In recent months, the neutrino research facility at the European laboratory CERN has been bustling with activity. Scientists, engineers and technicians from around the world have gathered there to assemble a large prototype of a new particle detector to study the neutrino, one of the most mysterious types of particles in the universe.
Neutrinos are everywhere, but they rarely interact with matter. Each second, trillions of these particles traverse our bodies and leave without a trace. By studying these ghost-like particles, physicists hope to answer questions, such as: Why is the universe made of matter? What is the relationship between the four forces of nature? How are black holes formed in the aftermath of an exploding star?
Researchers working on the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, hope to solve these mysteries. Their work on the prototype detector at CERN brings them a step closer to achieving this goal.
A crane lowers a charge readout plane attached to the top of the cryogenic vessel onto the vessel. Photo: DUNE collaboration
The infrastructure needed for DUNE is expansive. It includes a new particle accelerator at Fermilab, which will produce a neutrino beam that will pass through 1,300 kilometers of earth before reaching the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. At SURF, these particles will be greeted by the DUNE far detector, a gigantic subterranean detector housed 1.5 kilometers below the surface. The detector will comprise huge detector modules containing argon, an element whose highly stable nature makes it perfect for studying neutrinos. Excavation of the underground caverns for the DUNE far detector is about 60% complete.
Testing new technology
Members of the DUNE collaboration, which includes scientists and engineers from more than 35 countries, are busy at work designing, testing and building the components of the first two DUNE detector modules to be installed at SURF. Module one will be a horizontal drift detector, which is based on a tried-and-tested technique that will be scaled up for DUNE. The mass production of components for this first module already has begun. The second module, known as the vertical drift detector, will feature new technology. Testing has been ongoing for the last two years.
“I expect exciting physics out of both the horizontal and vertical drift detectors,” said Steve Kettell, the technical coordinator for the vertical drift detector, based at the DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. “But the vertical drift technology opens up significant opportunities for building additional detectors that are lower in cost and easier to install.”
Horizontal vs. vertical
On a basic level, horizontal and vertical drift detectors work in the same way. When a neutrino interacts with an argon atom inside the detector’s liquid-argon-filled chamber, the particles produced in this interaction release electrons. A strong electric field between opposite sides of the detector chamber pushes these loose electrons to an anode, a large structure that detects the arrival of charged particles. In a horizontal drift detector, the electric field exists between two opposing walls, and the electrons drift horizontally; in a vertical drift detector, the electric field runs between the bottom and top of the detector, and the electrons drift vertically. The argon-neutrino interaction also produces a brief flash of light that both detectors capture with a separate photon detection system.
“Fundamentally, there’s nothing different about vertical drift and horizontal drift,” Kettell explained. “We are detecting neutrino events in essentially the same manner.”
The differences are in the details. The anode of the horizontal drift detector consists of large planes of tightly wound wires, known as anode plane assemblies, or APAs. They are 6 meters tall and 2.3 meters wide. The anode of the vertical drift detector, on the other hand, will be composed of charge readout planes, or CRPs. They are large, perforated-printed circuit boards that are 3 meters by 3.5 meters in size and have copper strips printed onto their surfaces. Like the wires in the APAs, the copper strips in the CRPs will collect the drifting electrons.
A close-up of the charge readout planes for the DUNE vertical drift detector. Photo: DUNE collaboration
The DUNE vertical drift detector will feature multilayer CRPs at the top and at the bottom. “The CRPs have perforated 2.5-millimeter holes, so that electric charge can pass through and go to another layer to get collected,” said Dominique Duchesneau, leader of the CRP consortium and a physicist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Each CRP layer has differently orientated copper strips, he added, which “gives you the possibility to have multiple views of the electrons.”
A key advantage of CRPs is that because they are made of simple metal-plated circuit boards rather than a tight coil of wires, they are cheaper and easier to manufacture and install than APAs.
“With the vertical drift detector, we’re trying to demonstrate that we can build a less expensive detector that works equally well,” Kettell said.
Because the vertical drift detector technology requires fewer elements than the horizontal drift, it provides a larger active volume. A larger active volume means that there will be more space in which particle interactions can be collected, said Inés Gil-Botella, a DUNE physics coordinator based at the Centre for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research in Spain. “You’re maximizing the possibility of seeing neutrino interactions in this liquid argon.”
