This year, four of Fermilab’s CMS postdoctoral researchers were among those invited to share their work and the work of their colleagues at a series of particle physics conferences.
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Particle physics research attempts to answer timeless questions – questions first asked thousands of years ago. In this video, Don Lincoln gives an overview of some of the most pressing unanswered questions of physics and describes how it is that scientists are deciding which of these questions to pursue.
On July 4, 2012, researchers at the CERN laboratory in Europe announced the discovery of the Higgs boson. It was a tremendous triumph for the Standard Model of particle physics and confirmed a prediction made nearly half a century prior. In 2022, we celebrate the 10th anniversary of that momentous discovery.
From CERN, June 15, 2021: A new study shows a class of new unknown particles that could account for the muon’s magnetism, known as leptoquarks, also affects the Higgs boson’s transformation into muons.
From NewScientist, March 8, 2021: The recent experiment results of asymmetry in protons published in Nature calling out the new research used to improve measurement techniques from Fermilab’s SeaQuest detector.
From the Science of the Francis Mule, March 1, 2021: Scientists at Fermilab and Argonne publish new results from SeaQuest experiment showing the asymmetry of protons.
From Reccom Magazine, Feb. 26, 2021: Chuck Brown of the Fermilab SeaQuest research team is quoted in this piece on the sea of quarks inside the proton. The article discusses Fermilab’s contributions to the SeaQuest and NuSea experiments.
From Los Alamos Laboratory News, Feb. 24, 2021: The E-906/SeaQuest experiment, hosted by Fermilab, has produced results that are the opposite of what had previously been understood about proton structure and the dynamics of strong interacting antiquarks and gluons.
Protons are built from three quarks — two “up” quarks and one “down” quark. But they also contain a roiling sea of transient quarks and antiquarks that fluctuate into existence before swiftly annihilating one another. At the Fermilab-hosted SeaQuest experiment, researchers report that that lopsidedness persists in a realm of previously unexplored quark momenta.
Asymmetry in the proton confounds physicists, but a new discovery may bring back old theories to explain it.