Fermilab looks to lead the dark side

This jar of jelly beans, often referred to as the jelly bean universe, displays the percentages of dark matter and visible matter. Colored jelly beans represent the visible matter in the universe.

Theorists predict recent and ongoing advances in a range of technologies targeting dark matter will shine a light on its origin within the next five to 10 years. What experiment will serve as that flashlight? Will it shine from underground from an accelerator or through a telescope lens? Experiments across the globe are vying to claim the prize by creating unique and larger detectors and Cristiano Galbiati, of Princeton University, said Fermilab likely will play a role.

"Right now, in my opinion, nothing comes closer to being a dark matter lab than Fermilab," he said during a talk at last week's Fermilab Users' Meeting.

The laboratory works through the Tevatron at Fermilab and CMS at the LHC to produce dark matter and through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and upcoming Dark Energy Survey to measure its effects on a cosmic scale. But R&D projects with several universities for second-generation direct searches via nuclear recoils in the CDMS, COUPP and DarkSide experiments position the laboratory as a pioneer.

This is a push by the U.S. dark-matter community to take the lead in building bigger detectors, which can reduce background interference, using complementary technology: liquid argon, Xenon and CFI. Laboratories in Italy, Canada and Minnesota in the U.S. do, or will house, these small and medium detectors. Plans for deployment of the largest versions coincide with the 2017 to 2019 potential construction timeline of the proposed U.S. Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory.

-- Tona Kunz

New employees - June 1

Front row from left: Brett Zimmerman, Travis Roon, Virag Nanavati, Venktesh Singh, Kaitlyn Sprosty, Danny Smith, Michael Szuba, William Ponstein, Kyle Beczkiewicz, Daniel Brandt and Mathew Muether. Second row from left: Kevin Crampton, Lindsey Whiting, Kenny Gould, Ryan Mahoney, Azeam Anjum, Drew Sobczak, Matthew Michelotti, Tom Barnett, Falguni Soni, Leah Hesla, Bethany Herwaldt, Joshua Heidorn and Cindy Fuhrer.

Enjoy Fermilab Family Outdoor Fair on June 13

Children can learn about nature at Fermilab's Family Outdoor Fair this weekend.

Enjoy a day of bison, birds and bugs while learning about science and fun things to do outside this summer at Fermilab's annual Family Outdoor Fair.

Families and scout troops can drop by anytime between 1 and 4 p.m. Sunday, June 13, to explore a dozen hands-on activities that highlight the plant and animal life found at the Batavia physics laboratory.

The three-year-old program grew out of the Leave No Child Inside initiative aimed at keeping children active and learning during the summer. Children can learn about history from speakers dressed in 19th century settler attire, geology through a large fossil collection, ecology through prairie tours and soil core samples and biology through animal examinations.

"Science doesn't have to just happen in a lab," said co-organizer Gail Poisson, Fermilab docent. "We want to show parents and their children that science is everywhere."

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Testing targets for producing steady neutrino beams

From DOE Pulse, June 7, 2010

While neutrinos are among the most abundant particles in the universe, they rarely interact with other matter. They are often described as "ghost" particles and, in many ways, they are just as mysterious.

Neutrinos are created through nuclear reactions such as those powering the sun and other stars but much about them is still unknown. For the past several months, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island have been conducting experiments on potential materials for producing neutrino beams artificially here on Earth as part of the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE), a project funded by the Department of Energy's Office of Science. The plan is for the world's highest-intensity neutrino beam to be produced at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and sent more than 1,000 kilometers through the Earth to detectors at the proposed Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) in South Dakota. From measurements at these detectors, scientists hope to learn more about the three known types of neutrinos and how they oscillate, or change, from one type to another.

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