Editor’s note: This press release about the DESI early data set was originally published by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory contributed key elements to DESI, including the online databases used for data acquisition and the software that ensures that each of the 5,000 robotic positioners are precisely pointing to their celestial targets to within a 10th of the width of a human hair.
Fermilab also contributed the corrector barrel, hexapod and cage. The corrector barrel holds DESI’s six large lenses in precise alignment. The hexapod, designed and built with partners in Italy, focuses the DESI images by moving the barrel-lens system. Both the barrel and hexapod are housed in the cage, which provides the attachment to the telescope structure. In addition, Fermilab carried out the testing and packaging of DESI’s charge-coupled devices, or CCDs. The CCDs convert the light passing through the lenses from distant galaxies into digital information that can then be analyzed by the collaboration.
“It is very exciting to be making our first public data release.” said Liz Buckley-Geer, Fermilab scientist and one of the DESI lead observers responsible for the data collection. “I am looking forward to helping to acquire even more data as we continue the survey.”
The universe is big, and it’s getting bigger. To study dark energy, the mysterious force behind the accelerating expansion of our universe, scientists are using the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) to map more than 40 million galaxies, quasars, and stars. Today, the collaboration publicly released its first batch of data, with nearly 2 million objects for researchers to explore.
The 80-terabyte data set comes from 2,480 exposures taken over six months during the experiment’s “survey validation” phase in 2020 and 2021. In this period between turning the instrument on and beginning the official science run, researchers made sure their plan for using the telescope would meet their science goals – for example, by checking how long it took to observe galaxies of different brightness, and by validating the selection of stars and galaxies to observe.
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument sits atop the Mayall 4-Meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. DESI’s early data gathered in 2020 and 2021 is now publicly available.
Credit: Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley Lab
“The fact that DESI works so well, and that the amount of science-grade data it took during survey validation is comparable to previous completed sky surveys, is a monumental achievement,” said Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille, co-spokesperson for DESI and a scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), which manages the experiment. “This milestone shows that DESI is a unique spectroscopic factory whose data will not only allow the study of dark energy but will also be coveted by the whole scientific community to address other topics, such as dark matter, gravitational lensing, and galactic morphology.”
Today the collaboration also published a set of papers related to the early data release, which include early measurements of galaxy clustering, studies of rare objects, and descriptions of the instrument and survey operations. The new papers build on DESI’s first measurement of the cosmological distance scale that was published in April, which used the first two months of routine survey data (not included in the early data release) and also showed DESI’s ability to accomplish its design goals.
DESI uses 5,000 robotic positioners to move optical fibers that capture light from objects millions or billions of light-years away. It is the most powerful multi-object survey spectrograph in the world, able to measure light from more than 100,000 galaxies in one night. That light tells researchers how far away an object is, building a 3D cosmic map.
“Survey validation was very important for DESI because it allowed us – before starting the main survey – to adjust our selection of all the objects, including stars, bright galaxies, luminous red galaxies, emission line galaxies, and quasars,” said Christophe Yeche, a scientist with the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) who co-leads the target selection group. “We’ve been able to optimize our selection and confirm our observation strategy.”
Part of DESI’s survey validation included the “One-Percent Survey” visualized in this flythrough. Researchers took detailed images in 20 different directions on the sky, creating a 3D map of 700,000 objects and covering roughly 1% of the total volume DESI will study. With the instrument and survey plan successfully tested, the main DESI survey is now filling in the gaps between those observations. Credit: David Kirkby/DESI collaboration
As the universe expands, it stretches light’s wavelength, making it redder – a characteristic known as redshift. The further away the galaxy, the bigger the redshift. DESI specializes in collecting redshifts that can then be used to solve some of astrophysics’ biggest puzzles: what dark energy is and how it has changed throughout the universe’s history.
While DESI’s primary goal is understanding dark energy, much of the data can also be used in other astronomical studies. For example, the early data release contains detailed images from some well-known areas of the sky, such as the Hubble Deep Field.
