Fermilab Today Result of the Week

In a study published in Physical Review Letters, Fermilab and University of Chicago scientist Brad Benson and colleagues use the polarization, or orientation, of the cosmic microwave background to calculate the masses of enormous galaxy clusters using a new mathematical estimator. This is the first time that scientists have measured these masses using the polarization of the CMB[…]

Neutrinos have baffled scientists for decades as their properties and behavior differ from those of other known elementary particles. Their masses, for example, are much smaller than the masses measured for any other elementary matter particle we know. They also carry no electric charge and  interact only very rarely – through the weak force —[…]

After riding in a cage with nickel miners, walking down drifts and stopping at the dry, SuperCDMS scientists enter their shotcrete igloo of discovery deep underground. Translating this out of mining lingo: After taking an elevator down a two-kilometer mineshaft with nickel miners, Fermilab scientists walk through nearly two more kilometers of tunnels and then[…]

Underneath the vast, frozen landscape of the South Pole lies IceCube, a gigantic observatory dedicated to finding ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos stream through the Earth from all directions, but they are lightweight, abundant and hardly interact with their surroundings.  The IceCube detector consists of an array of 86 strings festooned with more than[…]

The American Physical Society (APS) Division of Particles and Fields has given its 2019 Early Career Instrumentation Award to two scientists on the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), hosted by Fermilab. You can read this brief article at the Fermilab News website.

The most recent physics result from the MicroBooNE experiment provides one of the very first rigorous tests of our understanding of neutrino interactions with argon. The paper, published in Physical Review Letters, presents the first ever measurement of neutrino interactions on argon as a function of the momentum and angle of the muon, a particle produced[…]

The inside of the ANNIE detector looks like a series of carefully placed Jell-O domes, or perhaps a jeweled Fabergé egg. Its walls are dotted by 137 sensors for detecting packets of light and embrace 26 tons of gadolinium-doped water. By Catherine N. Steffel. Read the entire article here.

In 2017, ADMX operated with the highest sensitivity of any axion experiment to date. In doing so, it ruled out a range of possible axion masses. Now the ADMX collaboration released its latest results based on data taken in 2018. The new results rule out yet another mass range, four times wider than the first, while maintaining[…]

Today the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced the launch of the Fermilab Quantum Institute, which will bring all of the lab’s quantum science projects under one umbrella. This new enterprise signals Fermilab’s commitment to this burgeoning field, working alongside scientific institutions and industry partners from around the world. This press release can[…]

Accelerated, charged particle beams do what light does for microscopes: illuminate matter. The more intense the beams, the more easily scientists can examine the object they are looking at. But intensity comes with a cost: the more intense the beams, the more they become prone to instabilities. By Alexey Burov . You can read the[…]