News

The new memorandum of understanding will elevate the collaboration between the Spanish Ministry of Science and Fermilab in developing detection systems and the physics of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. DUNE is an international science project that will seek to determine whether neutrinos could be the reason the universe is made of matter.

Illinois is poised to become a hub for quantum computing with investments from the the State of Illinois and the U.S. Department of Defense’s DARPA agency in a new QC campus. The Quantum Enterprise Zone will be a supportive environment for startups and entrepreneurs, offering access to resources, funding, and expertise. Fermilab and Argonne National Laboratories will also facilitate collaboration and knowledge transfer between academia and industry.

The UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) awarded Lancaster University £928,000 for the DUNE Anode Plane Assemblies project and £901,000 for the DUNE Reconstruction Software and Distributed Computing initiative. These projects form part of a wider UK DUNE collaboration that is providing significant effort in areas key to the success of the DUNE project.

The Chicago Quantum Exchange and the FBI’s Chicago office recently hosted leaders from industry, government and academia at Fermilab to build communication channels. The first-of-its-kind symposium between law enforcement and technology developers aims to create a national model for cooperation between the quantum ecosystem and the government agencies to protect the nation and its assets.

The Sanford Lab Homestake Visitor Center in Lead, SD has a new centerpiece. A towering three-dimensional model that includes the Open Cut and 370 miles of drifts, ramps, and shafts that make up the Sanford Underground Research Facility was made to convey the giant caverns at SURF for the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility / Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.

A partnership between Fermilab and xLight Inc. will focus on producing advanced semiconductors in the United States using extreme ultraviolet light and accelerator technology.

Rigging crews at SURF are performing a series of tests using a large wooden model L-beam built to the same scale as one of the huge steel components that arrived in South Dakota in January after being shipped from Spain. The tests are being done in anticipation of lowering the real thing down the shaft to the underground 4850 level.

Physicists from Syracuse University are part of the more than 1,400 scientists that make up the DUNE collaboration. The Syracuse team were involved in the development and testing of the first detector’s components, helping finalize the design and testing plans of the anode plane assemblies. The team also researched and developed light sensors for the first detector’s module and investigated how adding small amounts of the element xenon could improve their performance.

Fermilab scientist Juan Estrada recently took his novel Skipper detector technology to students in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at U of I run a thermal vacuum test for the DarkNESS mission. The test successfully demonstrated the crucial thermal control capabilities required for the detector operation.

Fermilab is contributing to research on newly developed detectors in PET scanners with the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago. They are working together to design chip technology capable of producing an inexpensive, highly usable readout of scan data that has the potential to reduce radiation dose by a factor of 1,000.