Another innovation is the photon detection system DUNE scientists plan to build for the vertical drift detector, an upgrade of the ARAPUCA technology developed for the first DUNE far detector module. This new system will cover all four cryostat walls as well as the cathode with photon detection modules. (In contrast, in the horizontal drift detector, the photon detectors only are embedded in the APA planes, behind the wires.) To power and read out the photo sensors on the high-voltage cathode, which is set to 300 kilovolts, the vertical drift team uses a powerful laser that provides power via optical fibers.
In addition, the argon within the vertical drift detector will be doped with xenon to enhance the number of photons that get detected when particles interact with atoms in the liquid —and to enhance the uniformity of light detection throughout the chamber. Together, these features will make this photon detection system more capable of detecting low-energy physics events, such as those triggered by supernovae or solar neutrino events, Gil-Botella said.
A bustle of activity
This newly designed high-voltage extender helps create a 300,000-volt electric field between the top and bottom of the vertical drift prototype detector. Photo: DUNE collaboration
The team working on the DUNE vertical drift detector comes from around the world. Major contributions are being made by CERN, France, Italy, Spain and the U.S. But members also come from several other countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America. “There’s been tremendous progress on many fronts,” said Kettell.
This group has been busy. To date, they have successfully tested small-scale, 32-centimeter-by-32-centimeter CRPs in a 50-liter liquid-argon-filled chamber fitted with a cathode, electronics and a photon detection system. This early prototype was able to collect data from cosmic-ray tracks with “good signal-to-noise performance,” said Kettell. They have also tested full-size, 3-meter by 3.5-meter CRPs with the cathode, electronics, and the photon detection system in a large coldbox at CERN.
The team has demonstrated that the components of the vertical drift detector could read out signals at 300 kilovolts — the high voltage that will be needed for creating the electric field in the full-sized DUNE detector. They have also shown that electrons can drift six meters — the maximum distance electrons will travel in the final-size module — and use the CRPs to receive these tracks. “The next big milestone we’ll face is the installation of all of the systems together at a larger scale,” Gil-Botella said.
The team is now assembling parts into a larger vertical drift prototype, dubbed “vertical drift module-0,” in a large cryogenic vessel at CERN, about the size of a small house. This prototype will contain two full-sized CRPs on both the top and bottom of the detector, with the cathode installed in the middle, as well as an advanced photon detection system. Electrons knocked loose in the upper half of the detector will drift upward toward the CRP set at the top, and electrons produced in the lower half will drift in the down direction, until they reach the CRP layers at the bottom. CRP development has been led by France and CERN, with the construction of the top CRPs at CERN and the bottom CRPs in the U.S.
The DUNE researchers aim to complete the installation of the vertical drift prototype detector in spring 2023. Once all systems have been tested, the team will fill the detector with liquid argon and turn it on, so that scientists can observe the tracks left by particle beams and cosmic rays that pass through it.
Ultimately, the goal is to have the components of the vertical drift detector ready to be installed in one of the large caverns in South Dakota in 2027.
“What I really would like to see is the installation of the first CRPs in the big cryostat at SURF, which will come in several years,” Duchesneau said. “In the meantime, I think module-0 running and taking data in the real configuration of the vertical drift is a very exciting step.”
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.
Preparations for the construction of the first detector module of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment are rapidly progressing. Members of the international DUNE collaboration have begun the final tests of detector components that will be shipped to South Dakota. There they will become part of a one-of-a-kind experiment designed to study some of the most elusive particles in the universe: neutrinos.
DUNE is an experiment aimed at exploring the nature of neutrinos. Scientists hope that unlocking the secrets of these particles will shed light on some of the biggest mysteries in physics, such as why the universe is made of matter and how neutron stars and black holes are forged in the aftermath of exploding stars.
DUNE, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, will be housed at two locations: the Fermilab site in Illinois and the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. The far detector, an enormous structure envisioned to ultimately comprise four modules, will be located 1.5 kilometers underground at SURF. Each module will be a liquid-argon time projection chamber, or LArTPC, designed to be filled with 17,000 tons of argon, an element commonly found in air that is ideal for studying neutrinos.
