Work begins for new Fermilab Welcome and Access Center

A new building at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory aims to improve the welcome experience while also enhancing site access, safety and security.

The Fermilab Welcome and Access Center, to be located near Fermilab’s main entrance on Pine Street in Batavia, Illinois, will host both informational and administrative functions for smoother processing and access to the site. In addition to the new access facility, the project also includes a new guardhouse and the reconfiguration of traffic routes for cars, bicyclists and pedestrians to provide easy and secure access to the campus. A new swipe-and-enter inbound lane will streamline badged employee entrance into the lab.

With proper identification presented to entrance guards, public visitors will continue to have access to public areas of Wilson Hall, see Fermilab’s herd of bison, explore hands-on exhibits and attend educational programs in the Lederman Science Center, and enjoy the laboratory’s publicly accessible bike paths and nature trails.

Business visitors, new employees, users, affiliates, subcontractors and others visiting Fermilab for work will use the building for a smoother administrative process. The new location will enable Fermilab to efficiently welcome people and issue badges needed to enter Fermilab work areas.

“We are deeply committed to our culture of openness, and we are also deeply committed to the safety of our employees and visitors and to the security and stewardship of our world-class facilities, infrastructure, and data at the lab,” said Fermilab Director Lia Merminga. “We are pleased to continue to welcome visitors, and the Fermilab Welcome and Access Center represents a solid step towards making the lab a more welcoming place.”

Like other national laboratories, visitors to Fermilab need to present a Real ID-compliant form of identification, such as a Real-ID driver’s license or passport, to enter the site. The Fermilab website provides information on the lab’s site access requirements.

“With the new space, we will be able to streamline the process of bringing people into the lab and take care of the access process up front,” said Greg Stephens, chief operation officer at Fermilab. “This will make for a better experience for visitors and help us improve site safety.”

A contract has been awarded to W.E. O’Neil Construction, and on-site construction has begun. Completion of the welcome and access center is expected for the fall of 2025.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

The ability of quantum computers to solve some of the world’s most complex problems is an exciting prospect. It’s no wonder that research and development to harness it is underway in all sectors. Quantum computers need specialized control and readout electronics to translate back and forth between the classical and quantum computing worlds. Optimizing these are key to advancing quantum information science, or QIS, technology.

Engineers at U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory developed the Quantum Instrumentation Control Kit, or QICK, a product that combines a radio frequency board with control and readout hardware and open source software to control it. QICK is being used increasingly in the scientific community, with over 300 users worldwide. Now, a multidisciplinary team at Fermilab, including engineers and business and technology transfer experts, wants to market a new product, a companion board called the “QICK box.”

“As with Raspberry Pi, an open-source product that has accessories one can purchase at commercial outlets, the QICK box can be thought of as accessory to QICK,” said Fermilab Lederman Fellow Sara Sussman, who is part of the QICK development team.

The accessory is a custom radio frequency board that improves signal-to-noise ratio and qubit control by optimizing amplification and filtering for the incoming and outgoing signals, which is, as Sussman explains, what everybody in QIS is trying to do.

Scientists must filter and amplify each signal in just the right way to minimize noise as the signal travels to a qubit housed inside an extremely cold dilution refrigerator. Because the signal loses strength along the way, scientists must re-amplify it. And they must do this with as little noise as possible so they can see the information contained in the qubit measurement.

The QICK box removes a lot of complexity for its users. Its hardware components come already optimized for signal-to-noise, so users do not need to become experts in doing so. In addition, the QICK box replaces all the space-consuming wiring, amplification and filtering components that would otherwise be required in a box the size of a small suitcase. This, along with its open-source field-programmable gate array firmware and software, makes QICK quite inexpensive.

The QICK developers have gathered feedback from established and potential users, most from the scientific community, since the open-source product became available. They believe the QICK box will benefit the broader quantum community. But first, they need to get it into that community’s hands.

For this goal, and with funding provided by the DOE Office of Science Advanced Scientific Computing Research program, Sara Sussman and Daiane Possebon Colombo, also from Fermilab, participated in Energy I-Corps. This intensive two-month program from DOE’s Office of Technology Transfer is designed to help labs bring technology that they’ve developed to the market. Sussman was the project’s principal investigator and Colombo was the entrepreneurial lead.

