Large Hadron Collider

This summer, physicist Larry Lee had festival-goers dancing to the sounds of science. He uses his musical training and an interest in collider machinery to create a new instrument of sorts. Using a piece of standard lab equipment, Lee has created a science-inspired, electronic music-backed light show.

Maria Teresa Dova has been instrumental in bringing scientists in Argentina new opportunities to participate in particle physics and astrophysics experiments, including one that co-discovered the Higgs boson.

From CERN, Oct. 7, 2019: The CMS collaboration has measured for the first time the variation, or “running,” of the top quark mass. The theory of quantum chromodynamics predicts this energy-scale variation for the masses of all quarks and for the strong force acting between them. Observing the running masses of quarks can therefore provide a way of testing quantum chromodynamics and the Standard Model.

From DOE, Sept. 10, 2019: Fermilab scientist Bo Jayatilaka is quoted in this article on ESnet, which has expanded to connect more than 40 major research institutions at speeds 15,000 times faster than a home network.

For years, U.S. institutions have been working to upgrade the hardware in the behemoth CMS particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider, enabling it to profit fully from the LHC’s increasing collision energy and intensity. With CD-4 approval, the Department of Energy formally recognized that the USCMS collaboration, managed by Fermilab, met every stated goal of the upgrade program — on time and under budget.

From MIT News, Aug. 19, 2019: A new prototype machine-learning technology co-developed by Fermilab and MIT scientists speeds Large Hadron Collider data processing by up to 175 times over traditional methods.

From Texas Tech Today, Aug. 5, 2019: Texas Tech physicists have been looking for dark matter at the CMS experiment at CERN and studying neutrinos.

A pioneer in particle physics and high-performance computing, Fermilab has launched HEPCloud, a cloud computing service that will enable the lab’s demanding experiments to make the best, most efficient use of computing resources. This flagship project lets experiments rent computing resources from external sources during peak demand, reducing the costs of providing for local resources while also providing failsafe redundancy.

From Listverse, May 3, 2019: The Dark Energy Camera made this list of 10 brilliant feats of scientific technology, along with LIGO, the Pierre Auger Observatory and the Large Hadron Collider.

From EarthSky, May 2, 2019: University of Chicago physicists and a former Fermilab scientist have laid out an innovative method – using the Higgs boson – for stalking dark matter. He said the Higgs might actually be “a portal to the dark world.”