The construction of wire planes, called anode plane assemblies, is underway at Daresbury Laboratory in the U.K. The laboratory will ship 136 APAs to South Dakota for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. Photo: DUNE collaboration
The first DUNE detector module to be built at SURF will employ horizontal drift technology. When neutrinos collide with the argon atoms inside the module, they will produce charged particles. These charged particles knock out electrons as they travel through the argon. The electrons are attracted by a strong electric field towards anode plane assemblies, or APAs, which record a projection of where the electrons were produced. By measuring the timing of when electrons hit the APAs, scientists are able to reconstruct three-dimensional particle tracks.
When complete, the first detector module will contain 150 APAs, each a large rectangular plane approximately 2.3 meters by 6 meters in size and composed of tightly wound copper-beryllium wires. “We are going to effectively plaster a wall with a grid of wires,” said Justin Evans, a professor of physics at the University of Manchester. He is leading the effort to build APAs in the U.K.
The technology for the first module was successfully tested in a scaled-down version called ProtoDUNE at the CERN Neutrino Platform in 2019. Although it was only one-twentieth of the size to the final DUNE detector module, it still was the largest LArTPC ever constructed and operated.
“That was the first time that we in the U.K. built any of these wire grids and took data from them,” said Evans. “And they worked wonderfully.”
In addition to proving that the detector technology would work, the horizontal drift prototype revealed where design improvements could be made. With this in mind, scientists designed ProtoDUNE II, an upgraded prototype that will undergo tests at CERN this year.
“With a prototype, there’s always lessons learned,” said Thomas Wieber, the installation team leader at CERN. “We want to prove that what we think is going to work better actually does work better.”
DUNE scientists are also working on developing the technology for a vertical drift detector, which is the planned technology for the second far detector module. Preparations for testing the new technology in a separate prototype detector, known as vertical drift module-0, are underway at CERN as well.
Testing the full assembly process
Testing all aspects of the horizontal drift module assembly also involves ensuring that all the detector components, which come from DUNE collaborators around the world, will arrive safely. To ensure this process goes smoothly, ProtoDUNE II also has served as a testbed for the installation process. The groups involved in manufacturing the detector components brought all their test parts together at CERN to assemble and test the prototype.
“We have had collaborators coming in from all over the world,” said Daniela Macina, the installation coordinator for the horizontal drift detector at CERN. “This is the first time we’ve integrated and installed the final DUNE horizontal drift detectors all together.”
ProtoDUNE II contains four APAs. All four were tested in a cold box filled with super-cold gaseous nitrogen in order to ensure that the electronics function properly at frigid temperatures. All four APAs passed the test. They then were assembled in the ProtoDUNE II cryostat, along with other parts of the prototype. These parts include the electronics and light sensors, which identify photons that are released when neutrinos interact with the liquid argon in the detector.
The DUNE collaboration has finished the assembly of their large horizontal drift prototype detector, known as ProtoDUNE II, at CERN. It is the final test before ramping up mass production of DUNE detector components. Photo: DUNE collaboration
“We needed to assemble things according to a procedure that will be as close as possible to the one we’ll use in South Dakota,” Macina said.
Later this year, the team will fill ProtoDUNE II with liquid argon and shoot a beam of particles through the detector to test it. “We don’t expect big surprises, because there were only minor changes between ProtoDUNE and ProtoDUNE II,” said Macina.
As the final work on ProtoDUNE II takes place at CERN, scientists are also ramping up production of the APAs that will be installed at SURF. Of the 150 APAs that will be installed in the first module of the far detector, 136 APAs will be produced at the Daresbury Laboratory in the U.K., and another 14 will be produced at the University of Chicago.
To support the mass production of these parts, the Daresbury Laboratory in the U.K. has constructed an APA factory where the team has set up four production lines, each with six-meter-long machines for winding the wires around steel frames to create the APAs.
“We have four of those set up, all working in parallel,” Evans said. “We’re trying to get to the point where each production line can produce one APA every two months.”
Shipping detector components to South Dakota
Activities related to the detector installation have also started up in South Dakota, where the excavation of the caverns for the DUNE far detector are about 60% complete. In early November, the team shipped one of the APAs from the first prototype at CERN to SURF for a logistics test. The process of transporting the long, rectangular APA from Europe to the United States, offloading the structure, then lowering it a mile below the ground through a relatively narrow mineshaft was successfully completed.
“We’re using older APAs to validate those procedures so that we’re not going to damage anything when we start bringing the real APAs to SURF,” said Fermilab scientist Eric James, a technical coordinator who focuses on DUNE’s horizontal drift detector.
