From the Big Think, October 7, 2022: High-energy particles can collide with others, producing showers of new particles that can be seen in a detector. By reconstructing the energy, momentum, and other properties of each one, we can determine what initially collided and what was produced in this event
particle physics
From the New York Times, October 4, 2022 (Sign-up needed to view): Yesterday, the three winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics were recognized for their experiments in an area that has broad implications for secure information transfer and quantum computing. Read more about how their results have cleared the way for “new technology based upon quantum information.”
From University of Chicago News, October 3, 2022: An international group of physicists is meeting to lay out a vision for the next decades of particle physics. Fermilab’s Marcela Carena, who is a member of the committee, will participate in this study, which will help guide federal agencies, policymakers and academics as they make decisions about research, funding and planning. The study is expected to be released in 2024.
From Physics Today: Snowmass 2022 this past July took place over 10 days with almost 1,200 people participating online and in person at the University of Washington. It involved 511 white papers spanning 10 “frontier” areas. This once-a-decade meeting also reaffirmed support for completing the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) and the affiliated Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility to carry our DUNE’s science goals.
From the American Physics Society, September 14, 2022: This April, Merminga became the new director of Fermilab and the first woman to hold the position. As director, she oversees nearly 2,000 people working on cutting-edge experiments. In this interview with APS News, she discusses her life, career, and views on the future of particle physics.
From Scientific American, September 8, 2022: What came out of Snowmass 2022? In late July, nearly 800 particle physicists met for over 10 days for the once-a-decade Snowmass process to discuss and build a unified scientific vision for the future of particle physics. Find out what Fermilab director Lia Merminga presented and more about discussions around DUNE, diversity, SUSY, the LHC, future colliders and more.
From Prospect, August 29, 2022: The LHC is back running now colliding more intense beams, generating more collisions and collecting more data to sift. Fermilab’s Muon g-2 results offered an intriguing hint about muons that the LHC can follow up on by looking for new particles directly and the behavior it should induce in particles we know about.
Symmetry chats with scientists and engineers about doing important work in physics without a doctoral degree.
From Caltech, July 28, 2022: Maria Spiropulu has been named co-chair of the National Academies’ Elementary particle physics committee. She will spearhead a new study to set a vision for the field of particle physics in the next decade and beyond called Elementary Particle Physics: Progress and Promise, or EPP-2024.
From The Big Think, June 28, 2022: Fermilab’s Don Lincoln explores the possible existence of a fourth neutrino known as “sterile neutrinos.” With the LSND, Mini BooNE and MicroBooNE experiments displaying anomalies from the Standard Model of physics, could this fourth neutrino really exist?