Advances in subatomic physics heavily depend on ingenuity and technology. And when it comes to discovering the nature of some of the most elusive particles in the universe, neutrinos, scientists need the best and most sensitive detector technology possible. Scientists working at CERN have started tests of a new neutrino detector prototype, using a very promising technology called “dual phase.”
Scientists working at CERN have started tests of a new neutrino detector prototype using a promising technology called “dual phase.” If successful, this new technology will be used at a much larger scale for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab. Scientists began operating the dual-phase prototype detector at CERN at the end of August and have observed first tracks. The new technology may be game-changing, as it would significantly amplify the faint signals that particles create when moving through the detector.
Fermilab and the University of Bern in Switzerland have signed an agreement to develop detector components for the laboratory’s neutrino experiments. The agreement is the first of its kind between Fermilab and a Swiss university.
Scientists are working on a pixelated detector capable of clearly and quickly capturing neutrino interactions — a crucial component for the near detector of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. Using technological solutions developed at University of Bern and Berkeley Lab, a prototype detector called ArgonCube is under construction in Bern and will arrive at Fermilab next year.
Discovering new physics beyond the Standard Model is a major objective of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. Signatures of beyond-the-Standard-Model physics that contain particles with long lifetimes have been largely unexplored so far, due to the complexity of their reconstruction. Thanks to the maturity reached by the LHC experiments, the community now turns its attention to these challenging searches. Long-lived particles are the territory that the new CMS timing detector in development will help conquer.
Postdoc Guillermo Fernandez Moroni is recognized for his outstanding work on the SENSEI experiment at Fermilab. Dark matter experiments are quite sensitive to unwanted background noise, and Moroni found a way to limit this noise for SENSEI, increasing the sensitivity of the experiment by a factor of a thousand, making it the most sensitive of its kind in the world.
From Science News, June 17, 2019: The particles could be spotted when they slam into electrons or atomic nuclei in the crystals, says Fermilab scientist Noah Kurinsky.
For the last six years, the mission of U.S. CMS scientists has been, in a phrase, to complete the LHC Phase 1 Upgrades. On May 1, with the successful outcome of the DOE Critical Decision 4 review, the U.S. CMS group fulfilled that mission. We’re proud of all the work we’ve done to upgrade the CMS detector so it can handle the increased luminosity of the Large Hadron Collider.
One sprinkle of sand at a time, two artists have recreated the moment a particle passed through a detector 30 years earlier. Their piece, a bright blue and white sculpture of tracks of microscopic bubbles in a bubble chamber, was inspired by the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of the sand mandala. To find the perfect bubble chamber image to recreate, they scrolled through hundreds of these photographs in the archive at Fermilab.
From Saense, Feb. 14, 2019: Uma parte vital de um dos maiores experimentos da física de partículas atual foi desenvolvida no Brasil. O Arapuca é um detector de luz a ser instalado no Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment — projeto que busca descobrir novas propriedades dos neutrinos, partícula elementar com muito pouca massa e que viaja a uma velocidade muito próxima à da luz.