Where the Higgs belongs

Particle accelerators shape our everyday lives. They are powerful tools in medical diagnosis and treatment. They were used to develop materials in everything from your cell phone screen to the chips in your computer. They even help us explore the fundamental particles and forces that make up the world around us. Until 2014, the National Science Foundation did not have a program funding fundamental R&D on accelerator science. This year marks the second year of this newly initiated program.

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. In both programs, Fermilab will play an integral role in exploring and pushing the limits of accelerator science.

The University of Chicago proposal, titled “Innovations in Bright Beam Science,” calls for the development of a program to make high-powered, stable beams with low losses. It comprises three themes: studying superconducting radio-frequency cavities; conducting a proof-of-principle experiment with circular accelerators to investigate ways to produce more stable beams; and exploring techniques to produce more intense X-rays. The first two of these are parts of a bigger R&D program at Fermilab, including the superconducting radio-frequency program and the Integrable Optics Test Accelerator.

This will be the first time the University of Chicago will assemble a group working on an accelerator program. Beyond improving accelerator technology, one of the goals of the program is to attract faculty members and students to accelerator research.

“The benefit from this is that we bring in chemistry and mathematics professors who would never otherwise be exposed to our research,” said Fermilab Accelerator Division Head Sergei Nagaitsev. “This is an opportunity for us to collaborate with colleagues who ordinarily don’t collaborate with Fermilab.”

The NIU proposal is called “Development of Ultra-cold Quantum-degenerate Relativistic Electron Beams for Research and Applications.” The NSF-funded research at NIU will address the question of whether they can produce a beam a thousand times cooler in temperature than existing beams, resulting in higher beam brightness and quality.

“Everybody’s trying to get to high energies, beam powers and intensities quickly, but nobody is working on producing high-quality, ultracold beams like these,” said Swapan Chattopadhyay, principal investigator of the NSF-funded project at NIU. “No matter what you do with a beam, you can not do any better than the intrinsic goodness of the beams. We’re working on producing beams not only of high energy and intensity, but also of very good purity and quality.”

The researchers, physicists and engineers aim to produce electron beams from specially designed nanocathodes immersed in high electric fields, packing and focusing the electrons tightly. The beams will be cold enough to serve as a source for high-quality compact X-ray lasers.

NIU will carry out the experimental work at Argonne National Laboratory and Fermilab and plans to collaborate with Cambridge University Graphene Center.

With Fermilab’s infrastructure and expertise in accelerator science and technology, the laboratory will offer a place to test and expand the ideas developed throughout the research, while the universities will have the capability and time to delve deep into a problem. The proposals emphasize student training and education and will give Fermilab access to high-caliber graduate students at the University of Chicago and NIU.

“The university brings the academic depth and focus,” Chattopadhyay said. “Fermilab brings national expertise, infrastructure and a breadth of skills and resources, and by collaborating with industry, we will also get a practical perspective.”

Although NIU and the University of Chicago are focusing their efforts on different issues, they share the goal of creating accelerators that are more powerful than the ones currently in use. The two are very complementary, Chattopadhyay said, and he hopes they can collaborate to create something that is larger than the sum of its parts.

“These are scientifically very exciting questions,” said Young-Kee Kim, lead of the University of Chicago research program. “We continue to push our technology to get better accelerators with brighter beams, but there are a lot of limits we have to overcome. That limit can be overcome only by understanding all these issues and limitations at a very fundamental level.”

New dwarf galaxy candidates could mean our sky is more crowded than we thought

Scientists on the Dark Energy Survey, using one of the world’s most powerful digital cameras, have discovered eight more faint celestial objects hovering near our Milky Way galaxy. Signs indicate that they, like the objects found by the same team earlier this year, are likely dwarf satellite galaxies, the smallest and closest known form of galaxies.

Satellite galaxies are small celestial objects that orbit larger galaxies, such as our own Milky Way. Dwarf galaxies can be found with fewer than 1,000 stars, in contrast to the Milky Way, an average-size galaxy containing billions of stars. Scientists have predicted that larger galaxies are built from smaller galaxies, which are thought to be especially rich in dark matter, the substance that makes up about 25 percent of the total matter and energy in the universe. Dwarf satellite galaxies, therefore, are considered key to understanding dark matter and the process by which larger galaxies form.

