron level. The Fermilab team plans to apply this innovation to the readout of qubits, with several iterative chip designs that will allow them to more tightly integrate the qubits and readout electronics. They believe this will ultimately lead to a low-power, highly sensitive detector.

Fermilab has been developing novel readout chips for particle physics experiments for many years. Now, engineers and scientists will employ some of these same types of microelectronic circuits and apply them to the development of the new sensor.

Scaling up

However, producing the quantity of qubits needed — potentially thousands — putting them together on a silicon chip, and making them work properly is not easy.  During the manufacturing process, each one must be nearly identical and must perform similarly to the others.

Diraq, a company with world-leading expertise indeveloping spin qubits in silicon, is one company that is well positioned to manufacture spin qubits at the scale needed. Silicon is the preferred material because the industrial infrastructure to produce it is firmly established. 

“In addition to quantum computing, the inherent characteristics and material properties of silicon spin-based qubits offer significant promise for large quantum-sensing array technology and particle detection applications,” said Andrew Dzurak, founder and CEO of Diraq.

“By utilizing high-precision fabrication processes we are looking to enable the production of quality controlled integrated silicon spin qubits at cost-effective and commercial volumes. This technology has the potential to underpin the development not only of large-scale quantum computers but large-scale quantum sensing platforms,” he said.

One step at a time

Over the next five years, the goal is to combine the two technologies — spin qubits and skipper readout technology — onto a single chip. However, to get there, they will build several prototypes.

“We’re going to start out by re-using existing chips and putting them together,” said Quinn. “We expect that to be a good proof of concept, but one lacking great performance. Then, over the next few years, we’re going to design better and better ASICs to improve performance.

Fermilab and Diraq will be joined on the Quandarum project by scientists from University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Chicago and Manchester University, who will be developing algorithms and modeling the interactions of the physics phenomena. All participating institutions are seeking to leverage the technology being developed for the mutual benefit of the Quandarum project and the high-energy physics research they are conducting.

“This project exemplifies the power of interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation to advance quantum technologies for fundamental science,” said Fermilab Microelectronics Division Head Farah Fahim.

“By combining Fermilab’s expertise in extreme environment electronics and constructing sensitive large-area detectors with Diraq’s world-class capabilities in silicon spin qubits, the Quandarum project will push the boundaries of quantum sensing to tackle one of the most profound mysteries of our universe,” said Fahim.

Quandarum is funded for a total of five years.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. Fermi Forward Discovery Group manages Fermilab for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov and follow us on social media.