Despite all the details that need to be worked out to bring the first DUNE detector module to life, DUNE scientists are not losing sight of their ultimate goal: exploring a new frontier of neutrino science.
“I’m hugely excited about what we will see when we switch this thing on,” Evans said. “There is so much the neutrino can tell us about the universe.”
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.
Fermilab Deputy Director Bonnie Fleming, chair of the DUNE Resources Review Board. Credit: Fermilab
On March 30 and 31, representatives from science funding agencies around the world will meet in Lead, South Dakota, to view the progress on the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, an international experiment hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
The funding agency representatives are members of the DUNE Resources Review Board, a group of about 40 people who provide oversight of DUNE and coordination among funding agencies. They meet three times a year. This is their first meeting in Lead, South Dakota.
More than 1,400 scientists and engineers across 200 institutions in over 35 countries collaborate on DUNE to decipher the secrets of the neutrino.
“The RRB helps facilitate a strong partnership between the member countries of DUNE,” said Fermilab Deputy Director Bonnie Fleming, chair of the RRB. “DUNE is bringing together many different countries to construct a very large and complicated experiment. This requires close coordination between all these partners.”
The DUNE collaboration focuses on studying subatomic particles known as neutrinos. They may hold the answers to some of the biggest open questions in physics, such as why our universe is made of matter and how neutron stars and black holes are formed.
Construction has begun on DUNE particle detector components as well as the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, which will provide the space, infrastructure, and neutrino beam for the experiment. Fermilab, located in Illinois, will house the DUNE near detector and provide the particle beam. The neutrinos will travel 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) straight through Earth to the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. There the DUNE far detector —located 1.5 kilometers (about a mile) below the surface — will catch neutrinos and unveil their mysterious behavior.
“Typically, the RRB meetings are held at Fermilab,” Fleming said. “We wanted to take the opportunity to bring the RRB members to SURF to let them see the facility and the place where the DUNE far detector will be.”
At SURF, the excavation of the huge underground complex for LBNF is about 60% complete. Construction crews have been hard at work carving out the extensive network of tunnels and caverns, which will cover about the size of eight soccer fields when complete. Two of the three caverns will be about 28 meters (92 feet) tall. They will provide space for four enormous detector modules that will be filled with a total of 70,000 tons of liquid argon, a highly stable element ideal for studying neutrino interactions.
Excavation of the tunnels and three large caverns for the DUNE detector in South Dakota is more than halfway complete. Credit: Photo: Matthew Kapust, Sanford Underground Research Facility
Work on components for the first two detector modules is moving forward at a rapid pace. DUNE members around the world have been busy building and testing prototypes of the underlying detector technology. The mass production of components for the first detector module has begun. They will be shipped to SURF and lowered underground. In the caverns, they will be assembled piece by piece — in a manner akin to putting together a ship in a bottle.
“The excavation is going beyond expectation, paralleled by similar progress in the testing and building of the far detector modules,” says DUNE co-spokesperson Sergio Bertolucci, former director of research at CERN and RRB member. “Two years from now, SURF will see a team of enthused engineers, technicians and physicists building this big ship in a bottle.”
During the meeting, which will take a hybrid format, the RRB members will receive updates on the status of the project and coordinate tasks. RRB members joining onsite will receive a tour of the excavation site as well.
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.
Head of talent development at Fermilab, Holly Lett, sees her role as helping people get to their next level, career-wise. Photo: Ryan Postel, Fermilab
What kind of work do you do at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory?
I’m the department head for Talent Development in human resources for the laboratory. In collaboration with other leaders, I’m responsible for Fermilab’s talent development strategy.
I see my role as helping people get to their next level, career-wise. Tell me where you want to go; tell me what you’ve got already; let’s take a look to see what’s missing; and let’s fill in those gaps. My job is to help individuals maximize their potential. I love it because it’s a wonderful thing to help people realize their goals.
What brought you here?
For about three years on and off, I contracted with Fermilab facilitating leadership communications and coaching courses. At the time, I was running my own business: I was traveling all across the country, presenting seminars. I had built a good relationship with the former talent development manager at Fermilab, so she told me about a potential opportunity. I applied, interviewed and was offered the position.