“There are some well-trodden spots where we’ve drilled down into the sky,” said Stephen Bailey, a scientist at Berkeley Lab who leads data management for DESI. “We’ve taken valuable spectroscopic images in areas that are of interest to the rest of the community, and we’re hoping that other people will take this data and do additional science with it.”
Two interesting finds have already surfaced: Evidence of a mass migration of stars into the Andromeda galaxy, and incredibly distant quasars, the extremely bright and active supermassive black holes sometimes found at the center of galaxies.
“We observed some areas at very high depth. People have looked at that data and discovered very high redshift quasars, which are still so rare that basically any discovery of them is useful,” said Anthony Kremin, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Lab who led the data processing for the early data release. “Those high-redshift quasars are usually found with very large telescopes, so the fact that DESI – a smaller, 4-meter survey instrument – could compete with those larger, dedicated observatories was an achievement we are pretty proud of and demonstrates the exceptional throughput of the instrument.”
DESI uses 5,000 fiber-optic “eyes” to rapidly collect light from distant galaxies. In good observing conditions, the experiment can image a new set of 5,000 objects every 20 minutes. Credit: Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley Lab
Survey validation was also a chance to test the process of transforming raw data from DESI’s ten spectrometers (which split a galaxy’s light into different colors) into useful information.
“If you looked at them, the images coming directly from the camera would look like nonsense – like lines on a weird, fuzzy image,” said Laurie Stephey, a data architect at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), the supercomputer that processes DESI’s data. “The magic happens in the processing and the software being able to decode the data. It’s exciting that we have the technology to make that data accessible to the research community and that we can support this big question of ‘what is dark energy?’”
DESI’s early data was a unique project for NERSC. All of the experiment’s code, including the computational heavy lifting, is written in the programming language Python rather than the traditional C++ or Fortran.
DESI collects spectra, the different frequencies of light that objects in space emit. That light tells researchers how far away the object is, meaning they can create a 3D map of the universe. This spectrum is from an incredibly distant quasar more than 12 billion light-years from Earth. The universe’s expansion has stretched the light’s wavelength and shifted it into the infrared.
Credit: Eleanor Downing/DESI collaboration
“That was the first time that using pure Python was shown to be a feasible approach for a major experiment at NERSC, and since then, Python has become increasingly common in our user workload,” Stephey said.
The DESI early data release is now available to access for free through NERSC.
There is plenty of data yet to come from the experiment. DESI is currently two years into its five-year run and ahead of schedule on its quest to collect more than 40 million redshifts. The survey has already catalogued more than 26 million astronomical objects in its science run, and is adding more than a million per month.
DESI is supported by the DOE Office of Science and by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science user facility. Additional support for DESI is provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Science and Technologies Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico, the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain, and by the DESI member institutions.
Kitt Peak National Observatory is a program of NSF’s NOIRLab.
The DESI collaboration is honored to be permitted to conduct scientific research on Iolkam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O’odham Nation.
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Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest scientific challenges are best addressed by teams, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its scientists have been recognized with 16 Nobel Prizes. Today, Berkeley Lab researchers develop sustainable energy and environmental solutions, create useful new materials, advance the frontiers of computing, and probe the mysteries of life, matter, and the universe. Scientists from around the world rely on the Lab’s facilities for their own discovery science. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory, managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics 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 https://www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter @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.
Associate scientist Jennifer Ngadiuba received two top awards last fall to advance artificial intelligence and machine-learning research in high-energy physics. Photo: Jennifer Ngadiuba
Jennifer Ngadiuba, an associate scientist at Fermilab on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, was always curious — she felt like the world was a puzzle to be solved. When she was young, she knew she wanted to study science to help solve this puzzle. Later, she realized her curiosity and research could help advance human knowledge and well-being in general.
