Hear what Fermilab’s honored guests had to say about the importance of science, international collaboration and Fermilab’s role in advancing discovery and cutting-edge technology at the March 15 groundbreaking for the PIP-II accelerator project. The ceremony was attended by U.S. dignitaries and international partners.
LBNF/DUNE is an international mega-science project hosted by the Department of Energy’s Fermilab. It will send a beam of tiny particles called neutrinos 1,300 kilometers straight through the earth from Fermilab to the Sanford Underground Research Facility. It will help solve some of the deepest mysteries of the universe and boost innovation while training young people around the world in science, engineering and computing. Scientists and engineers at universities and laboratories are working hand-in-hand with companies to design electronics, build hardware and develop computer programs for the project. LBNF and DUNE will create jobs as well as demand for materials, products and services. Students in dozens of countries around the world will start their careers in science and engineering with this project, and then transfer their knowledge into industry, medicine, computer science and many other fields.
The PIP-II project is an essential upgrade of Fermilab’s particle accelerator complex and includes the construction of a 215-meter-long linear particle accelerator. It is the first U.S. particle accelerator project with significant contributions from international partners. Research institutions in France, India, Italy and the UK will build major components of the new particle accelerator. PIP-II will become the new heart of the Fermilab accelerator complex. Its high-intensity proton beams will provide a flexible platform for the long-term future of the Fermilab accelerator complex and the U.S. accelerator-based particle physics program. The upgrade will enable Fermilab’s accelerator complex to generate an unprecedented stream of neutrinos—subtle, subatomic particles that could hold the key to understanding the universe’s evolution—by creating the world’s most intense high-energy neutrino beams. This capability positions Fermilab to be the world leader in accelerator-based neutrino research. It enables the scientific program for the international, Fermilab-hosted Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) and Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF).
Science fiction sometimes borrows from science fact. In the movie “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” the writers blended multiverses and alternate realities with the real-world Large Hadron Collider and the Compact Muon Solenoid. In this 6-minute video, Fermilab’s Don Lincoln gives you the low-down on what is real and what is made up.
Big discoveries need big detectors and Fermilab’s DUNE experiment is one of the biggest. Fermilab plans to shoot beams of neutrinos and antimatter neutrinos through the Earth from Chicago to western South Dakota. The DUNE experiment will study neutrino interactions in great detail, with special attention on (a) comparing the behaviors of neutrinos vs. antineutrinos, (b) looking for proton decay, and (c) searching for the neutrinos emitted by supernovae. The experiment is being built and should start operations in the mid-to-late 2020s. In this video, Fermilab’s Don Lincoln gives us the lowdown on this fascinating project in this 10-minute video.
For his 2018 Physics Slam presentation at Fermilab, Northwestern University scientist André de Gouvêa took on one of the most fascinating particles in physics: the neutrino. In 10 minutes, he explained—with the help of a few props—what neutrinos are and how physicists discovered that these particles can transform into one other, a phenomenon known as neutrino oscillation. At the end of the evening, the audience declared him to be the winner of the 2018 Physics Slam.
In this public lecture, Fermilab physicist Dan Bauer explains what scientists know about dark matter, the mysterious, invisible stuff that accounts for most of the matter in the universe. After presenting evidence for the existence of dark matter, he describes some of the physics experiments that scientists build and operate to look for signals from dark matter particles. From going deep underground to operating equipment at temperatures close to absolute zero to operating the most powerful particle collider in the world, scientists are pushing technological boundaries in their quest to discover the building blocks of dark matter. This lecture was held at Fermilab in October 2018 as part of a worldwide series of events to celebrate Dark Matter Day.