DOE/Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
With a powerful enough light, you can see things that people once thought would be impossible. Large-scale light source facilities generate that powerful light, and scientists use it to create more durable materials, build more efficient batteries and computers, and learn more about the natural world.
When it comes to building these massive facilities, space is money. If you can get higher-energy beams of light out of smaller devices, you can save millions on construction costs. Add to that the chance to significantly improve the capabilities of existing light sources, and you have the motivation behind a project that has brought scientists at three U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories together.
DOE/Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
A combination of observational data and sophisticated computer simulations have yielded advances in a field of astrophysics that has languished for half a century. The Dark Energy Survey, which is hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, has published a burst of new results on what s called intracluster light, or ICL, a faint type of light found inside galaxy clusters.
The first burst of new, precision ICL measurements appeared in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal in April 2019. Another appeared more recently in
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. In a surprise finding of the latter, DES physicists discovered new evidence that ICL might provide a new way to measure a mysterious substance called dark matter.
DOE/Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Shown here is the elliptical galaxy NGC 474 with star shells. Elliptical galaxies are characterized by their relatively smooth appearance as compared with spiral galaxies, one of which is to the left of NGC 474, which is oriented with South to the top and West to the left. The colorful neighboring spiral (NGC 470) has characteristic flocculent structure interwoven with dust lanes and spiral arms. NGC 474 is at a distance of about 31 megaparsecs (100 million light-years) from the sun in the constellation of Pisces. The region surrounding NGC 474 shows unusual structures characterized as tidal tails or shells of stars made up of hundreds of millions of stars. These features are likely due to recent (within the last billion years) mergers of smaller galaxies into the main body of NGC 474 or close passages of nearby galaxies, such as the NGC 470 spiral. For coordinate information, visit the NOIRLab webpage for this photo. (Photo: DES/NOIRLab
DOE/Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science has awarded funding to Fermilab to use machine learning to improve the operational efficiency of Fermilab s particle accelerators.
These machine learning algorithms, developed for the lab s accelerator complex, will enable the laboratory to save energy, provide accelerator operators with better guidance on maintenance and system performance, and better inform the research timelines of scientists who use the accelerators.
Engineers and scientists at Fermilab, home to the nation s largest particle accelerator complex, are designing the programs to work at a systemwide scale, tracking of all the data resulting from the operation of the complex s nine accelerators. The pilot system will be used on only a few accelerators, with the plan to extend the program tools to the entire accelerator chain.
Illustration by Sandbox Studio, Chicago with Corinne Mucha
Physics at tiniest scale could explain ‘impossible’ black holes
12/15/20
By Scott Hershberger
Until recently, scientists had never detected black holes in the “mass gap” now, particle physicists are exploring ideas beyond the Standard Model that could explain them.
On May 21, 2019, a ripple in spacetime alerted scientists to what they thought was an impossible event: a collision between two black holes that should not have existed.
The LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave observatories had witnessed over a dozen black-hole collisions, but this merger was different. Both black holes were situated in the “mass gap,” a range of masses that, for black holes, should be forbidden.