The need to understand the truth behind mysteries of the physical world has guided her career. Her curiosity has led to Ngadiuba’s receiving two prestigious awards: The U.S. Department of Energy’s AI4HEP award and the Schmidt Futures AI2050 Early Career Fellows award. Both will enable her to expand development of new methods for more reliable and robust machine learning, using physics-informed models where humans are not needed in the decision-making loop.
Ngadiuba’s research focuses on designing efficient edge artificial intelligence for the real-time processing system of the CMS experiment. In the last year, her research has focused on understanding the feasibility of a novel data-acquisition approach for CMS, based on unsupervised learning. This approach, also called anomaly detection, has the potential to lead the field to uncover unknown and beyond the Standard Model physics.
She will now expand her research to improve the efficiency and robustness of edge AI models with physics information for different high-energy physics applications, including CMS, the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment and accelerator technology.
Award for advancing artificial intelligence
The AI4HEP DOE Award supports the DOE Office of Science initiative in artificial intelligence research that focuses on using AI techniques to deliver scientific discoveries and to broaden participation in high-energy physics research. It represents new partnerships between researchers at DOE national labs and collaborating universities that will enable the next discoveries in high-energy physics.
Ngadiuba’s research was one of three national lab-led team projects to receive funding to continue artificial intelligence research for high-energy physics. Also, Fermilab is the only national lab with a scientist who will receive $2.96M over three years for her research.
This award will allow Ngadiuba and her team to expand capabilities by adding one AI associate, two postdoctoral research associates — one to work on a neutrino experiment and another on CMS — and at least one doctoral student from each collaborating institute.
Solving hard problems in AI
The Schmidt Futures is a philanthropic program that supports researchers from around the globe at various stages of their career who are solving hard problems in science and society.
In late 2022, Ngadiuba was one of 15 Schmidt Futures Early Career Fellows selected to solve hard problems in artificial intelligence through interdisciplinary research.
Nominees from 10 universities — and Ngadiuba, the only researcher from a national lab — each were selected to receive up to $300,000 over two years in AI research support. Ngadiuba holds an affiliate position at California Institute of Technology, which will set up and manage the grant to allow AI researchers to work with her group at Fermilab.
“I would like to help advance this field, and I am thankful to DOE and the Schmidt Futures Foundation for recognizing the importance of AI and ML in high-energy physics,” said Ngadiuba. “I am very thankful to the mentors who initially led me down the AI path and those who continue to mentor and inspire me in my current endeavors at Fermilab. I realize the potential of AI to help the field of high-energy physics, as well as the advantages and applications it brings to society.”
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.
The United States and United Kingdom are sharing expertise and capabilities in the blossoming field of quantum information science across the pond. This new partnership between the countries will lead to new quantum devices, insights into their performance, ways to harness quantum information and discoveries in fundamental physics.
Research will be conducted under the Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, with the United Kingdom’s National Physical Laboratory and Royal Holloway, University of London. With the additional institutions, the SQMS Center collaboration now totals 28 partners.
From left to right: Marius Hegedus, Tobias Lindstrom and Alexander Tzalenchuk stand outside the door to Quantum Computing Lab-3 during their visit to SQMS Center’s headquarters on Fermilab’s campus. Photo: SQMS Center
These new additions to the SQMS Center are rooted in goals to increase cooperation in the field of quantum information science between the U.S. and U.K. governments. These goals were set in a November 2021 joint statement that emphasizes the importance of growing an ecosystem of international partners with shared values. The statement also highlights the impact of quantum technology on global health security, climate change and efficient resource use.
“Our new U.K. partners bring unique characterization techniques that complement the SQMS Center’s strengths,” said Anna Grassellino, director of the SQMS Center. “This partnership advances the center’s mission of identifying and overcoming fundamental obstacles that interfere with quantum device performance, while also finding ways to use quantum devices to harness quantum information and perform physics and sensing experiments.”
New investigations
Quantum information science seeks to harness the behavior of quantum mechanics to process information in new ways, develop ultra-sensitive detectors and much more.
