Fermilab hosts a new kind of workshop for educators

For the first time, the Fermilab Office of Education and Public Outreach hosted a series of a new kind of professional development workshop — one where teachers played the roles not only of educator, but also student and curriculum designer. The events were aimed at providing new knowledge, tools and techniques for educators passionate about spreading STEM fields.

In total, 14 people attended the first workshop on Oct. 10, which was developed by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, or BSCS, a nonprofit organization focused on science teaching and learning. Participants included education program leaders from both the Fermilab Education Office and Argonne National Laboratory, along with teachers who serve as instructors for Fermilab teacher workshops.

“I thoroughly enjoyed the workshop,” said Milton Harris, teacher at Clarendon Hills Middle School and program instructor at the Fermilab Beauty & Charm program, an activity-based science program for middle schoolers. “What I liked most was the focus on transformative teaching and learning as it relates to the NGSS.”

NGSS, or Next Generation Science Standards, is a multistate agreement to provide a benchmark for science education in schools.

The first of four sessions focused on developing and using models — one of the eight NGSS science and engineering practices.

During the workshop, representatives embedded participants in the workshop from multiple angles.

“The presenter really made us think about and envision what this would look like from the perspective of a student, a teacher and a professional development provider,” Harris said.

This first session was also designed to provide a platform for the attendees to discuss NGSS practices, as well as strategies for the most effective professional development. Further sessions were delivered each day of the week, until Oct. 13.

“The workshop was a unique opportunity for us to bring together our teacher leaders and our educational program leaders,” said Susan Dahl of the Fermilab Office of Education and co-organizer of the events. “They are experiencing NGSS learning as both a learner and as a teacher and, in doing so, can consider how they as professional development planners and providers can develop experiences for the teachers in our workshops and the students on our field trips.”

The experience for Fermilab’s teacher leaders was funded by the Fermilab Friends for Science Education, a not-for-profit organization that supports science education programs at Fermilab.

Fermilab’s Office of Education provides educational resources and support to a wide array of audiences, from the public to teachers to laboratory staff, in the pursuit of developing the STEM workforce and stimulating science literacy. Working with external institutes also engenders successful professional development.

“By including our education colleagues from Argonne, we can establish potential relationships between our areas of expertise,” Dahl said, “and see possibilities to work together to complement our work.”

Editor’s note: This release was issued by the international Interactions Collaboration, a group of science communicators representing the world’s particle physics laboratories. Fermilab is a member of this collaboration and is sponsoring several Dark Matter Day events. 

The world will soon be celebrating the hunt for the universe’s most elusive matter in a series of Dark Matter Day (www.darkmatterday.com) events planned in over a dozen countries.

The events, planned on and around the formally recognized day on Oct. 31, 2017, will engage the public in discussions about dark matter, which together with dark energy makes up about 95 percent of the mass and energy in our universe. Although we know through its gravitational effects that dark matter greatly dwarfs the visible matter in our universe, we know little about it.

How can I get involved? 

Universities, institutions, science centers and individuals have already announced Dark Matter Day-themed events in Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and in the U.K. and U.S., with more events on the way. There are also several online events planned if you can’t be there in person.

• View the full events list, a country-sorted list, or a list of online or virtual events.
• There still time to organize your own event. Check out our Event Starter Kit.
• Also, you can help promote dark matter day to your friends, colleagues, and social network. Join an online campaign (via Thunderclap) to get the word out about Dark Matter Day, and use #darkmatterday in your social posts.

What is dark matter?

Dark matter explains how galaxies spin at a faster-than-expected rate without coming apart. Scientists know from these and other space observations that there is “missing” mass — something we can’t see — that makes up an estimated 95 percent of the total mass and energy of the universe. So a big part of the universe is largely unknown to us.

Finding out what dark matter is made of is a pressing pursuit in physics. We don’t yet know if it’s composed of undiscovered particles or whether it requires some other change in our understanding of the universe’s laws of physics. A host of innovative experiments are searching for the source of dark matter using different types of tools, such as mile-deep detectors, powerful particle beams, and space-based and ground-based telescopes.

Why is there a day dedicated to dark matter?

Revealing dark matter’s true nature will tell us a lot about the origins, evolution and overall structure in the universe and will reshape our understanding of physics.

Dark Matter Day events are intended to educate the public about the importance of learning all we can about dark matter to develop a fuller picture of the unseen universe. Focusing more brain power and scientific resources on dark matter’s mysteries could lead to new ideas and new discoveries.

Who is behind Dark Matter Day?