By contracting with the organization first, I got a feel for the culture here before taking a permanent position. My experiences working here were positive while engaging with different leaders during classes. I had a good feeling about the people here. I thought, “I really think I can work with these people. They’re super smart and have great senses of humor.” That’s why I decided to go back to working for an organization because I was vehemently against it until I met Fermilab.
What programs does your department oversee?
A lot comes out of my department. In addition to me, there are three people, and we do an enormous amount of work. For example, the TAP program, which is the Tuition Assistance Program; the mentoring program, Fermilab management practices, FRA scholarships; those are scholarships for the children of Fermilab employees. We also manage Fermilab’s harassment discrimination training, and we’re responsible for the instructional design of our web-based training for [non-safety-related] courses.
We’ve also recently launched the Emerging Leaders Development Program. Past climate surveys recognized that individual contributors were looking for opportunities to develop their leadership skills before becoming a leader. Emerging Leaders Development program was created to address this need. We currently have 12 participants in this year’s pilot cohort, and we’re monitoring the program closely for improvements along the way. It will be interesting to hear what the participants think of the program once completed.
Do you have a favorite program that you’re working on?
One of my favorite projects right now is the Course Catalog Cleanup Project. It was identified that our current web-based training, in many instances, is very content-heavy and needs to be consolidated and streamlined. Additionally, we want to update and refresh the look of our web-based training and go in a slightly different direction than we have in the past.
We work for a national laboratory, so we have a lot of training. However, we can trim down some things to make the trainings more succinct and impactful to the learner. We’re not trying to water down content by streamlining it, but really trying to bring the best of the content up to the surface in a way that’s engaging, modern and keeps the interest of the learner.
Another benefit of this project is the development of a standards guide that provides guidance on Fermilab branding, content development, images and font usage for e-learning. This way, there’s consistency in the quality of training developed at the lab.
I’m so excited about this project because I wanted to do it a couple of years ago, but things just didn’t line up; we didn’t have the resources to do it. Now we do.
What are some of your favorite things about working at Fermilab?
When you come from a corporate background, it’s a lot different coming to a place that’s a little corporate, a little academic, a little this and a little that. That’s what I like about Fermilab — it’s a combination of many disciplines. It’s not just one thing, so there’s a diversity here that you don’t get at other organizations.
I also think the work and the research is worthwhile. I think the science is incredibly interesting. I love dark matter. Don’t ask me why I love dark matter, I just do; I think it’s fascinating. And neutrinos I feel are like my hair: all over the place. I just love neutrinos.
What do you like to do outside of work?
I have two grandsons. They are about 15 months apart. So when I’m not working, I’m typically babysitting and spending time with the grandkids.
I’m also finishing up a Master of Science in leadership and organizational development. I’ve got one more class to go, so that will be taking up a lot of my time as well.
And, I do enjoy Netflix and reading.
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.
Claire Lee inside the CERN LHC tunnel at Point 4 where protons are given a kick of speed. Photo: Claire Lee
How long have you worked with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory?
Almost three years. I did my Ph.D. on the ATLAS experiment, then I did a postdoc with Brookhaven National Laboratory. I joined Fermilab in March 2020. But I’ve been based here at CERN in Switzerland since the summer of 2011.
What brought you to Fermilab?
So much of my career has been being in the right place at the right time: people asking, “Oh, would you like to do this?” and me saying, “Yes, that that sounds like a lot of fun! Let’s go do that!”
I did a master’s in South Africa on an experiment at Jefferson Lab’s Hall C, which is a fixed-target, high-energy nuclear physics experiment rather than a particle physics collider experiment. My advisor and I were the first two people from a South African university to join ATLAS, thanks to a collaboration with Kétévi Assamagan and others from Brookhaven. Then I started a Ph.D. with ATLAS.
After my postdoc, I just wanted a bit of a change and to do more of the outreach and public engagement side of things, which I really enjoy. That was one of the main reasons that I moved over to Fermilab.
What are you working on now?
Right now, I am working for Fermilab on the CMS experiment. Specifically, I am working on the communications and operations teams. We have this amazing, complex detector that thousands of people built over decades, and we want to be able to make sure we make the best use of it and get every exciting bit of physics we can out of it. LHC Run 3 started last year, but all of the collisions the LHC will produce will be worthless if we don’t have our detector on and running in optimal condition to detect and measure the particles that come out of those collisions. The very first, critical step in the entire process of producing great physics results is being able to keep our detector running safely. When I am on shift at Point 5 where the CMS detector is located, I am basically the first human point of contact for all the detector hardware, as well as responsible for any people on site doing technical work or taking visitors underground.
