Fermilab Today Result of the Week

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[…]

Today’s special, commemorative episode is a look back at some of the results achieved by scientists and engineers at Fermilab over 50-plus years of operation.  It is based on a photo essay that appeared in Fermilab News in 2017, our 50th year, entitled “Fifty years of discoveries and innovations.” I have selected 15 of the[…]

Dr. Lyon gives a lay-person’s introduction to the concepts of quantum computing. By Adam Lyon. Click here for the article at Fermilab’s web site.

More than a thousand million years before dinosaurs roamed Earth, a ripple in space was spreading through the universe. Traveling at 300,000 kilometers per second, the speed of light, it had covered 95 percent of its journey to Earth when the dinosaurs became extinct. By Mike Albrow. You can read this Physics in a Nutshell[…]

The MINOS+ collaboration at the Department of Energy’s Fermilab has published a paper in Physical Review Letters about their latest results: new constraints on the existence of sterile neutrinos. The collaboration has exploited new high-statistics data and a new analysis regime to set more stringent boundaries on the possibility of sterile neutrinos mixing with muon neutrinos. They have significantly[…]

Fifty years ago physicists, pondering how particles get mass, had suggested that there is another field, but one with no direction and the same value everywhere throughout the universe.  Dr. Higgs said, “If that field exists, there should be a particle that goes with it,” just as the electromagnetic field, light, has a particle, the[…]

Scientists solve neutrino mysteries by watching them interact with detectors — specifically, with the atomic nuclei in the detector material. Most of the time, a neutrino does not even shake hands with a nucleus. But when it does, the lightweight, neutral particle can transform into a charged particle and knock things out of the nucleus as[…]

An introduction to the “Solar Neutrino Problem”, that is, why did scientists originally think that there was something really fishy going on with Wolfgang Pauli’s “little neutral one.” This post is a mash-up of two “Physics in a Nutshell” articles: Neutrinos: The ghost particle, published on June 2, 2017; Neutrinos from the sun, published June[…]