The main goal of the Dark Energy Survey (DES), as its name suggests, is to better understand the nature of dark energy, the mysterious stuff that makes up about 70 percent of the matter and energy in the universe. Scientists believe that dark energy is the key to understanding why the expansion of the universe is speeding up. To carry out its dark energy mission, DES takes snapshots of hundreds of millions of distant galaxies. However, some of the DES images also contain stars in dwarf galaxies much closer to the Milky Way. The same data can therefore be used to probe both dark energy, which scientists think is driving galaxies apart, and dark matter, which is thought to hold galaxies together.

Scientists can only see the faintest dwarf galaxies when they are nearby, and had previously only found a few of them. If these new discoveries are representative of the entire sky, there could be many more galaxies hiding in our cosmic neighborhood.

“Just this year, more than 20 of these dwarf satellite galaxy candidates have been spotted, with 17 of those found in Dark Energy Survey data,” said Alex Drlica-Wagner of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, one of the leaders of the DES analysis. “We’ve nearly doubled the number of these objects we know about in just one year, which is remarkable.”

In March, researchers with the Dark Energy Survey and an independent team from the University of Cambridge jointly announced the discovery of nine of these objects in snapshots taken by the Dark Energy Camera, the extraordinary instrument at the heart of the DES, an experiment funded by the DOE, the National Science Foundation and other funding agencies. Two of those have been confirmed as dwarf satellite galaxies so far.

Prior to 2015, scientists had located only about two dozen such galaxies around the Milky Way.

“DES is finding galaxies so faint that they would have been very difficult to recognize in previous surveys,” said Keith Bechtol of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The discovery of so many new galaxy candidates in one-eighth of the sky could mean there are more to find around the Milky Way.”

The closest of these newly discovered objects is about 80,000 light-years away, and the furthest roughly 700,000 light-years away. These objects are, on average, around a billion times dimmer than the Milky Way and a million times less massive. The faintest of the new dwarf galaxy candidates has about 500 stars.

Most of the newly discovered objects are in the southern half of the DES survey area, in close proximity to the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud. These are the two largest satellite galaxies associated with the Milky Way, about 158,000 light-years and 208,000 light-years away, respectively. It is possible that many of these new objects could be satellite galaxies of these larger satellite galaxies, which would be a discovery by itself.

“That result would be fascinating,” said Risa Wechsler of DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. “Satellites of satellites are predicted by our models of dark matter. Either we are seeing these types of systems for the first time, or there is something we don’t understand about how these satellite galaxies are distributed in the sky.”

Since dwarf galaxies are thought to be made mostly of dark matter, with very few stars, they are excellent targets to explore the properties of dark matter. Further analysis will confirm whether these new objects are indeed dwarf satellite galaxies and whether signs of dark matter can be detected from them.

The 17 dwarf satellite galaxy candidates were discovered in the first two years of data collected by the Dark Energy Survey, a five-year effort to photograph a portion of the southern sky in unprecedented detail. Scientists have now had a first look at most of the survey area, but data from the next three years of the survey will likely allow them to find objects that are even fainter, more diffuse or farther away. The third survey season has just begun.

“This exciting discovery is the product of a strong collaborative effort from the entire DES team,” said Basilio Santiago, a DES Milky Way Science Working Group coordinator and a member of the DES-Brazil Consortium. “We’ve only just begun our probe of the cosmos, and we’re looking forward to more exciting discoveries in the coming years.”

View the Dark Energy Survey analysis online. Follow the Dark Energy Survey on Facebook and Twitter. For images taken with the Dark Energy Camera, visit the experiment’s photo blog, Dark Energy Detectives.

The Dark Energy Survey is a collaboration of more than 300 scientists from 25 institutions in six countries. Its primary instrument, the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera, is mounted on the 4-meter Blanco telescope at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, and its data is processed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, ETH Zurich for Switzerland, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and the Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the collaborating institutions in the Dark Energy Survey, which can be found at www.darkenergysurvey.org/collaboration.

Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter at @Fermilab.

The DOE 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.

In 1995, physicists working on the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector, or LSND, at Los Alamos National Laboratory stumbled upon some curious results.

