A joint Fermilab/SLAC publication

latest news

02/27/19
Quartz

Tape is here to rescue big data

While tape technology may have largely disappeared from our daily lives, it turns out that it’s critical to places that deal with big data like CERN.

View full archive
ALICE with one door open

Curiouser and curiouser: a riddle at the ALICE detector

12/09/25
Sarah Charley

In 2023, the ALICE experiment was ready for their best year yet, until a mysterious signal threatened everything. As the LHC wraps up its 2025 lead-ion run, physicists recall how they worked together to solve the puzzle.

07/01/07

Pesky invaders

An overgrown zebra mussel population at Fermilab received a rude awaking when operations engineers treated the lab’s water cooling system in early June to remove nearly 4000 pounds of mussels.

07/01/07

Chalkboard

Chalkboard discussions usually arise spontaneously, with one person explaining something to a small group standing nearby. Scratchings on the board tend to represent fragments of a conversation rather than a complete train of thought.

07/01/07

Russian quiz champ

What? An intellectual game show. Where? Based in Russia and played all around the world. When? Since 1986.

07/01/07

Cordless juice

Peter Fisher was in the audience when Marin Soljacic, a fellow physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gave a lunchtime talk about a technology that could transform consumer electronics.

07/01/07

Rig, and rig alike

When objects weighing thousands of pounds have to be moved, the call goes out to riggers— specialized teams that work with hoists and cranes. They’re required to wear proper safety gear; and at some point, the riggers at SLAC decided to make a statement with their helmets.

07/01/07

Run, Rabbit, run

The problem: How to get short-lived radioactive drugs from the nuclear physics lab that makes them to a hospital 2.5 kilometers away, on the far side of a busy campus, in two minutes flat.

07/01/07

Secrets of a heavyweight

A dozen years after it first appeared on the world stage, the top quark is still one of the hottest topics in particle physics. Why is it so much heavier than any other particle? And what can it tell us about the origin of mass and other quantum mysteries?

An illustration of a film strip with particle events on each frame
07/01/07

Particle event

Scientists call the particle collisions and interactions they study “particle events.”

View full archive