From New Scientist, Jan. 25, 2021: The Big Bang left us the universe — and a major set of mysteries around antimatter, dark matter, dark energy, and cosmic inflation. While the Large Hadron Collider looks at what the laws of physics were like a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, Dan Hooper, head of theoretical astrophysics at Fermilab, thinks the answers to these puzzles may depend on better understanding that first fraction of a second — even closer to the universe’s beginning.
dark matter
From University of Glasgow, Jan. 13, 2021: Fermilab will take part in an international collaboration, led by Cardiff University, on quantum-enhanced interferometry for new physics. The project’s four table-top experiments may help explore new parameter spaces of photon-dark matter interaction, and seek answers to the long-standing question at the heart of modern science: How can gravity be united with the other fundamental forces?
Faint light from rogue stars not bound to galaxies has been something of a mystery to scientists. The dimness of this intracluster light makes it difficult to measure, and no one knows how much there is. Scientists on the Dark Energy Survey, led by Fermilab, have made the most radially extended measurement of this light ever and have found new evidence that its distribution might point to the distribution of dark matter.
From Forbes, Jan. 22, 2021: Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln describes recent findings of scientists studying an unexplained excess of hard X-rays emanating from neutron stars. The explanation for the excess could lie in a hypothesized dark matter candidate called the axion.
Once the most popular framework for physics beyond the Standard Model, supersymmetry is facing a reckoning — but many researchers are not giving up on it yet.
Until recently, scientists had never detected black holes in the “mass gap.” Now, particle physicists are exploring ideas beyond the Standard Model that could explain them.
More than 3,500 researchers from around the world collaborate with Fermilab to develop state-of-the-art technologies and solve the mysteries of matter, energy, space and time. Here is a look at 10 ways Fermilab advanced science and technology in 2020.
From Quanta Magazine, Nov. 23, 2020: Physicists plan to leave no stone unturned, checking whether dark matter tickles different types of detectors, nudges starlight, warms planetary cores or even lodges in rocks. Their efforts include the SENSEI and ADMX experiments, in which Fermilab plays a key role.
From Gizmodo, Nov. 10, 2020: Fermilab and University of Maryland scientist Dan Carney and a small group of scientists have begun work on a prototype they say could one day lead to a dark matter detector capable of pinpointing the minute gravitational pull of a particle we can neither see nor feel. The detector is simple in design, but the theory behind its construction amounts to a fundamental rethinking of the search for dark matter.
Researchers have proposed a novel method for finding dark matter, the cosmos’s mystery material that has eluded detection for decades. The proposed experiment, in which a billion millimeter-sized pendulums would act as dark matter sensors, would be the first to hunt for dark matter solely through its gravitational interaction with visible matter.