The experiment, whose goal was to investigate oscillations between the three different flavors of the elusive neutrino, saw evidence that there might be at least one additional flavor of neutrino lurking just out of reach. In 2002, an experiment at Fermilab called MiniBooNE started collecting data to explore this anomaly, but the results were inconclusive: some data seemed to refute the possibility of a fourth neutrino, but other data seemed to indicate particle interactions that couldn’t be explained with conventional three-neutrino models. The possibility of a mysterious, fourth neutrino remained alive.

“It’s a question that’s been first lingering with the anomalies from LSND and then MiniBooNE,” said Bonnie Fleming, co-spokesperson of a new neutrino experiment at Fermilab called MicroBooNE. “There’s now a worldwide campaign to address whether these short-baseline oscillations and hints from other experiments are indicating new physics.”

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 (SBN) program, makes use of a trio of detectors positioned along one of Fermilab’s neutrino beams. Although there are other reactor and source-based experiments in the world that actively seek a fourth neutrino, also called a sterile neutrino, SBN is the only program that uses a particle accelerator to produce neutrinos and multiple neutrino detectors for this search.

“No one else is doing an experiment like this,” said Peter Wilson, coordinator for the SBN program. “There are no other experiments on this energy scale using the concept of a near detector and a far detector.”

Determining whether there are more than three neutrino flavors would affect how scientists interpret data from experiments like the planned Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, which is expected to make transformative discoveries about neutrinos, and perhaps other aspects of the universe, in the future. Solving the mystery of the anomalies seen at LSND and MiniBooNE, however, will not be easy. Because the sterile neutrino would not interact through the weak nuclear force as the other three do (hence the name “sterile”), detecting this particle would be like chasing the shadow of a ghost.

It begins at the Fermilab Booster, where protons are accelerated to 8 GeV and smashed into a target, creating new particles. Charged particles are bent forward by a magnetic focusing device into a tunnel where most decay to produce muon neutrinos. The three detectors — named the Short-Baseline Near Detector, or SBND, MicroBooNE and ICARUS — will be spread out over a distance of 600 meters. SBND, 100 meters from the target, will take data close to the source to reduce systematic uncertainties by measuring the initial characteristics of the muon neutrino beam. Four hundred meters beyond the planned site for SBND is MicroBooNE, which is already installed. ICARUS will be located 110 meters past MicroBooNE. ICARUS is an existing detector from a previous experiment at the Italian INFN laboratory at Gran Sasso that is currently being refurbished at CERN. It will have a massive chamber holding 760 tons of liquid argon to beat down statistical uncertainties in the experiment.

All three of the detectors are time projection chambers, a type of detector that allows physicists to analyze particle collisions in three dimensions. For these particular TPCs, scientists use liquid argon because its relatively heavy mass ensures a higher rate of interactions.

MicroBooNE received its last fill of liquid argon in July and recently began taking data. Scientists are expecting to break ground on buildings for both ICARUS and SBND by this fall. In 2017, ICARUS will be fully refurbished and delivered to Fermilab. Scientists hope to complete building SBND that same year.

Since experimenters won’t be able to directly detect the sterile neutrino, they will search for clues in the trails of particles the three known neutrino flavors leave behind in the liquid argon after they interact. If the experiments, expected to begin running in 2018, see deviations in the expected neutrino oscillation pattern, scientists will know that they’re on the right track in their hunt for this fugitive particle. If not, they will be able to put the mystery of the sterile neutrino to rest.

“If we design a strong enough experiment, which I believe we have, then one of two things will happen when we start taking data,” said David Schmitz, co-spokesperson for SBND. “Either we will rule out the earlier hints, or we make, frankly, the most exciting discovery in particle physics in some time.”

Scientists on the NOvA experiment saw their first evidence of oscillating neutrinos, confirming that the extraordinary detector built for the project not only functions as planned but is also making great progress toward its goal of a major leap in our understanding of these ghostly particles.

NOvA is on a quest to learn more about the abundant yet mysterious particles called neutrinos, which flit through ordinary matter as though it weren’t there. The first NOvA results, released this week at the American Physical Society’s Division of Particles and Fields conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, verify that the experiment’s massive particle detector — 50 feet tall, 50 feet wide and 200 feet long — is sitting in the sweet spot and detecting neutrinos fired from 500 miles away. Scientists have sorted through millions of cosmic ray strikes and zeroed in on neutrino interactions.

