Feature Articles

The Department of Energy's Office of Science has selected three Fermilab scientists to receive the 2020 DOE Early Career Research Award, now in its 11th year. The prestigious award is designed to bolster the nation's scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during the crucial early years, when many scientists do their most formative work.

The 29th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics brings together thousands of researchers for the latest developments in the field.

An international team of theoretical physicists have published their calculation of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. Their work expands on a simple yet richly descriptive equation that revolutionized physics almost a century ago and that may aid scientists in the discovery of physics beyond the Standard Model. Now the world awaits the result from the Fermilab Muon g-2 experiment.

Engineers from five countries are coordinating the design of the large cryomodules that will enable the new PIP-II accelerator at Fermilab to generate protons for the world's most powerful beam of neutrinos, in support of the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.

Quantum computing will affect the future of every area of science, creating the need for a quantum-fluent workforce. In collaboration with two high school teachers, a group of Fermilab theorists has developed a quantum computing course for high school students. With this course, Fermilab scientists are breaking new ground in both quantum computing research and supporting the competitiveness of the STEM workforce in the quantum era.

A good dark matter detector has a lot in common with a good teleconference setup: You need a sensitive microphone and a quiet room. The SENSEI experiment has demonstrated world-leading sensitivity and the low background needed for an effective search for low-mass dark matter.

Fermilab is upgrading its accelerator complex to produce the world's most powerful beam of high-energy neutrinos. To generate these particles, the accelerators will send proton beams traveling near the speed of light through a maze of accelerator components before passing through metallic "windows" and colliding with a target. Researchers are testing the endurance of windows made of a titanium alloy, exposing samples to high-intensity proton beams to see how the material will perform.

If you have ever taken a walk on the Fermilab hike-and-bike trail along Batavia Road, you've probably noticed large trees with long, slender bean pods, which are ignored by wildlife. Not that long ago, mammoths, mastodons and giant ground sloths roamed the Fermilab grounds and feasted on these bean pods, along with the fruit of two additional species that still can be found growing on site.

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment detector will collect massive amounts of data from star-born and terrestrial neutrinos. A single supernova burst could provide as much as 100 terabytes of data. A worldwide network of computers will provide the infrastructure and bandwidth to help store and analyze it. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, scientists are writing software to mine the data -- to better understand supernovae and the evolution of our universe.

Scientists and engineers at Fermilab and Brookhaven are uniting with other organizations in the Open Science Grid to help fight COVID-19 by dedicating considerable computational power to researchers studying how they can help combat the virus-borne disease.