As a musician, Suzie Shrubb has always looked up to the skies for inspiration. The music of the universe and its particles has always fascinated them, which is why their appointment as the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s guest composer this year makes perfect sense.
Fermilab’s 2022 guest composer Suzie Shrubb, who sees music and physics as one in the same, considers this yearlong residency as chance to musically express the energy and sounds of the science at Fermilab. Photo: Suzie Shrubb
Based in the United Kingdom, Shrubb, who uses both they/them and she/her as pronouns, is a composer as well as a classical and improvising musician who plays the piano and the oboe. They currently work with the Hurly Burly Theatre in the UK. Their previous collaborations have included work as a resident artist with the Oxford Playhouse, Lancaster University and Royal Opera House, among others.
Now in its third year, Fermilab’s guest composer program fosters the relationship and engagement between scientists, composers and the public. According to Shrubb, their yearlong online residency at Fermilab is a chance to musically express the energy and sounds of the science at the lab. From conversations with physicists to the specific noises of technology in experiments, these sounds and experiences all will inspire her body of work, which will be presented to the community at the end of the residency.
In some ways, her appointment at Fermilab is the culmination of two lifelong passions – music and physics. Shrubb has been a musician their whole life and started playing piano as a toddler.
“When I was a child, all of the Voyager and Pioneer data started coming back. I was fascinated by that,” said Shrubb. “Also, my mother would teach me all the constellations at night when I couldn’t sleep. So, I was very lucky in that respect; these ideas were always wafting around in my life.”
Shrubb said that at a certain point they just started to think of music and physics as one in the same. They drew inspiration from various ideas: the ancient Greek concept of music of the spheres (the idea that the movements of celestial bodies, such as the sun, the moon and the planets, are a form of music), great cosmic fugues, and various cosmologies of gods singing the cosmos into being.
“I feel like a musical space is a context through which we can take these particle physics systems that are a description of a reality and then translate them. It’s an expression and a relationship,” said Shrubb.
Shrubb has previously been a guest speaker for VOICES, or Virtual Ongoing Interdisciplinary Collaborations on Educating with Song, to share their work on translating neutrino oscillations into musical notation. At Fermilab, they have already begun talking to physicists about using experimental data for composition. Even though Shrubb does not have a particle physics academic background, she hopes that by engaging in dialogue with various Fermilab scientists, she can create pieces of music that are very specific to their field of research or work.
For instance, Shrubb is taking the mapped movement of a proton going through a detector to create a musical score that illustrates the proton’s journey. To do so, she first converts the mass or energy of the quarks that make up the proton into hertz and then translates that into scientific pitch notation, which can be played on any musical instrument. But as Shrubb pointed out, the science can inspire multiple different approaches and interpretations, including improvisation.
“The proton just becomes a set of instructions for our musicians. We all begin here, and we all know we’re going to end there. The piece is us going on this journey to find that beginning and ending place,” they said. “Working within the constraints of the journey, musicians can then improvise how they end up from start to finish.”
“I feel like a musical space is a context through which we can take these particle physics systems that are a description of a reality and then translate them.” — Suzie Shrubb, Fermilab 2022 guest composer
Shrubb noted that this interpretation may not necessarily speak to the truth of what’s going on with the particles. In order to reflect that, they are going to translate the data of the image to map the different energy levels to different pitches and notes.
“Suzie’s deep passion for, and prior experience in, melding physics and music composition made her a natural fit for this Fermilab adventure. Collaboration is such a huge part of Suzie’s music-making, working with various volunteer choirs and other groups, even through COVID,” said Janet MacKay-Galbraith, who manages Fermilab’s guest composer program, which explores the relationship between art and science.
“In fact, Suzie had already worked with [Fermilab scientist] Elena Gramellini, providing a musical backdrop for Elena’s 2021 Physics Slam film, before even starting their residency.”
Pulling from their previous work, Shrubb hopes to eventually run improvisation sessions for anyone musically inclined at Fermilab, so that people can gather and bounce ideas back and forth to create music together. They also plan to give a talk during their residency, explaining their process behind translating scientific data into music.
“They bring great enthusiasm to our guest composer program and is a terrific representative of the relationship between art/music and science,” added MacKay-Galbraith.
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.
World-class particle physics research isn’t the only thing Fermilab is known for. The iconic sight of the Midwestern bison graces the acres of prairie land surrounding the lab, beckoning visitors from across the country. On April 13, baby bison season officially began at the lab, a sure sign spring is truly on its way. The first calf of the year was born in the morning, and we’re pleased to announce that both mother and baby are doing well.
Fermilab’s bison population has grown by one. Photo credit: Ryan Postel, Fermilab
Currently, the herd comprises 32 bison — 30 females and two bulls. The bulls are changed out periodically to maintain the herd’s health and genetic diversity.
This year, Fermilab is expecting up to 20 new calves. For a front-seat view of the bison, visit Fermilab’s new bison cam to glimpse the activities of the mighty herd.
This year, Fermilab is expecting up to 20 new calves. Photo: Ryan Postel, Fermilab
Robert Wilson, Fermilab’s first director, established the bison herd in 1969 as a symbol of the history of the Midwestern prairie and the laboratory’s pioneering research at the cutting-edge of particle physics.