The duo paired with industry mentor Conner Prochaska of Bohr Quantum Technology, who reviewed their progress and provided valuable feedback.

The primary purpose of the program, according to Colombo, was to analyze the market and see whether there was a market for the QICK box. To this end, they interviewed 76 members of the international quantum community, including those from Google, Amazon Web Services and Rigetti Computing, the Unitary Fund and several universities.

These interviews not only established that there is a market for the QICK box but also offered other insights. For instance, the team determined that today’s quantum industry values open-source hardware.

“Being open source is important to the quantum market,” said Colombo, adding that several interviewees mentioned the room to grow, since QIS is still a new, research-based field.

Using information they gathered, the pair developed a value proposition statement and a marketing proposal along with key interview takeaways that led to the proposal.

Based on their market research, the pair presented their proposal in Washington, D.C., to DOE program managers and leaders from the Office of Technology Transfer, ASCR and the QIS community.

Back at Fermilab, the team is on to the next step — working with Fermilab’s Office of Partnerships and Technology Transfer to work with industrial partners to manufacture the QICK box on a larger scale.

Throughout the program, the full QICK team, including principal engineer Gustavo Cancelo and software lead Sho Uemura, along with Sussman and Colombo, were meeting to discuss what was learned and to collect input on program exercises. The team is already incorporating some of what was learned into QICK and its companion board.

“Energy I-Corps has helped QICK advance several steps toward industrialization,” said Cancelo. In particular, it has shown a clear path forward to increase QICK use in the quantum community.”

The team is continuing to focus on providing researchers and scientists with the tools they need to build their experimental capabilities without spending a lot of money.

The development of QICK was supported by QuantISED, the Quantum Science Center (QSC) and later by the Fermilab-hosted Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center (SQMS). The QICK electronics is important for research at the SQMS, where scientists are developing superconducting qubits with long lifetimes. It is also of interest to a second national quantum center where Fermilab plays a key role, the QSC hosted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

After an unexpected measurement by the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experiment in 2022, physicists on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider announced today a new mass measurement of the W boson, one of nature’s force-carrying particles. This new measurement, which is a first for the CMS experiment, uses a new technique that makes it the most elaborate investigation of the W boson’s mass to date. Following nearly a decade of analysis, CMS has found that the W boson’s mass is consistent with predictions, finally putting a multi-year long mystery to rest. View the paper.

The final analysis used 300 million events collected from the 2016 run of the LHC, and 4 billion simulated events. From this dataset, the team reconstructed and then measured the mass from more than 100 million W bosons. They found that the W boson’s mass is 80 360.2 ± 9.9 megaelectron volts (MeV), which is consistent with the Standard Model’s predictions of 80 357 ± 6 MeV. They also ran a separate analysis that cross-checks the theoretical assumptions.

“The new CMS result is unique because of its precision and the way we determined the uncertainties,” said Patty McBride, a distinguished scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Research Laboratory and the former CMS spokesperson. “We’ve learned a lot from CDF and the other experiments who have worked on the W boson mass question. We are standing on their shoulders, and this is one of the reasons why we are able to take this study a big step forward.”

Since the W boson was discovered in 1983, physicists on 10 different experiments have measured its mass.

The W boson is one of the cornerstones of the Standard Model, the theoretical framework that describes nature at its most fundamental level. A precise understanding of the W boson’s mass allows scientists to map the interplay of particles and forces, including the strength of the Higgs field and merger of electromagnetism with the weak force, which is responsible for radioactive decay.

“The entire universe is a delicate balancing act,” said Anadi Canepa, deputy spokesperson of the CMS experiment and a senior scientist at Fermilab. “If the W mass is different from what we expect, there could be new particles or forces at play.”

The new CMS measurement has a precision of 0.01%. This level of precision corresponds to measuring a 4-inch-long pencil to between 3.9996 and 4.0004 inches. But unlike pencils, the W boson is a fundamental particle with no physical volume and a mass that is less than a single atom of silver.