“People are ecstatic to see our first observation of neutrino oscillations,” said NOvA co-spokesperson Peter Shanahan of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. “For all the people who worked over the course of a decade on the designing, building, commissioning and operating this experiment, it’s beyond gratifying.”

Researchers have collected data aggressively since February 2014, recording neutrino interactions in the 14,000-ton far detector in Ash River, Minnesota, while construction was still under way. This allowed the collaboration to gather data while testing systems before starting operations with the complete detector in November 2014, shortly after the experiment was completed on time and under budget. NOvA construction and operations are supported by the DOE Office of Science.

The neutrino beam generated at Fermilab passes through an underground near detector, which measures the beam’s neutrino composition before it leaves the Fermilab site. The particles then travel more than 500 miles straight through the Earth, no tunnel required, oscillating (or changing types) along the way. About once per second, Fermilab’s accelerator sends trillions of neutrinos to Minnesota, but the elusive neutrinos interact so rarely that only a few will register at the far detector.

When a neutrino bumps into an atom in the NOvA detector, it releases a signature trail of particles and light depending on which type it is: an electron, muon or tau neutrino. The beam originating at Fermilab is made almost entirely of one type — muon neutrinos — and scientists can measure how many of those muon neutrinos disappear over their journey and reappear as electron neutrinos.

If oscillations did not occur, experimenters predicted they would see 201 muon neutrinos arrive at the NOvA far detector in the data collected; instead, they saw a mere 33, proof that the muon neutrinos were disappearing as they transformed into the two other flavors. Similarly, if oscillations did not occur, scientists expected to see only one electron neutrino appearance (due to background interactions). But the collaboration saw six such events, evidence that some of the missing muon neutrinos had turned into electron neutrinos.

Similar long-distance experiments such as T2K in Japan and MINOS at Fermilab have seen these muon neutrino to electron neutrino oscillations before. NOvA, which will take data for at least six years, is seeing nearly equivalent results in a shorter time frame, something that bodes well for the experiment’s ambitious goal of measuring neutrino properties that have eluded other experiments so far.

“One of the reasons we’ve made such excellent progress is the impressive Fermilab neutrino beam and accelerator team,” said NOvA co-spokesperson Mark Messier of Indiana University. “Having a beam of that power running so efficiently gives us a real competitive edge and allows us to gather data quickly.”

Fermilab’s flagship accelerator recently set a high-energy neutrino beam world record when it reached 521 kilowatts, and the laboratory is working on improving the neutrino beam even further for projects such as NOvA and the upcoming Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. Researchers expect to reach 700 kilowatts early next calendar year, accumulating a slew of neutrino interactions and tripling the amount of data recorded by year’s end.

Neutrinos are the most abundant massive particle in the universe but are still poorly understood. While researchers know that neutrinos come in three types, they don’t know which is the heaviest and which is the lightest. Figuring out this ordering — one of the goals of the NOvA experiment — would be a great litmus test for theories about how the neutrino gets its mass. While the famed Higgs boson helps explain how some particles obtain their masses, scientists don’t know yet how it is connected to neutrinos, if at all. The measurement of the neutrino mass hierarchy is also crucial information for neutrino experiments trying to see if the neutrino is its own antiparticle.

Like T2K, NOvA can also run in antineutrino mode, opening a window to see whether neutrinos and antineutrinos are fundamentally different. An asymmetry early in the universe’s history could have tipped the cosmic balance in favor of matter, making the world we see today possible. Soon, scientists will be able to combine the neutrino results obtained by T2K, MINOS and NOvA, yielding more precise answers about scientists’ most pressing neutrino questions.

“The rapid success of the NOvA team demonstrates a commitment and talent for taking on complex projects to answer the biggest questions in particle physics,” said Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer. “We’re glad that the detectors are functioning beautifully and providing quality data that will expand our understanding of the subatomic realm.”

The NOvA collaboration comprises 210 scientists and engineers from 39 institutions in the United States, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Greece, India, Russia and the United Kingdom.

