From CERN: “Colliders join the hunt for dark energy”

From CERN

24 January 2019

Dark analysis

It is 20 years since the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, yet physicists still know precious little about the underlying cause. In a classical universe with no quantum effects, the cosmic acceleration can be explained by a constant that appears in Einstein’s equations of general relativity, albeit one with a vanishingly small value. But clearly our universe obeys quantum mechanics, and the ability of particles to fluctuate in and out of existence at all points in space leads to a prediction for Einstein’s cosmological constant that is 120 orders of magnitude larger than observed. “It implies that at least one, and likely both, of general relativity and quantum mechanics must be fundamentally modified,” says Clare Burrage, a theorist at the University of Nottingham in the UK.

With no clear alternative theory available, all attempts to explain the cosmic acceleration introduce a new entity called dark energy (DE) that makes up 70% of the total mass-energy content of the universe.

Dark energy depiction. Image: Volker Springle/Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics/SP)

It is not clear whether DE is due to a new scalar particle or a modification of gravity, or whether it is constant or dynamic. It’s not even clear whether it interacts with other fundamental particles or not, says Burrage. Since DE affects the expansion of space–time, however, its effects are imprinted on astronomical observables such as the cosmic microwave background and the growth rate of galaxies, and the main approach to detecting DE involves looking for possible deviations from general relativity on cosmological scales.

Unique environment

Collider experiments offer a unique environment in which to search for the direct production of DE particles, since they are sensitive to a multitude of signatures and therefore to a wider array of possible DE interactions with matter. Like other signals of new physics, DE (if accessible at small scales) could manifest itself in high-energy particle collisions either through direct production or via modifications of electroweak observables induced by virtual DE particles.

Last year, the ATLAS collaboration at the LHC [below]carried out a first collider search for light scalar particles that could contribute to the accelerating expansion of the universe. The results demonstrate the ability of collider experiments to access new regions of parameter space and provide complementary information to cosmological probes.

Unlike dark matter, for which there exists many new-physics models to guide searches at collider experiments, few such frameworks exist that describe the interaction between DE and Standard Model (SM) particles.

The Standard Model of elementary particles (more schematic depiction), with the three generations of matter, gauge bosons in the fourth column, and the Higgs boson in the fifth.

However, theorists have made progress by allowing the properties of the prospective DE particle and the strength of the force that it transmits to vary with the environment. This effective-field-theory approach integrates out the unknown microscopic dynamics of the DE interactions.

The new ATLAS search was motivated by a 2016 model by Philippe Brax of the Université Paris-Saclay, Burrage, Christoph Englert of the University of Glasgow, and Michael Spannowsky of Durham University. The model provides the most general framework for describing DE theories with a scalar field and contains as subsets many well-known specific DE models – such as quintessence, galileon, chameleon and symmetron. It extends the SM lagrangian with a set of higher dimensional operators encoding the different couplings between DE and SM particles. These operators are suppressed by a characteristic energy scale, and the goal of experiments is to pinpoint this energy for the different DE–SM couplings. Two representative operators predict that DE couples preferentially to either very massive particles like the top quark (“conformal” coupling) or to final states with high-momentum transfers, such as those involving high-energy jets (“disformal” coupling).

Signatures

“In a big class of these operators the DE particle cannot decay inside the detector, therefore leaving a missing energy signature,” explains Spyridon Argyropoulos of the University of Iowa, who is a member of the ATLAS team that carried out the analysis. “Two possible signatures for the detection of DE are therefore the production of a pair of top-anti­top quarks or the production of high-energy jets, associated with large missing energy. Such signatures are similar to the ones expected by the production of supersymmetric top quarks (“stops”), where the missing energy would be due to the neutralinos from the stop decays or from the production of SM particles in association with dark-matter particles, which also leave a missing energy signature in the detector.”

The ATLAS analysis, which was based on 13 TeV LHC data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 36.1 fb–1, re-interprets the result of recent ATLAS searches for stop quarks and dark matter produced in association with jets. No significant excess over the predicted background was observed, setting the most stringent constraints on the suppression scale of conformal and disformal couplings of DE to normal matter in the context of an effective field theory of DE. The results show that the characteristic energy scale must be higher than approximately 300 GeV for the conformal coupling and above 1.2 TeV for the disformal coupling.

The search for DE at colliders is only at the beginning, says Argyropoulos. “The limits on the disformal coupling are several orders of magnitudes higher than the limits obtained from other laboratory experiments and cosmological probes, proving that colliders can provide crucial information for understanding the nature of DE. More experimental signatures and more types of coupling between DE and normal matter have to be explored and more optimal search strategies could be developed.”

With this pioneering interpretation of a collider search in terms of dark-energy models, ATLAS has become the first experiment to probe all forms of matter in the observable universe, opening a new avenue of research at the interface of particle physics and cosmology. A complementary laboratory measurement is also being pursued by CERN’s CAST experiment [below], which studies a particular incarnation of DE (chameleon) produced via interactions of DE with photons.

But DE is not going to give up its secrets easily, cautions theoretical cosmologist Dragan Huterer at the University of Michigan in the US. “Dark energy is normally considered a very large-scale phenomenon, but you may justifiably ask how the study of small systems in a collider can say anything about DE. Perhaps it can, but in a fairly model-dependent way. If ATLAS finds a signal that departs from the SM prediction it would be very exciting. But linking it firmly to DE would require follow-up work and measurements – all of which would be very exciting to see happen.”