“This measurement is extremely difficult to make,” Canepa added. “We need multiple measurements from multiple experiments to cross-check the value.”

The CMS experiment is unique from the other experiments that have made this measurement because of its compact design, specialized sensors for fundamental particles called muons and an extremely strong solenoid magnet that bends the trajectories of charged particles as they move through the detector.

“CMS’s design makes it particularly well-suited for precision mass measurements,” McBride said. “It’s a next generation experiment.”

Because most fundamental particles are incredibly short-lived, scientists measure their masses by adding up the masses and momenta of everything they decay into. This method works well for particles like the Z boson, a cousin of the W boson, which decays into two muons. But the W boson poses a big challenge because one of its decay products is a tiny fundamental particle called a neutrino.

“Neutrinos are notoriously difficult to measure,” said Josh Bendavid, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who worked on this analysis. “In collider experiments, the neutrino goes undetected, so we can only work with half the picture.”

Working with just half the picture means that the physicists need to be creative. Before running the analysis on real experimental data, the scientists first simulated billions of LHC collisions.

“In some cases, we even had to model small deformations in the detector,” Bendavid said. “The precision is high enough that we care about small twists and bends; even if they’re as small as the width of a human hair.”

Physicists also need numerous theoretical inputs, such as what is happening inside the protons when they collide, how the W boson is produced, and how it moves before it decays.

“It’s a real art to figure out the impact of theory inputs,” McBride said.

In the past, physicists used the Z boson as a stand-in for the W boson while calibrating their theoretical models. While this method has many advantages, it also adds a layer of uncertainty into the process.

“Z and W bosons are siblings, but not twins,” said Elisabetta Manca, a researcher at the University of California Los Angeles and one of the analyzers. “Physicists need to make a few assumptions when extrapolating from the Z to the W, and these assumptions are still under discussion.”

To reduce this uncertainty, CMS researchers developed a novel analysis technique that uses only real W boson data to constrain the theoretical inputs.

“We were able to do this effectively thanks to a combination of a larger data set, the experience we gained from an earlier W boson study, and the latest theoretical developments,” Bendavid said. “This has allowed us to free ourselves from the Z boson as our reference point.”

As part of this analysis, they also examined 100 million tracks from the decays of well-known particles to recalibrate a massive section of the CMS detector until it was an order of magnitude more precise.

“This new level of precision will allow us to tackle critical measurements, such as those involving the W, Z and Higgs bosons, with enhanced accuracy,” Manca said.

The most challenging part of the analysis was its time intensiveness, since it required creating a novel analysis technique and developing an incredibly deep understanding of the CMS detector.

“I started this research as a summer student, and now I’m in my third year as a postdoc,” Manca said. “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

 The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is funded in part by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the National Science Foundation. It is one of two large general-purpose experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. 

 Fermilab is the host laboratory in the U.S. that facilitates the participation of hundreds of USCMS physicists from more than 50 university groups and plays a leading role in detector construction and operations, computing and software, and data analysis.

 Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

During her childhood, Brynn Kristen MacCoy was inspired by “Anne of Green Gables,” a fiction book series that tells the adventures of a spirited, imaginative girl.

“’Anne of Green Gables’ is one of the formative influences in my worldview: a curiosity about the world and an excitement to live in this world knowing that there are all of these open questions,” MacCoy said. “I’ll never run out of interesting things to look into.” “It’s really resonant how she’s just a little bit different and out of sync with people’s expectations, and that doesn’t hold her back.”

Now a researcher passionate about uncovering the laws of physics by studying the muon, MacCoy dedicates her award-winning thesis to physicists who feel like they don’t quite fit by quoting “Anne of Green Gables”: “Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about?”

MacCoy, who received a doctorate in physics from the University of Washington last year, received this year’s Universities Research Association Honorary Doctoral Thesis Award. This award recognizes an outstanding doctoral thesis based on research at or in collaboration with Fermilab.

“Once again, the committee was thrilled to see so many great theses from Fermilab research,” said Chris Stoughton, chair of the URA Thesis Award Committee. “Dr. MacCoy’s thesis will be a resource for experts in muon physics, as well as an engaging introduction for all who want to learn more about how these measurements are made, and why they have critical importance for the field of particle physics.”