This first-ever Dark Matter Day campaign was conceived by the Interactions Collaboration, a group of science communicators representing the world’s particle physics laboratories. The collaboration also runs the www.darkmatterday.com website as a resource for people who want to host or attend local Dark Matter Day events.

Need more help?

Members of the Interactions Collaboration want you to be a part of Dark Matter Day. Please send an email to darkmatterday@interactions.org with any questions, comments or suggestions.

For a press contact in your region visit: http://www.darkmatterday.com/contacts

The Interactions Collaboration (Interactions.org) seeks to support the international science of particle physics and to set visible footprints for peaceful collaboration across all borders. The www.darkmatter.com website was developed and is jointly maintained by the Interactions Collaboration, whose members represent the world’s particle physics laboratories and institutions in Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia, with funding provided by science funding agencies from many nations.

Editor’s note: The following press release was issued by Caltech. Fermilab is part of a continuing collaboration on this work, pursuing quantum technology for new scientific applications and discoveries. Daniel Lidar, one of the co-authors on the paper referenced in the release, will give a Colloquium talk at Fermilab on Dec. 6 as part of the Near-Term Applications of Quantum Computing conference, which Fermilab will host Dec. 6 and 7. Read more about this application at the INQNET website. 

Researchers from Caltech and the University of Southern California (USC) report the first application of quantum computing to a physics problem. By employing quantum-compatible machine learning techniques, they developed a method of extracting a rare Higgs boson signal from copious noise data. Higgs is the particle that was predicted to imbue elementary particles with mass and was discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012. The new quantum machine learning method is found to perform well even with small data sets, unlike the standard counterparts.

Despite the central role of physics in quantum computing, until now, no problem of interest for physics researchers has been resolved by quantum computing techniques. In this new work, the researchers successfully extracted meaningful information about Higgs particles by programming a quantum annealer — a type of quantum computer capable of running only optimization tasks — to sort through particle measurement data littered with errors. Caltech’s Maria Spiropulu, the Shang-Yi Ch’en professor of physics, conceived the project and collaborated with Daniel Lidar, pioneer of the quantum machine learning methodology and Viterbi professor of engineering at USC who is also a distinguished Moore scholar in Caltech’s Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy.

The quantum program seeks patterns within a data set to tell meaningful data from junk. It is expected to be useful for problems beyond high-energy physics. The details of the program as well as comparisons to existing techniques are detailed in a paper published on Oct. 19 in the journal Nature.

A popular computing technique for classifying data is the neural network method, known for its efficiency in extracting obscure patterns within a data set. The patterns identified by neural networks are difficult to interpret, as the classification process does not reveal how they were discovered. Techniques that lead to better interpretability are often more error-prone and less efficient.

“Some people in high-energy physics are getting ahead of themselves about neural nets, but neural nets aren’t easily interpretable to a physicist,” said USC’s physics graduate student Joshua Job, co-author of the paper and guest student at Caltech. The new quantum program is “a simple machine learning model that achieves a result comparable to more complicated models without losing robustness or interpretability,” Job said.

With prior techniques, the accuracy of classification depends strongly on the size and quality of a training set, which is a manually sorted portion of the data set. This is problematic for high-energy physics research, which revolves around rare events buried in large amount of noise data.

“The Large Hadron Collider generates a huge number of events, and the particle physicists have to look at small packets of data to figure out which are interesting,” Job said.

The new quantum program “is simpler, takes very little training data, and could even be faster. We obtained that by including the excited states,” Spiropulu said.

Excited states of a quantum system have excess energy that contributes to errors in the output.

“Surprisingly, it was actually advantageous to use the excited states, the suboptimal solutions,” Lidar said. “Why exactly that’s the case, we can only speculate. But one reason might be that the real problem we have to solve is not precisely representable on the quantum annealer. Because of that, suboptimal solutions might be closer to the truth.”

Modeling the problem in a way that a quantum annealer can understand proved to be a substantial challenge that was successfully tackled by Spiropulu’s former graduate student at Caltech, Alex Mott, who is now at DeepMind.

“Programming quantum computers is fundamentally different from programming classical computers. It’s like coding bits directly. The entire problem has to be encoded at once, and then it runs just once as programmed,” Mott said.

Despite the improvements, the researchers do not assert that quantum annealers are superior. The ones currently available are simply “not big enough to even encode physics problems difficult enough to demonstrate any advantage,” Spiropulu said.

“It’s because we’re comparing a thousand qubits — quantum bits of information — to a billion transistors,” said Jean-Roch Vlimant, a postdoctoral scholar in high-energy physics at Caltech. “The complexity of simulated annealing will explode at some point, and we hope that quantum annealing will also offer speedup.”

The researchers are actively seeking further applications of the new quantum-annealing classification technique.

