A joint Fermilab/SLAC publication

latest news

02/06/19
Scientific American

Have we mismeasured the universe?

New studies of the oldest light and sound in the cosmos suggest novel physics—rather than systematic errors—could explain an unsolved scientific mystery.

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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.

05/01/07

Farmers' picnic

Just inside the site boundary, secluded from most of Fermilab, sits Leonard Baumann's rickety red barn. Baumann, like 55 other farmers, relocated 40 years ago to make way for the construction of Fermilab.

05/01/07

Katie & Adam Yurkewicz: Bon voyage

In August 2006, after almost a year of preparation, we packed up all our belongings to move from Batavia, Illinois, to Geneva, Switzerland. We were following our particle physics careers from Fermilab to CERN, the European particle physics lab.

05/01/07

A tale of dark energy

In the 1990s, astronomical observations revealed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Not knowing what causes this acceleration, scientists began to attribute the phenomenon to some unknown source of energy, coined "dark energy" by astrophysicist Michael Turner.

05/01/07

The search for dark energy

What is this stuff that fills the vacuum of space, accelerates the expansion of the universe, and accounts for 70 percent of everything? More than two dozen experiments aim to find out.

05/01/07

Peel and stick

Chip Edstrom routinely tidies the Fermilab Main Control Room to stay awake while working as an accelerator operator on the owl shift. One night, while cleaning equipment and peeling off decades-old labels, Edstrom decided to replace the old ones with fresh ones. In Russian.

05/01/07

The great string debate

Inside, the auditorium at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, was packed and humming in anticipation. Outside, a man waved a sign at stragglers hurrying for the door: "Need One Ticket for String Theory Debate."

05/01/07

Wait just a minute

Berkeley Lab physicist Hitoshi Murayama and SLAC physicist Herman Winick have provided audio segments for One-Minute How-To, a Web site that provides 60-second explanations ranging from "How to write a flawless email," to "How to organize a river clean-up," to "How to sto

Logbook of April 2007
04/01/07

PET scan

Scientists have sought to create better medical imaging techniques ever since Wilhelm Röntgen’s 1896 discovery that X-rays can reveal bones and other anatomical structures in a noninvasive way.

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