For more information, visit the experiment’s website.
Watch live particle events recorded by the NOvA experiment online.
Follow the experiment on Facebook and Twitter.

Note: NOvA stands for NuMI Off-Axis Electron Neutrino Appearance. NuMI is itself an acronym, standing for Neutrinos from the Main Injector, Fermilab’s flagship accelerator. The Fermilab Accelerator Complex is an Office of Science user facility.

Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov, and follow us on Twitter at @Fermilab.

The DOE 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.

Most powerful high-energy particle beam for a neutrino experiment ever generated

A key element in a particle-accelerator-based neutrino experiment is the power of the beam that gives birth to neutrinos: The more particles you can pack into that beam, the better your chance to see neutrinos interact in your detector. Today scientists announced that Fermilab has set a world record for the most powerful high-energy particle beam for neutrino experiments.

Scientists, engineers and technicians at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have achieved for high-energy neutrino experiments a world record: a sustained 521-kilowatt beam generated by the Main Injector particle accelerator. More than 1,000 physicists from around the world will use this high-intensity beam to more closely study neutrinos and fleeting particles called muons, both fundamental building blocks of our universe.

The record beam power surpasses that of the 400-plus-kilowatt beam sent to neutrino experiments from particle accelerators at CERN.

Setting this world record is an initial step for the Fermilab accelerator complex as it will gradually increase beam power over the coming years. The next goal for the laboratory’s two-mile-around Main Injector accelerator — the final and most powerful in Fermilab’s accelerator chain — is to deliver 700-kilowatt beams to the laboratory’s various experiments. Ultimately, Fermilab plans to make additional upgrades to its accelerator complex over the next decade, achieving beam power in excess of 1,000 kilowatts, also referred to as 1 megawatt.

“We have the world’s highest-power beam for neutrinos, and we’re only going up from here,” said Ioanis Kourbanis, head of the Main Injector Department at Fermilab.

Laboratory-made neutrino experiments start by accelerating a beam of particles, typically protons, and then smashing them into a target to create neutrinos. Scientists then use particle detectors to “catch” as many of those neutrinos as possible and record their interactions. Neutrinos rarely engage with matter: Only one out of every trillion emerging from the proton beam will interact in an experiment’s detector. The more particles in that beam, the more opportunities researchers will have to study these rare interactions.

The amped-up particle beam provided by the Main Injector enriches the lab’s neutrino supply, positioning Fermilab to become the primary laboratory for accelerator-based neutrino research. Neutrinos are also made in stars and in the Earth’s core, and they pass through everything — people and planets alike.

“The idea is that if you build a more intense beam, neutrino scientists from around the world will beat a path to your door,” said Fermilab Deputy Director Joe Lykken. “This is exactly what’s happening.”

Fermilab currently operates four neutrino experiments: MicroBooNE, MINERvA, MINOS+ and the laboratory’s largest-to-date neutrino experiment, NOvA, which sends particles from Fermilab’s suburban Chicago location to a far detector 500 miles away in Ash River, Minnesota. The laboratory is working with scientists from around the world on expanding its short-baseline neutrino program and would also serve as host to the proposed flagship Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility and Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE. Scientists aim to address basic questions about the mass and properties of each kind of neutrino as well as the role neutrinos played in the evolution of the universe.

“Reaching this milestone is a fantastic achievement for Fermilab; beam power is everything in our field,” said DUNE co-spokesperson Mark Thomson of the University of Cambridge. “The ability for Fermilab to deliver, yet again, gives the international neutrino community huge confidence in the future U.S.-hosted neutrino program.”

Fermilab is also preparing to operate two experiments for studying muons, short-lived particles that could reveal secrets about the earliest moments of the universe. The increased beam power will also benefit the Fermilab Test Beam Facility, one of the few facilities in the world that provides muons, pions and other particles that researchers can use to test their particle detectors.

Since 2011, Fermilab has made significant upgrades to its accelerators and reconfigured the complex to provide the best possible particle beams for neutrino and muon experiments. With the dedicated work of the Fermilab Accelerator Division, the Main Injector is on track to nearly double its Tevatron-era beam power by 2016.