“We were able to demonstrate a very similar result in a completely different application domain by applying the same methodology to a problem in computational biology,” Lidar said.

“There is another project on particle-tracking improvements using such methods, and we’re looking for new ways to examine charged particles,” Vlimant said.

“The result of this work is a physics-based approach to machine learning that could benefit a broad spectrum of science and other applications,” Spiropulu said. “There is a lot of exciting work and discoveries to be made in this emergent cross-disciplinary arena of science and technology.”

This project was supported by the United States Department of Energy, Office of High Energy Physics, Research Technology, Computational HEP, and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory as well as the National Science Foundation. The work was also supported by the AT&T Foundry Innovation Centers through INQNET (INtelligent Quantum NEtworks and Technologies), a program for accelerating quantum technologies.

Sending bunches of protons speeding around a circular particle collider to meet at one specific point is no easy feat. Many different collider components work keep proton beams on course — and to keep them from becoming unruly.

Scientists at Fermilab invented and developed one novel collider component 20 years ago: the electron lens. Electron lenses are beams of electrons formed into specific shapes that modify the motion of other particles — usually protons — that pass through them.

The now retired Tevatron, a circular collider at Fermilab, and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory have both benefited from electron lenses, a concept originally developed at Fermilab.

“Electron lenses are like a Swiss Army knife for accelerators: They’re relatively simple and inexpensive, but they can be applied in a wide variety of ways,” said Alexander Valishev, a Fermilab scientist who co-authored a recent study for a new electron lens application, which could be crucial to forthcoming colliders.

The innovation is detailed in an article published on Sept. 27 in Physical Review Letters. (The article was also recently selected for presentation in the Physics Central’s Physics Buzz Blog.)

“This little breakthrough in the physics of beams and accelerators is kind of a beginning of a bigger invention — it’s a new thing,” said Fermilab’s Vladimir Shiltsev, an author of the published paper. Shiltsev also played a major role in the origination of electron lenses in 1997. “Fermilab is known for inventions and developments that are, first, exciting, and then, functional. That’s what national labs are built for, and that’s what we’ve achieved.”

A lens into the future

This new type of electron lens, called the Landau damping lens, will be a critical part of a huge, prospective project in particle physics research: the Future Circular Collider at CERN. The FCC would push the boundaries of traditional collider design to further study the particle physics beyond the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle discovered only five years ago.

The proposed FCC has to be a high-luminosity machine: Its particle beams will need to be compact and densely packed. Compared with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the beams will also have a dramatic increase in energy — 50 trillion electronvolts, compared with the LHC’s beam energy of 7 trillion electronvolts. That involves an equally dramatic increase in the size of the accelerator. With a planned circumference of 100 kilometers, the FCC would dwarf the 27-kilometer LHC.

These high-energy, high-luminosity supercolliders all experience a problem, regardless of size: An intense beam of protons packed into the width of human hair traveling over a long distance can become unstable, especially if all the protons travel in exactly the same way.

In a collider, particles arrive in packets called bunches — roughly foot-long streams packed with hundreds of billions of particles. A particle beam is formed of dozens, hundreds or thousands of these bunches.

Imagine a circular collider as a narrow racetrack, with protons in a bunch as a tight pack of racecars. A piece of debris suddenly appears in the middle of the track, disrupting the flow of traffic. If every car reacts in the same way, say, by veering sharply to the left, it could lead to a major pileup.

Inside the collider, it’s not a matter of avoiding just one bump on the track, but adjusting to numerous dynamic obstacles, causing the protons to change their course many times over. If an anomaly, such as a kink in the collider’s magnetic field, occurs unexpectedly, and if the protons in the beam all react to it in the same way at the same time, even a slight change of course could quickly go berserk.

One could avoid the problem by thinning the particle beam from the get-go. By using lower-density proton beams, you provide less opportunity for protons to go off course. But that would mean removing protons and so missing out on potential for scientific discovery.

Another, better way to address the problem is to introduce differences into the beam so that not all the protons in the bunches behave the same way.

To return to the racetrack: If the drivers all react to the piece of debris different ways —some moving slightly to the right, others slightly to the left, one brave driver just skips over the top — the cars can all merge back together and continue the race, no accidents.

Creating differentiations within a proton bunch would do essentially the same thing. Each proton follows its own, ever-so-slightly different course around the collider. This way, any departure from the course is isolated, rather than compounded by protons all misbehaving in concert, minimizing harmful beam oscillations.

“Particles at the center of the bunch will move differently than particles around the outside,” Shiltsev said. “The protons will all be kind of messed up, but that’s what we want. If they all move together, they become unstable.”

