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.
From babies in strollers to their grandparents, about 2000 people of all ages enjoyed science at the Fermilab Family Open House on Sunday, February 13.
In January 2000, Tom Jordan had just finished up a conference in San Diego, where he had presented one of the new cosmic ray detectors to QuarkNet teachers.
Custom designed microchips have become essential in processing signals from modern physics experiments that generate lots of data. This chip, the QIE9, designed by Fermilab engineers, is just one example of the many Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) used in such experiments.
Because particle physicists cannot directly see the objects they study, they rely on deduction and decay products to detect nature's tiny, ephemeral particles.
Do you know why Louis Victor de Broglie won a Nobel Prize in 1929? Or why a Nobel Prize wasn't given out in 1934? What about Nils Gustaf Dalen's invention of an automatic sun valve beating out Max Planck and Albert Einstein for the Nobel Prize in 1912?