Physicists often find thrifty, ingenious ways to reuse equipment and resources. What do you do about an 800-ton magnet originally used to discover new particles? Send it off on a months-long journey via truck, train and ship halfway across the world to detect oscillating particles called neutrinos, of course. It’s all part of the vast recycling network of the physics community.
We already know neutrinos break the mold of the Standard Model. The question is: By how much?
Scientists on two neutrino experiments—the MINOS experiment at Fermilab and the Daya Bay experiment in China—have presented results that limit the places where sterile neutrinos might be hiding.
After more than a decade of running, on June 29, the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search experiment and its second iteration, MINOS+, concluded their runs.
From Physics, July 26, 2016: A team at MIT analyzes data from Fermilab’s MINOS neutrino experiment. The results rule out a class of realist models in which the evolving system does not depend on any “memory” of its initial state.
From Motherboard, July 20, 2016: A team of MIT physicists has observed quantum correlations extending 456 miles from Fermilab’s MINOS experiment near Chicago to an underground detector in Minnesota.
The 27th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics, commonly called Neutrino 2016, will bring together scientists from experiments around the world. Scientists working with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will give numerous presentations at Neutrino 2016 and unveil some significant results.
As we approach the one year anniversary of the formation of the Neutrino Division, it is exciting to look back on the developments of the past year and to appreciate how far we, as a laboratory and community, have come in shaping the future neutrino program.
Nobel Prize-winning Italian physicist and former CERN Director General Carlo Rubbia visited Fermilab on Tuesday, Sept. 17, to discuss future collaborations related to Fermilab’s neutrino program. While on site, Rubbia met with Director Nigel Lockyer and toured the lab’s Liquid-Argon Test Facility, the MicroBooNE detector assembly hall and the Minos cavern, where this photo was taken. Pictured, from left: Alberto Scaramelli, ICARUS collaboration; Carlo Rubbia; Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer; Antonio Masiero, vice president of Italy’s INFN; Jim Strait, project manager for LBNE; and Regina Rameika, project manager for MicroBooNE.
The bottom of the MINOS detector resembles an arcade.