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.
HL-LHC
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 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, June 17, 2020: While COVID-19 risks had led to a temporary halt in fabrication work on high-power superconducting magnets built by a collaboration of three national labs for an upgrade of the world’s largest particle collider at CERN in Europe, researchers at Berkeley Lab are still carrying out some project tasks. Fermilab scientist Giorgio Apollinari, head of the U.S.-based magnet effort for the HL-LHC, is quoted in this piece.
From Semiconductor Engineering, April 6, 2020: Fermilab, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have built an enormous superconducting magnet — one of 16 — that will be used in the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator project at CERN in Europe.
From CERN Courier, March 23, 2020: A quadrupole magnet for the High-Luminosity LHC has been tested successfully in the U.S., attaining a conductor peak field of 11.4 tesla — a record for a focusing magnet ready for installation in an accelerator. The device is based on the superconductor niobium-tin and is one of several quadrupoles being built by U.S. labs and CERN for the HL-LHC, where they will squeeze the proton beams more tightly within the ATLAS and CMS experiments to produce a higher luminosity.
Fermilab, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have achieved a milestone in magnet technology. Earlier this year, their new magnet reached the highest field strength ever recorded for an accelerator focusing magnet. It will also be the first niobium-tin quadrupole magnet to operate in a particle accelerator — in this case, the future High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
What if you want to capture an image of a process so fast that it looks blurry if the shutter is open for even a billionth of a second? This is the type of challenge scientists on experiments like CMS and ATLAS face as they study particle collisions at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. An extremely fast new detector inside the CMS detector will allow physicists to get a sharper image of particle collisions.
The USCMS collaboration has received approval from the Department of Energy to move forward with final planning for upgrades to the giant CMS particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The upgrades will enable it to take clearer, more precise images of particle events emerging from the upcoming High-Luminosity LHC, whose collision rate will get a 10-fold boost compared to the collider’s design value when it comes online in 2027.
The U.S. Department of Energy has approved the scope, cost and schedule for the U.S. LHC Accelerator Upgrade Project and has given the first approval for the purchase of materials. This project brings together scientists, engineers and technicians from national laboratories — such as Fermilab, Brookhaven, Berkeley, SLAC and Jefferson labs — to develop two cutting-edge technologies to advance the future of both the Large Hadron Collider and broader collider research.
These international projects, selected during the process to plan the future of U.S. particle physics, are all set to come online within the next 10 years.