Under these new partnerships, researchers will investigate the following: losses of quantum information in quantum computing devices, new systems based on quantum technologies to search for new particles, new quantum algorithms, and the performance and fundamental limits of quantum computers.
“The areas the SQMS Center focuses on are building high-quality superconducting qubits and looking at ways in which this will scale for both quantum computing and fundamental physics,” said Sir Peter Knight, chair of the U.K. National Quantum Technologies Programme and SQMS Center advisory board member.
Scientists will use quantum computers to manipulate qubits — the basic building block of information used by quantum computers — to perform calculations that would be practically impossible for classical computers when the machines are fully realized.
“Superconducting qubits can be used as a quantum computing engine, but equally in the other direction for dark matter detection,” said Knight. “Quantum has become a major part of the scientific adventure that everybody wants to participate in, and SQMS is going to be a beacon of getting stuff done. NPL and RHUL researchers are excited to become collaborative SQMS Center partners.”
Cutting-edge capabilities
Quantum devices need to be cooled down to prevent information from being obscured or lost by noise produced by heat. Making devices ultra-cold might lead to better device performance and new insights on how quantum devices behave and operate.
RHUL performs cutting-edge research in quantum and hosts the London Low Temperature Laboratory. Researchers at RHUL have experience cooling quantum devices down to the microkelvin range, or millionths of degrees kelvin. This temperature regime is much colder than where researchers typically operate devices, which are the millikelvin range or thousandth degrees kelvin.
“What my group brings to the table is expertise in low-temperature physics into the microkelvin regime,” said John Saunders, a professor at RHUL and SQMS Center advisory board member. “For approximately the last 10 years, we’ve been working on developing new low-temperature platforms and working on cooling down quantum circuits and quantum materials to the lowest possible temperatures. We are very interested in cooling them down to ultra-low temperatures to see how they behave,” said Saunders.
This expertise in low temperatures complements the National Physical Laboratory’s capabilities. The National Physical Laboratory serves a similar function as the United States’ National Institute of Standards and Technology, both of which perform precision measurements to maintain measurement standards for their respective countries. NIST is also a core partner within the SQMS Center.
“Quantum has become a major part of the scientific adventure that everybody wants to participate in, and SQMS is going to be a beacon of getting stuff done.” – Sir Peter Knight, chair of the U.K. National Quantum Technologies Programme
“As the NPL head of science for quantum technologies, I lead a team of about 100 scientists working on various aspects of computing, sensing, communications, metrology, and materials,” said Alexander Tzalenchuk, the SQMS Center principal investigator for NPL. “In particular, we strive to understand and mitigate noise in superconducting circuits, which affects their ‘quantumness.’ We also work on algorithms and developing technologies that enable scalable quantum computing in the future. This formal collaboration is one of the first examples where the two countries can work together on closely aligned projects, which is enabled by the joint statement.”
“We want to make quantum technologies viable in order to provide new tools and capabilities that benefit our national initiative as well as, more broadly, the world,” said Abid Patwa, program manager for SQMS in DOE’s Office of High Energy Physics. “We need to learn more about the fundamental aspects of QIS, such as cryogenics, and to understand the underlying mechanisms that currently limit quantum computing devices.
“The United Kingdom continues to be an excellent partner to the United States and has the expertise as well as the essential resources to test and build on the QIS fundamentals,” said Patwa. “These efforts will further advance our insights in quantum research to enable this emerging technology.”
The Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center at Fermilab is supported by the DOE Office of Science.
The Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center is one of the five U.S. Department of Energy National Quantum Information Science Research Centers. Led by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, SQMS is a collaboration of 28 partner institutions—national labs, academia and industry—working together to bring transformational advances in the field of quantum information science. The center leverages Fermilab’s expertise in building complex particle accelerators to engineer multiqubit quantum processor platforms based on state-of-the-art qubits and superconducting technologies. Working hand in hand with embedded industry partners, SQMS will build a quantum computer and new quantum sensors at Fermilab, which will open unprecedented computational opportunities. For more information, please visit sqmscenter.fnal.gov.
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.