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Text on a purple background reads: Dark Energy Survey Year 3 Update

To tackle big questions about our universe, the Dark Energy Survey uses a powerful 570-megapixel camera to photograph galaxies close to home and billions of light years away. The analysis of the first three years of data resulted in the largest maps ever made showing the distribution and shapes of galaxies in our universe — and provided a fantastic test for scientist’s best predictions.

A starry night sky with purple diagonal stripe from lower left to upper right corner above an observatory lit up in bright red. A shadow of a building or facility is in the lower right corner.

The Dark Energy Survey collaboration has created the largest ever maps of the distribution and shapes of galaxies, tracing both ordinary and dark matter in the universe out to a distance of over 7 billion light years. The analysis, which includes the first three years of data from the survey, is consistent with predictions from the current best model of the universe, the standard cosmological model. Nevertheless, there remain hints from DES and other experiments that matter in the current universe is a few percent less clumpy than predicted.

Muon g-2 superconducting magnetic storage ring

The first results from the Muon g-2 experiment hosted at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory show fundamental particles called muons behaving in a way not predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. These results confirm an earlier experiment of the same name performed at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Combined, the two results show strong evidence that our best theoretical model of the subatomic world is incomplete. One potential explanation would be the existence of undiscovered particles or forces.

The long-awaited first results from the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab will be unveiled and discussed in a special seminar to be held Wednesday, April 7, 2021, at 10 a.m. U.S. Central Time. The full agenda and connection information are available at the Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar web page. The Muon g-2 experiment searches for telltale signs of new particles and forces by examining the muon’s interaction with a surrounding magnetic field. By precisely determining the magnetic moment of the muon and comparing…

New amplification algorithms expand the utility of quantum computers to handle non-Boolean scenarios, allowing for an extended range of values to characterize individual records, such as the scores assigned to each disk in the output superposition above. Illustration: Prasanth Shyamsundar

To fully realize the potential of quantum computing, scientists must start with the basics: developing step-by-step procedures, or algorithms, for quantum computers to perform simple tasks. A Fermilab scientist has done just that, announcing two new algorithms that build upon existing work in the field to further diversify the types of problems quantum computers can solve.