Bison are native to North America and play a big part in the Indigenous cultures of the land. A herd of bison is a natural fit for a laboratory surrounded by nature. Fermilab hosts nearly 1,000 acres of reconstructed tallgrass prairie, as well as remnant oak savannas, marshes and forests.
The American bison nearly went extinct in the 19th century. Thanks to conservation efforts, it is no longer an endangered species, but conservation of the bison genome is still a federally recognized priority.
Fermilab has confirmed through genetic testing that the laboratory’s herd shows no evidence of cattle gene mixing.
If the bison cam isn’t enough, Fermilab has reopened to the public, and visitors are welcome to come view the herd in person.
To learn more about Fermilab’s bison herd, please visit the section on wildlife at Fermilab on our website.
The Fermilab site has been designated a National Environmental Research Park by the U.S. Department of Energy. The lab’s environmental stewardship efforts are supported by the Department of Energy Office of Science as well as Fermilab Natural Areas.
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.
Editor’s note: this press release was originally published by Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Physicists studying ghost-like particles called neutrinos from the international MicroBooNE collaboration have reported a first-of-its-kind measurement: a comprehensive set of the energy-dependent neutrino-argon interaction cross sections. This measurement marks an important step towards achieving the scientific goals of next-generation of neutrino experiments — namely, the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).
A close-up view of a muon neutrino argon interaction within an event display at MicroBooNE, one out of 11,528 events used to extract energy-dependent muon neutrino argon interaction cross sections. Image: Brookhaven National Laboratory
Neutrinos are tiny subatomic particles that are both famously elusive and tremendously abundant. While they endlessly bombard every inch of Earth’s surface at nearly the speed of light, neutrinos can travel through a lightyear’s worth of lead without ever disturbing a single atom. Understanding these mysterious particles could unlock some of the biggest secrets of the universe.
The MicroBooNE experiment, located at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, has been collecting data on neutrinos since 2015, partially as a testbed for DUNE, which is currently under construction. To identify elusive neutrinos, both experiments use a low-noise liquid-argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) — a sophisticated detector that captures neutrino signals as the particles pass through frigid liquid argon kept at negative 303 degrees Fahrenheit. MicroBooNE physicists have been refining LArTPC techniques for large-scale detectors at DUNE.
Now, a team effort led by scientists at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers from Yale University and Louisiana State University, has further refined those techniques by measuring the neutrino-argon cross section. Their work published today in Physical Review Letters.
“The neutrino-argon cross section represents how argon nuclei respond to an incident neutrino, such as those in the neutrino beam produced by MicroBooNE or DUNE,” said Brookhaven Lab physicist Xin Qian, leader of Brookhaven’s MicroBooNE physics group. “Our ultimate goal is to study the properties of neutrinos, but first we need to better understand how neutrinos interact with the material in a detector, such as argon atoms.”
One of the most important neutrino properties that DUNE will investigate is how the particles oscillate between three distinct “flavors”: muon neutrino, tau neutrino, and electron neutrino. Scientists know that these oscillations depend on neutrinos’ energy, among other parameters, but that energy is very challenging to estimate. Not only are neutrino interactions extremely complex in nature, but there is also a large energy spread within every neutrino beam. Determining the detailed energy-dependent cross sections provides physicists with an essential piece of information to study neutrino oscillations.
“Once we know the cross section, we can reverse the calculation to determine the average neutrino energy, flavor, and oscillation properties from a large number of interactions,” said Brookhaven Lab postdoc Wenqiang Gu, who led the physics analysis.
To accomplish this, the team developed a new technique to extract the detailed energy-dependent cross section.
“Previous techniques measured the cross section as a function of variables that are easily reconstructed,” said London Cooper-Troendle, a graduate student from Yale University who is stationed at Brookhaven Lab through DOE’s Graduate Student Research Program. “For example, if you are studying a muon neutrino, you generally see a charged muon coming out of the particle interaction, and this charged muon has well-defined properties like its angle and energy. So, one can measure the cross section as a function of the muon angle or energy. But without a model that can accurately account for “missing energy,” a term we use to describe additional energy in the neutrino interactions that can’t be attributed to the reconstructed variables, this technique would require experiments to act conservatively.”
The research team led by Brookhaven sought to validate the neutrino energy reconstruction process with unprecedented precision, improving theoretical modeling of neutrino interactions as needed for DUNE. To do so, the team applied their expertise and lessons learned from previous work on the MicroBooNE experiment, such as their efforts in reconstructing interactions with different neutrino flavors.
“We added a new constraint to significantly improve the mathematical modeling of neutrino energy reconstruction,” said Louisiana State University assistant professor Hanyu Wei, previously a Goldhaber fellow at Brookhaven.
The team validated this newly constrained model against experimental data to produce the first detailed energy-dependent neutrino-argon cross section measurement.
“The neutrino-argon cross section results from this analysis are able to distinguish between different theoretical models for the first time,” Gu said.
While physicists expect DUNE to produce enhanced measurements of the cross section, the methods developed by the MicroBooNE collaboration provide a foundation for future analyses. The current cross section measurement is already set to guide additional developments on theoretical models.
In the meantime, the MicroBooNE team will focus on further enhancing its measurement of the cross section. The current measurement was done in one dimension, but future research will tackle the value in multiple dimensions — that is, as a function of multiple variables — and explore more avenues of underlying physics.
This work was supported by the DOE Office of Science.
Brookhaven National 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