“Fermilab’s beamline has been a tremendous driver of neutrino science for many years, and the continued improvements to the intensity mean that it will remain a driver for many years to come,” said Indiana University’s Mark Messier, co-spokesperson for the NOvA experiment.

Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov, and follow us on Twitter at @Fermilab.

The DOE 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 American Physical Society has recognized the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory as a Historic Site for its nearly five decades of contributions to high-energy physics.

In a ceremony at the laboratory earlier today, Laura Greene, vice president of APS, presented Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer with a plaque commemorating the lab’s official status as a Historic Site. The plaque reads, in part: “In recognition of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory for its pivotal contributions to high-energy physics, including the discoveries of the bottom and top quarks and the tau neutrino, key components of the Standard Model.”

“We’re very pleased to receive this official status from the American Physical Society,” Lockyer said. “Fermilab’s bright future is built on a tradition of strong and important work, and it’s great to see that work recognized in this way.”

American Physical Society Historic Sites are chosen by the APS Historic Sites Committee with the goal of raising public awareness of physics and enlightening scientists about important events and places in their field.

“Fermilab has been the home of numerous significant scientific achievements, in addition to being an architecturally impressive facility,” Greene said. “I am truly honored that I will be presenting the plaque signifying Fermilab as an APS Historic Site.”

Fermilab was founded in 1967 under the leadership of its first director, Robert R. Wilson. The 6,800-acre site soon housed the iconic Wilson Hall and the Tevatron, a four-mile-around particle collider that was the laboratory’s flagship physics machine for 25 years.

In 1977, an experiment led by the laboratory’s second director, Leon M. Lederman, discovered the bottom quark, one of 12 known elementary particles that make up the fabric of the universe. In 1995, scientists on the CDF and DZero experiments discovered another of those elementary particles, the top quark. In 2000, scientists on a Fermilab experiment were the first to directly observe the tau neutrino, the long-theorized third type of this ghostly, mysterious particle.

Learn more about the history of Fermilab’s scientific achievements.

Fermilab scientists have been at the forefront of many other important discoveries, including that of the long-sought Higgs boson, found by the CMS and ATLAS collaborations on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland in 2012. More than 100 Fermilab scientists work on the CMS experiment at CERN, and the laboratory serves as the U.S. hub for that experiment, supporting roughly 1,000 university scientists. The LHC has just begun its second run, probing the unknown at the highest energies ever harnessed by mankind.

Fermilab’s current and future physics program includes experiments to unravel the mysteries of the neutrino over long and short distances, experiments to better understand the properties of particles called muons, and an effort to crack the enigma of dark energy, the force believed to be pushing the universe apart faster and faster. Fermilab is also involved in the hunt for the elusive dark matter, which makes up a quarter of our known universe.

The plaque presented to Fermilab today will be placed on display in Wilson Hall. The full text is as follows:

“In recognition of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) for its pivotal contributions to high-energy physics, including the discoveries of the bottom and top quarks and the tau neutrino, key components of the Standard Model. Honoring the achievements of Robert R. Wilson, who helped design and establish the lab in 1967 and served as its first director, and Nobel Laureate Leon M. Lederman, who served as its second director and helped inaugurate the Tevatron, the world’s highest energy proton-antiproton collider with the pioneering use of superconducting magnets.”

Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter at @Fermilab.

The DOE 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 American Physical Society is a nonprofit membership organization working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics through its outstanding research journals, scientific meetings, and education, outreach, advocacy and international activities. APS represents over 51,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories and industry in the United States and throughout the world. Society offices are located in College Park, Maryland (Headquarters), Ridge, New York, and Washington, DC.

Editor’s note: The following news release about upcoming public meetings related to the LBNF/DUNE project was issued by the U.S. Department of Energy and is being hosted on the Fermilab website on its behalf.

Public meetings on environmental impacts set for June

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) invites interested citizens to review and comment on the possible environmental effects of building and operating the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) and the associated Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). The experiment will send a beam of neutrinos through the Earth from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Batavia, Illinois, to the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota.