URA President and CEO John Mester added, “Dr. MacCoys’ thesis probes the essential tools of metrology to lay the foundation for predictive new physics.”

MacCoy’s path to research in particle physics began in an unexpected place: photography. As a fine arts student at the University of Washington, she took a physics class focused on the science of light and color.

“It just absolutely blew me away,” she said. “I had not understood before that light is actually both a wave and a particle. By the end of that class, I was so interested that I wanted to try to major in physics.”

After graduating with degrees in physics and photography, she worked for a few years in private industry on precision measurement technology, before returning to the University of Washington as a Ph.D. student. There, she joined a group that works on the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab.

The Muon g-2 experiment seeks to precisely measure the way muons, charged fundamental particles like electrons but more massive, spin in a magnetic field. Muons wobble like a spinning top when they’re in a magnetic field, MacCoy said, and observing the particles that the muons decay into lets physicists measure the frequency of that wobble.

Theories from the Standard Model of particle physics can very precisely predict this measurement, so Muon g-2’s goal is to provide a measurement to compare to theory. If the values differ, it could indicate something is happening that is not explained through the Standard Model. Last summer, the Muon g-2 experiment announced the results from its first and second data-taking runs, providing the most precise measurement of this muon behavior yet, with higher precision expected as more runs are analyzed.

To supply the positively charged muons, or antimuons, for the Muon g-2 experiment, the linear particle accelerator at Fermilab shoots a beam of protons at a target. This collision produces other particles, including muons, which are redirected to the building where Muon g-2 resides. Once there, the straight muon beam encounters a strong magnetic field, curving the muons into a circle around a ring until they decay.

MacCoy’s doctoral research focused on beam dynamics, or specifically, how movement of the beam affects the measurement result.

A major challenge for the beam is the transition from a straight line into a circular path. MacCoy worked on a system of detectors that monitors the direction of the beam and the distribution of its muons as it enters the ring. Verifying that the beam’s properties match expectations is crucial for an experiment like Muon g-2.

“If you imagine trying to shine a flashlight through a really long narrow pipe, if you get that angle a little bit wrong, it might just run into the sides and not actually make it through,” MacCoy said. “If we don’t actually get the muons into the magnet at the rate that we need to, then we can’t collect enough data.”

Additionally, the researchers had to know exactly where the muons were located once they were in the magnetic field. The result that Muon g-2 is measuring relies on the muons’ wobble frequency and the exact strength of the magnetic field.

“The magnetic field is very uniform, but still, even tiny, one part per million nonuniformities in the magnetic field can affect the measurement,” MacCoy said. “We need to know exactly what they’re doing.”

Finally, MacCoy studied higher-order systematic effects, or problems in the data that become more important as the data set becomes bigger.

“The more statistics you collect, the more the statistical uncertainty goes down, and the more your systematic effects start to make themselves more important,” she said. “Because we are measuring a time dependent effect — the frequency of the wobbling of the muons — anything that changes over the time of our measurement is a potential systematic effect.”

One issue is that the strength of the kicker magnet, which moves the beam into its orbit, changes as muons enter the ring. The muons that experience a stronger kick end up in a different location in the ring, introducing uncertainties to the understanding of the distribution of muons in the magnetic field. This issue contributes a few tens of parts per billion to the experiment’s precision, compared to the ultimate target precision of 140 parts per billion.

The Muon g-2 team discovered this systematic effect in the experiment’s first run. MacCoy worked with a group to build a detector that can understand this effect, which was installed for Muon g-2’s final run.

Now, MacCoy continues to work at the University of Washington as a postdoctoral researcher. She will continue working on the analysis of Muon g-2’s results, as well as fine-tuning the systematics adjustments.

“There’s been low-hanging fruit, where we could put in a little bit of effort and get a big improvement, and we’ve done all of that,” she said. “Now, there’s the higher fruit that we have to put in a lot more effort for a smaller improvement. I’m really excited about picking up those last little higher-hanging fruits and getting the most precise measurement we can.”

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.