Fermilab Today Result of the Week

“This is a tremendous achievement in a key enabling technology for circular colliders beyond the LHC,” said Soren Prestemon, a senior scientist at Berkeley Lab and director of the multilaboratory U.S. Magnet Development Program, which includes the Fermilab team. “This is an exceptional milestone for the international community that develops these magnets, and the result[…]

The physics usage case of this result stems from our investigations of neutrino oscillation probabilities in matter, which involve finding eigenvectors and eigenvalues, both of which are rather complicated expressions. While the eigenvalues are somewhat unavoidably tricky, this new result shows that the eigenvectors can be written down in a simple, compact, and easy-to-remember form,[…]

Charged particles, like protons and electrons, can be characterized by the trails of atoms these particles ionize. In contrast, neutrinos and their antiparticle partners almost never ionize atoms, so their interactions have to be pieced together by how they break nuclei apart. But when the breakup produces a neutron, it can silently carry away a[…]

Why is our universe accelerating in its expansion? If Einstein’s theory of general relativity is correct, then the dark energy that drives this expansion accounts for nearly 70% of the total energy in the universe. However, precise measurements of the history of this expansion may reveal that new dynamic forces are in play. The Dark Energy[…]

Burov summarize the results of a study in which he instabilities in high intensity particle beams and concluded that a special feedback would make the beams much more stable. The required feedback was then designed and implemented by Nathan Eddy and his Fermilab team. The result was a 20% increase in proton beam intensity and a reduction in[…]

“Complete the LHC Phase 1 Upgrades….” is how the first project-specific and concrete recommendation (Recommendation 10) of the 2014 Report of the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5), “Building for Discovery,” starts. This short phrase has been the mission statement for U.S. CMS scientists from Fermilab and around 30 U.S. institutes for the last six[…]

The CMS collaboration reached a major milestone last week by submitting for publication its 900th paper. As you can see in CMS’ publications website, starting in early 2010, CMS has been publishing about 100 papers every year on physics analyses using LHC collision data. The publications timeline of the 880 collider-data papers, split by physics topics,[…]

Fermilab has an impact on science in many ways. In addition to the laboratory’s lead role in high-energy physics, we contribute to astrophysics, computing, accelerator science and technology, and many other scientific initiatives. We also contribute to global warming. To run a complex as large as Fermilab requires significant energy resources. Our laboratory recognizes this[…]

This March, scientists from around the world gathered in LaThuile, Italy, for the 53rd annual Recontres de Moriond conference, one of the longest running and most prestigious conferences in particle physics. This conference is broken into two distinct weeks, with the first week usually covering electroweak physics and the second covering processes involving quantum chromodynamics. Fermilab and[…]

Compared to other configurations, this novel design is more suitable for high-temperature superconductors, which are capable of operating up to a temperature of 77 Kelvin (a temperature that liquid nitrogen can maintain). Two new simple, elegant magnets for particle accelerators could lead to significant cost savings. Researchers have found a way to create high-temperature superconducting[…]