DOE’s Draft Environmental Assessment (EA) analyzes the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of the proposed facility. DOE released the draft EA for public review and comment in accordance with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The comment period on the document is June 8 through July 10. To help people understand the document and start the comment process, DOE will conduct three public meetings:

• June 17 at 6:30 p.m. at Copper Mountain Resort, 900 Miners Ave., Lead, South Dakota
• June 18 at 6:30 p.m. at the Surbeck Center at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, 501 E St. Joseph St., Rapid City, South Dakota
• June 24 at 6:30 p.m. in the atrium of Wilson Hall, the main building at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois

DOE, Sanford Lab and Fermilab will have people available at the meetings to explain the proposed project, the science it plans to accomplish and the specifics of the impacts that are listed in the EA. There are a number of ways people can comment on the document, including:

• At the meeting;
• By U.S. Mail: LBNF/DUNE Comments, U.S. Department of Energy (STS), Fermi Site Office, P.O. Box 2000, Batavia, IL 60510;
• Email: lbnf.comments@science.doe.gov; and
• Online: http://lbnf.fnal.gov/env-assessment.html;

All comments, both oral and written, received during this period will be given equal consideration.
People interested in reviewing, downloading or requesting a copy of the document can view it on the LBNF website at http://lbnf.fnal.gov/files/LBNF-DUNE-Draft-EA.pdf. DOE expects to issue a final EA late this summer.

In Illinois, project leaders plan the construction of four buildings on the Fermilab site, one of which would be about 40 feet high, 160 feet long and located near Kirk Road and Giese Road. That building would be connected via a vertical shaft to an underground hall about 200 feet below the Fermilab site. The project also would include the construction of a 50- to 60-foot-high hill about 1,000 feet from Kirk Road on the Fermilab site as part of the facility that would create the neutrinos.

In South Dakota, project leaders plan the construction of one building at the surface adjacent to an existing building near the Ross Shaft. Approximately one mile underground, the project would include three large caverns, each about 60 feet wide and 500 feet long. These caverns would provide space for utilities and four large detectors filled with liquid argon to detect the neutrinos from Fermilab. Material excavated from the underground to create this space would be delivered to the surface and transported off site. A conveying system would be used on the surface as part of this transportation.

Particle detectors at Sanford Lab would record neutrinos from Fermilab and measure their properties. They also would look for neutrinos from a supernova and search for signs of nucleon decay. With the data, scientists aim to learn more about the building blocks of matter and determine the exact role that neutrinos play in the universe.

Neutrinos, which are also produced by our sun and in the interior of the Earth, are among the most abundant particles in the universe. Fermilab has been operating neutrino-producing facilities for more than 30 years. These include the construction in the early 2000s of a facility that now sends a beam of neutrinos from Fermilab straight through the Earth to Minnesota. The experiments that now use that facility have made important measurements of neutrino properties and how neutrinos interact with other building blocks of matter. The new project would greatly add to that research.

DOE is preparing this environmental assessment to identify and address potential environmental impacts from the proposed action and the range of reasonable alternatives. If significant impacts would result from the construction and operation of the LBNF/DUNE, a more detailed analysis called an Environmental Impact Statement would be undertaken. DOE has explored a number of potential impacts in the draft EA, including:

• Impacts from construction accidents and transportation;
• Impacts to both workers and the public from potential exposure to radiation and other hazards under routine operations and credible accident scenarios;
• Impacts on air, water and soil;
• Socioeconomic impacts; and
• Potential impacts on land-use plans, policies and controls, and visual resources.

Simultaneously, DOE will also be accepting comments on its Draft Programmatic Agreement to address the National Historic Preservation Act which requires DOE to consider the potentially adverse effects of its actions on properties eligible for listing and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Draft Programmatic Agreement, which pertains to proposed activities at Sanford Lab, appears in Appendix C2 of the Draft EA.

For additional details about the project, visit the website or contact:

Mike Weis, manager
Fermi Site Office
U.S. Department of Energy Fermi Site Office
P.O. Box 2000
Batavia, Illinois 60510
630-840-2227
michael.weis@science.doe.gov

For general information concerning DOE’s NEPA process, contact:

Peter R. Siebach, NEPA compliance officer
U.S. Department of Energy (STS)
9800 S. Cass Avenue
Argonne, Illinois 60564
630-252-2007
peter.siebach@science.doe.gov

DOE support of this project comes from its Office of Science’s Office of High Energy Physics.