Fermilab Today Result of the Week

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[…]

NOvA’s latest measurements of neutrino oscillation parameters have been published in Physical Review Letters. The data were recorded between 2014 and 2019 and correspond to 8.85 x 1020 protons-on-target of neutrino beam and 12.33 x 1020 protons-on-target of antineutrino beam. This represents a 78% increase in the amount of antineutrino data compared to NOvA’s previous results, presented at the Neutrino[…]

In October 2019, the Department of Energy announced that it has awarded scientists at its Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory funding to boost research on dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up an astounding 85% of the matter in the universe. The award will fund two Fermilab projects focused on searching for dark matter particles of low[…]

Tthe CMS Collaboration has just announced the most precise measurement of the Higgs boson’s mass achieved so far.  CMS physicists recently measured the mass of the Higgs boson to be 125.35 GeV with a precision of 0.15 GeV, an uncertainty of roughly 0.1%!  This very high precision was achieved thanks to the enormous amount of[…]

The Dark Energy Survey is the first experiment to demonstrate the immense power and promise of this combined-probes approach to survey design. The combined-probes approach is the basis for all major next-generation dark energy experiments in the 2020s including the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. It enables scientists to make the most precise measurement of dark energy[…]

Fermilab is celebrating Dark Matter Day with a Facebook Live event — underground! On Thursday, Oct. 31, at 10 a.m. CT, visit Fermilab’s Facebook page to hear our scientists chat about their exciting dark matter investigations from one of Fermilab’s underground experimental halls. By the Interactions collaboration. You can read this press release at the Fermilab[…]

“Mohamed and Donato developed a truly beautiful method and apparatus to tune dressed cavities,” said Aaron Sauers, the lab’s patent and licensing executive. “I was excited to file the patent application on their invention.” Hassan and Passarelli see automated balloon tuning as a possibility, which could make it as convenient to use as the current[…]

“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[…]