Postdoctoral scientist Adi Ashkenazi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has earned the Universities Research Association 2020 Tollestrup Award for her research into neutrinos, ghostly particles that can pass through solid matter at high speeds without slowing. Working with two different experiments, she and her collaborators hope to improve their simulations of neutrino interactions with atomic nuclei.
The MINOS+ and Daya Bay neutrino experiments combine results to produce most stringent test yet for the existence of sterile neutrinos.
Laura Fields has won an Early Career Research Award from the Department of Energy to help physicists better understand the composition of neutrino beams used by Fermilab experiments. Her work will help gather and validate results that could shed light on why the universe consists of something rather than nothing.
The ArgoNeuT collaboration has published new measurements of the neutrino interaction channel critical for future experiments that seek to understand the difference between matter and antimatter in the world of neutrinos. Their paper presents new strategies for identifying electron neutrinos in liquid-argon neutrino detectors like ArgoNeuT.
From CERN Courier, July 23, 2020: Fermilab scientists Steve Brice and Sam Zeller and University of Minnesota scientist Marvin Marshak authored this article on the Neutrino 2020 conference, in which 4,350 people from every continent, including Antarctica, participated. The online program, hosted by Fermilab and the University of Minnesota comprised eight half-days over two weeks, four poster sessions with both web-based and virtual-reality displays, and the use of the Slack platform for speaker questions and ongoing discussions.
A collaboration of the Americas aims to take the first pioneering images of low-energy neutrinos and provide new data to shed light on the mysterious identity of dark matter.
A dash of virtual reality helps replicate the serendipitous interactions of an in-person conference when participants are scattered across the globe.
From CERN Courier, July 7, 2020: A new generation of accelerator and reactor experiments is opening an era of high-precision neutrino measurements to tackle questions such as leptonic CP violation, the mass hierarchy and the possibility of a fourth “sterile” neutrino. These include the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab, and Fermilab’s NOvA and Short-Baseline Neutrino programs.
From CERN Courier, July 7, 2020: Fermilab scientist Boris Kayser Texplains how neutrino physicists are now closing in on a crucial piece of evidence in a most convoluted detective story: the unknown origin of the matter–antimatter asymmetry observed in the universe.
From Department of Energy, July 6, 2020: DOE announces $132 million in funding for 64 university research awards on a range of topics in high-energy physics to advance knowledge of how the universe works at its most fundamental level. Projects include experimental work on neutrinos at Fermilab, the search for dark matter, studies of the nature of dark energy and the expansion of the universe with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and and investigation of the Higgs boson from data collected at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland.