New neutrino discovery will unlock secrets of the rarest events in the cosmos

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.

Mary Bishai, an experimental particle physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, is the new co-spokesperson for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, a one-of-kind experiment to study neutrinos, elusive particles that hold the key to some of the universe’s greatest mysteries. She joins Sergio Bertolucci, professor of physics at the University of Bologna in Italy, who became co-spokesperson in 2022.

DUNE, hosted by DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, is an international effort aimed at addressing some of the biggest open questions in physics, such as the role neutrinos play in the evolution of the universe and the relationship between the forces of nature.

The experiment will reside at two sites: Fermilab, which will house a particle accelerator to generate a neutrino beam that will pass through the DUNE near detector before traveling 1,300 kilometers through the earth; and the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, where the gigantic DUNE far detector will receive the neutrinos 1.5 kilometers below the surface. The neutrino beamline and infrastructure are known as the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, or LBNF.

Work is progressing at a rapid pace: Excavation of the underground caverns at SURF is more than halfway complete, and the testing and mass production of components for the detector modules is currently underway.

“We are entering a critical phase of DUNE,” said Bishai. DUNE collaborators will work on the installation of the detectors in South Dakota. A key task for the spokespeople of this experiment will be to engage all those involved and coordinate their efforts in order to meet the milestones for detector installation that lay ahead. In addition, Fermilab will provide people to support the collaboration and installation, along with the logistics provided by personnel at the Sanford Underground Research Facility.

Spokespeople for a unique experiment

The DUNE collaboration elects a new co-spokesperson each year for a two-year term. Spokespeople represent and help organize the entire collaboration, which includes more than 1,400 collaborators across 200 institutions in over 35 countries and CERN.

Together with U.S. project director Chris Mossey of Fermilab, the DUNE co-spokespeople play an important role in working with funding agencies in order to secure the support needed to carry out DUNE’s ambitious program.

“DUNE is a unique experiment,” Bertolucci said. “It is the only experiment in the world which can measure all the parameters of the neutrino oscillation matrix without any external input.”

DUNE will also be able to measure neutrinos from supernovae and explore a wide range of physics beyond the Standard Model. Scientists will also search for signs of proton decay, dark matter and dark photons using the DUNE detectors.

Long legacies

Bishai has been a part of DUNE since before its inception, when the idea for a very-long-baseline neutrino experiment with a high-intensity, wide-band neutrino beam was first proposed in the early 2000s.

Prior to being elected spokesperson, Bishai played a crucial role in the design and development of the experiment. In 2015, Bishai served as project scientist when the newly formed LBNF/DUNE project successfully passed the first critical DOE project milestone, which established that the far detector of DUNE would comprise four liquid-argon time projection chambers, or LArTPCs, the technology of choice for the experiment’s particle detectors. The new caverns being excavated at SURF will provide space for these four detector modules, each containing 17,000 tons of argon, a highly stable element ideal for studying neutrinos.

In recent years, Bishai has been involved in various aspects of the experiment, including being part of the neutrino beam interface working group and carrying out internal technical reviews as chair of the LBNF/DUNE review office.

“Having been there from the very start, the thing I’m most excited about is that we’re starting to really build this,” said Bishai. “It’s no longer just a technical design report. It’s been a long journey, but that’s what makes it so gratifying to witness this stage.”

Bertolucci, too, is one the pioneering members of DUNE. During his role as the director of research at CERN, Bertolucci worked with particle physicists to explore options for building a global particle physics experiment in the U.S. In January 2015, as interim chair of the institutional board of the new experiment, Bertolucci presented the concept of what became DUNE.

After completing his term as the director of research of CERN, Bertolucci returned to his home country of Italy, where he set up a group to work on DUNE. The group in Italy now comprises more than 100 members and receives funding from Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics, or INFN.

“As a collaboration, we are building something that will be relevant for physics in the long-term,” Bertolucci said. “Fortunately for us, we have many young people within the collaboration who will not only help build DUNE, but also be able to exploit it to get results for many years to come.”

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.