I really enjoy the shifts because each day is different. Some days are calm; some days you’re working intensely with subdetector experts to help them while they troubleshoot something; and some days you’re having to call the fire department because a bird has got itself stuck in the cavern! But it’s great because no matter what, you feel like you’re contributing in real time to the success of the experiment.
One of the wonderful things about our experiment is that it has such a wide, international collaboration, and another part of my job is to work on developing this as an advantage on the operations side too. Fermilab has the CMS Remote Operations Centre, which is basically a secondary control room for CMS at Fermilab. Between myself liaising from CERN and the team at the Fermilab, we are working on developing a new distributed operations model where we can use the ROC to support and complement the on-site operations at CERN. In essence, we could have US-CMS physicists taking CMS shifts without needing to travel very far. I think, in 2023, where we’ve just gone through the learning experience of a global pandemic, which heavily curtailed our travel, and with sustainability as a key goal for the future, this is a really important effort, and it would be a first for LHC experiments, too.
I also work with both the CMS and the Fermilab communications teams. I’ve also just trained as a guide for CMS, so I can take visitors underground. Also, because I previously worked on the ProtoDUNE project for the last couple years, I coordinated visits for the CERN Neutrino Platform. So, I’m also helping with visits there, but I’ll be passing this responsibility over to someone else soon.
Tours are super fun — a lot of talking to people, a lot of telling people how cool physics is. It’s so rewarding when people walk into the cavern, see the detector, and they’re like, “Wow, this is so cool,” and really understand what’s going on.
What are the goals of the CMS experiment?
One of the biggest goals was to discover the Higgs boson or basically see if we can figure out what it is that is giving mass to all the particles in the universe. That happened 10 years ago: The CMS and ATLAS experiments discovered the Higgs boson, which was really great because it was a huge missing piece in our understanding of the universe. But there are still many unanswered questions. For one, is that the only Higgs boson, or are there more of them? That’s one of the things that we’re looking for.
Another thing is that if we total up all the particles that we know of, it only makes up 5% of the universe; there’s 95% of the universe that we don’t know about. We think that at least some of that 95% acts like matter, and we call it dark matter. This is another big thing that we’re investigating. We’re hoping that studying proton‑proton collisions with the CMS is going to be one of the ways that we can shed some light on the nature of dark matter, even if we are not able to produce it directly with our accelerator.
The universe is a really interesting place, and if we truly want to say we understand it, we need to measure the way matter behaves across as wide a range of energies as possible with our current technology.
You’ve been vocal about your recent ADHD diagnosis and advocating for folks with ADHD in the sciences. Did your diagnosis impact your career?
You know, it’s kind of like particle physics. Once we understand how the particles and everything work, then we better understand the universe. In the same way, once you understand how your brain works, then you can do things either to help or hinder you.
While I was going through all of my research, I didn’t actually know that I had ADHD; I just sort of plodded along. With hindsight, I think a lot of things make sense. It took me years and years and years to do my master’s because I would spend weeks just staring at the screen doing nothing, then go off on a tangent, and then spend two weeks where I did a bunch of stuff because I was super motivated for this one little piece. Then once I completed that, I lost motivation again. So yeah, it’s an interesting thing to look back on.
One of the things that I used to occasionally do — without understanding why it worked — and now try to do more is when I have a task I need to do, I give myself the reward as I start. Because the thing with ADHD is being unable to start and then being unable to stop. Figuring out ways in which you can give yourself the reward at the beginning to get started can be pretty helpful. My brain really does enjoy standing up and talking to people so if I can do that a lot and make that more of my job, that’s fantastic.
What do you enjoy doing outside the lab?
I used to run a lot, but I injured my foot over a year ago; it still hasn’t recovered.
I started violin lessons in November, so that’s fun! I’ve got an electric violin — my husband bought me one as a present couple of weeks ago, and it’s super cool. I’m very much a beginner. The nice thing with the electric violin is that I can put headphones on when I’m playing at home, and then my cats don’t hate me so much.
Otherwise, just spending time with my family and friends is great.
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.