Fermilab physicist transforms dark energy lens into dark matter detector

Presidential Early Career Award recipient Juan Estrada

A Fermilab physicist recently transformed technology used to search for signs of dark energy into the best detector in the world for spotting low-mass dark matter particles.

The White House honored that physicist, Juan Estrada, on Friday with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Thirteen U.S. Department of Energy researchers received the award this year.

Estrada spends most of his time building and testing imaging sensors for the Dark Energy Camera. But he has set himself apart by using the same technology in a side project to search for dark matter.

"Juan is relatively new to the dark matter field," said Dan Bauer, deputy head of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics. "You'd think it'd be enough of a challenge to work on DECam. But he somehow had spare time to think of new ideas."

Brenna Flaugher, Estrada's supervisor, joked, "I don't think he sleeps."

Estrada credited the technicians and engineers from the dark energy search who gave their spare time and expertise to his dark matter search project, called DAMIC for Dark Matter in CCDs.

"Fermilab was in a good position to take advantage of this opportunity because of all the work we had already done for DECam," he said.

The president gives the Early Career Award each year to about 100 young researchers "whose early accomplishments show the greatest promise for strengthening America's leadership in science and technology and contributing to the awarding agencies' missions." With the grant money from the award, Estrada will be able to build a larger, more advanced prototype of his dark matter detector.

Estrada started at Fermilab as a student from the University of Rochester working on the DZero experiment. As a 32-year-old postdoc, he earned a Wilson Fellowship, which gave him up to five years to study whatever he wanted at the laboratory.

He had worked on cosmology as an undergraduate in Argentina, so he chose to work on the Dark Energy Survey, much to the surprise of his colleagues.

"Nobody on DZero knew that Juan was a closet astrophysicist," said Tom Diehl, Estrada's former DZero colleague who now builds CCDs for the Dark Energy Survey as well.

Estrada builds charge-coupled devices, the same type of imaging sensors found in digital cameras, for the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera. These CCDs are specifically designed to capture the light that reaches Earth from extremely distant galaxies and supernovae. The Dark Energy Survey will use data from the camera to search of signs of dark energy, which scientists theorize affects the evolving shape of the universe.

Read more

Left to right: Technician Kevin Kuk, physicist Juan Estrada, engineer Herman Cease and physicist Ben Kilminster stand in the NuMI hall next to the DAMIC detector.

ES&H Safety Fair Wednesday, Nov. 10 in Wilson Hall atrium

The ES&H Section will hold a laboratory-wide safety fair from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 10, in the Wilson Hall atrium. At the fair you can learn how to stay safe in winter weather, take the commuting and travel survey and get free goodies and treats.

How the hunt for the Higgs boson began

From io9, Nov. 5, 2010

In this excerpt from Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science (Basic Books), author Ian Sample tells the story of how Peter Higgs went from being a joke to a legend with just one lecture.

Peter Higgs arrived in Chapel Hill to set up home on September 6, 1965, having left Jody, who was heavily pregnant at the time, with her parents in Urbana, Illinois. At the university, he set about writing his first major paper on the origin of mass. On September 24 he was working in the library of his new department when he was called to the phone. His first son, Christopher, had just been born. Higgs finished the paper in November and sent a copy for publication and a few more to physicists he thought might be interested.

Though it wasn't clear at the time, Higgs's theory pointed to a critical moment in the birth of the universe. In the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, the cataclysmic explosion that flung the universe into existence, the elementary particles were entirely massless. Then, a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, something happened: an energy field that permeated the fledgling universe switched on. Massless particles that had been zipping around at the speed of light were caught in the field and became massive. The more strongly they felt the effects of the field, the more massive they became. Most scientists concur that time began about 13.7 billion years ago, possibly with the first bang there ever was, but perhaps as just one of many bangs that occur in a cyclic process.

The universe, at first a microscopic ball of intense energy, was too hot for the laws of nature as we know them to yet emerge. But in the blink of an eye (had there been one around to oblige) the cosmos grew to the size of a beach ball and cooled just enough-to around ten thousand trillion degrees Celsius-for the Higgs field to come to life. In that eye-blink, the first building blocks of matter were tamed-made heavy and slow, like flies in soup.

The Higgs field is crucial to the structure of the universe and its ability to support life as we know it. Without the field, the elementary particles, the building blocks of matter, would behave like light. The chemistry we are familiar with would not be possible.19 Matter would not have clumped together into the atoms we see today. Stars and planets would not have formed. The universe would be a lifeless wasteland.

Read more