These differences are usually created with a special type of magnet called octupoles. The Tevatron, before its decommissioning in 2011, had 35 octupole magnets, and the LHC now has 336.

But as colliders get larger and achieve greater energies, they need exponentially higher numbers of magnets: The FCC will require more than 10,000 octupole magnets, each a meter long, to achieve the same beam-stabilizing results as previous colliders.

That many magnets take up a lot of space: as much as 10 of the FCC’s 100 kilometers.

“That seems ridiculous,” Shiltsev said. “We’re looking for a way to avoid that.”

The scientific community recognizes the Landau damping nonlinear lens as a likely solution to this problem: A single one-meter-long electron lens could replace all 10,000 octupole magnets and possibly do a better job keeping beams stable as they speed toward collision, without introducing any new problems.

“At CERN they’ve embraced the idea of this new electron lens type, and people there will be studying them in further detail for the FCC,” Valishev said. “Given what we know so far about the issues that the future colliders will face, this would be a device of extremely high criticality. This is why we’re excited.”

Electron Legos

The Landau damping lens will join two other electron lens types in the repertoire of tools physicists have to modify or control beams inside a collider.

“After many years of use, people are very happy with electron lenses: It’s one of the instruments used for modern accelerators, like magnets or superconducting cavities,” Shiltsev said. “Electron lenses are just one of the building blocks or Lego pieces.”

Electron lenses are a lot like Legos: Lego pieces are made of the same material and can be the same color, but a different shape determines how they can be used. Electron lenses are all made of clouds of electrons, shaped by magnetic fields. The shape of the lens dictates how the lens influences a beam of protons.

Scientists developed the first electron lens at Fermilab in 1997 for use to compensate for so-called beam-beam effects in the Tevatron, and a similar type of electron lens is still in use at the Brookhaven’s RHIC.

In circular colliders, particle beams pass by each other, going in opposing directions inside the collider until they are steered into a collision at specific points. As the beams buzz by one another, they exert a small force on each other, which causes the proton bunches to expand slightly, decreasing their luminosity.

That first electron lens, called the beam-beam compensation lens, was created to combat the interaction between the beams by squeezing them back to their original, compact state.

After the success of this electron lens type in the Tevatron, scientists realized that electron beams could be shaped a second way to create another type of electron lens.

Scientists designed the second lens to be shaped like a straw, allowing the proton beam to pass through the inside unaffected. The occasional proton might try to leave its group and stray from the center of the beam. In the LHC, losing even one-thousandth of the total number of protons in an uncontrolled way could be dangerous. The electron lens acts as a scraper, removing these rogue particles before they could damage the collider.

“It’s extremely important to have the ability to scrape these particles because their energy is enormous,” Shiltsev said. “Uncontrolled, they can drill holes, break magnets or produce radiation.”

Both types of electron lens have made their mark in collider design as part of the success of the Tevatron, RHIC and the LHC. The new Landau damping lens may help usher in the next generation of colliders.

“The electron lens is an example of something that was invented here at Fermilab 20 years ago,” Shiltsev said. “This is a one of the rare technologies that wasn’t just brought to perfection at Fermilab: It was invented, developed and perfected and still continues to shine.”

 

As you walk down the stairs from the main floor of Wilson Hall (cafeteria area) to the auditorium lobby, look up to the near edge of the wood block ceiling. Slightly west of the center line is a “hole” where a wooden block supposedly should be. I have often observed this hole since the ceiling was finished about 1973 and can attest that a block has been missing ever since. (Over time a few other distant pieces have gotten lost but should not be confused with this one.)

For me this has raised two issues:

1. Was this just a mistake in assembling the structure and never corrected or
2. Was this done on purpose to destroy any symmetry that might exist in this ceiling?

Obviously, the first issue is trivial except that it gives a plausible alternative to the second issue which is certainly more intriguing.

Fermilab founding director Bob Wilson appreciated the concept of “Broken Symmetry.” He designed a sculpture with this name, and it stands at the Pine Street entrance to the laboratory. He also gave a conference dinner talk, “Symmetry in Art and Science.” In it he discussed an artist dilemma of making something too perfect: “Only the gods are perfect.” Therefore ancient Asian artists would leave a small flaw in their work, he said. Did Wilson do the same here? I guess we will never know but the possibility is interesting.

Or, is it an omen of missing pieces in our physics knowledge?

Note: The wood for this ceiling and supposedly throughout the auditorium is walnut. It was gotten from several walnut trees that were cut down by vandals during the very early days of NAL. They were soon after captured by the FBI and the wood recovered. See the Fermilab history website.

Charles Schmidt is a Fermilab scientist emeritus.