LHC signatures of scalar dark energy
https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.94.084054

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Meet CERN in a variety of places:

Quantum Diaries

Cern Courier

THE FOUR MAJOR PROJECT COLLABORATIONS

ATLAS

ALICE

CERN/ALICE Detector

CMS

LHCb

LHC

CERN map

OTHER PROJECTS AT CERN

CERN AEGIS

CERN ALPHA

CERN ALPHA

CERN ALPHA-g Detector

CERN ALPHA-g Detector

CERN AMS

CERN ACACUSA

CERN ASACUSA

CERN ATRAP

CERN ATRAP

CERN AWAKE

CERN AWAKE

CERN CAST

CERN CAST Axion Solar Telescope

CERN CLOUD

CERN CLOUD

CERN COMPASS

CERN COMPASS

CERN DIRAC

CERN DIRAC

CERN GBAR

CERN GBAR

CERN ISOLDE

CERN ISOLDE

CERN LHCf

CERN LHCf

CERN NA62

CERN NA62

CERN NTOF

CERN TOTEM

CERN UA9

CERN Proto Dune

CERN Proto Dune

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From CERN: “Solving the next mystery in astrophysics”

From CERN

Stellar stats for FRB’s

CSIRO/Parkes Observatory, located 20 kilometres north of the town of Parkes, New South Wales, Australia

UTMOST-Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST) a radio telescope operating at 843 mhz, operated by the school of physics of U Sidney, AU

Green Bank Radio Telescope, West Virginia, USA, now the center piece of the GBO, Green Bank Observatory, being cut loose by the NSF

NAIC Arecibo Observatory operated by University of Central Florida, Yang Enterprises and UMET, Altitude 497 m (1,631 ft).

Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is a radio telescope array located at Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in the Australian Mid West. ASKAP consists of 36 identical parabolic antennas, each 12 metres in diameter, working together as a single instrument with a total collecting area of approximately 4,000 square metres.

In 2007, while studying archival data from the Parkes radio telescope in Australia, Duncan Lorimer and his student David Narkevic of West Virginia University in the US found a short, bright burst of radio waves. It turned out to be the first observation of a fast radio burst (FRB), and further studies revealed additional events in the Parkes data dating from 2001. The origin of several of these bursts, which were slightly different in nature, was later traced back to the microwave oven in the Parkes Observatory visitors centre. After discarding these events, however, a handful of real FRBs in the 2001 data remained, while more FRBs were being found in data from other radio telescopes.

The cause of FRBs has puzzled astronomers for more than a decade. But dedicated searches under way at the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) and the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) [above], among other activities, are intensifying the search for their origin.

CHIME Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment -A partnership between the University of British Columbia, the University of Toronto, McGill University, Yale and the National Research Council in British Columbia, at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton, British Columbia, CA

Recently, while still in its pre-commissioning phase, CHIME detected no less than 13 new FRBs – one of them classed as a “repeater” on account of its regular radio output – setting the field up for an exciting period of discovery.

Dispersion

All FRBs have one thing in common: they last for a period of several milliseconds and have a relatively broad spectrum where the radio waves with the highest frequencies arrive first followed by those with lower frequencies. This dispersion feature is characteristic of radio waves travelling through a plasma in which free electrons delay lower frequencies more than the higher ones. Measuring the amount of dispersion thus gives an indication of the number of free electrons the pulse has traversed and therefore the distance it has travelled. In the case of FRBs, the measured delay cannot be explained by signals travelling within the Milky Way alone, strongly indicating an extragalactic origin.

The size of the emission region responsible for FRBs can be deduced from their duration. The most likely sources are compact km-sized objects such as neutron stars or black holes. Apart from their extragalactic origin and their size, not much more is known about the 70 or so FRBs that have been detected so far. Theories about their origin range from the mundane, such as pulsar or black-hole emission, to the spectacular – such as neutron stars travelling through asteroid belts or FRBs being messages from extraterrestrials.

For one particular FRB, however, its location was precisely measured and found to coincide with a faint unknown radio source within a dwarf galaxy. This shows clearly that the FRB was extragalactic. The reason this FRB could be localised is that it was one of several to come from the same source, allowing more detailed studies and long-term observations. For a while, it was the only FRB found to do so, earning it the title “The Repeater”. But the recent detection by CHIME has now doubled the number of such sources. The detection of repeater FRBs could be seen as evidence that FRBs are not the result of a cataclysmic event, since the source must survive in order to repeat. However, another interpretation is that there are actually two classes of FRBs: those that repeat and those that come from cataclysmic events.

Until recently the number of theories on the origin of FRBs outnumbered the number of detected FRBs, showing how difficult it is to constrain theoretical models based on the available data. Looking at the experience of a similar field – that of gamma-ray burst (GRB) research, which aims to explain bright flashes of gamma rays discovered during the 1960s – an increase in the number of detections and searches for counterparts in other wavelengths or in gravitational waves will enable quick progress. As the number of detected GRBs started to go into the thousands, the number of theories (which initially also included those with extraterrestrial origins) decreased rapidly to a handful. The start of data taking by ASKAP and the increasing sensitivity of CHIME means we can look forward to an exponential growth of the number of detected FRBs, and an exponential decrease in the number of theories on their origin.
Further reading

CHIME/FRB Collaboration 2019 Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0867-7.

CHIME/FRB Collaboration 2019 Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0864-x

E F Keane 2018 Nat. Astron. 2 865.https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0603-0

D Lorimer 2018 Nat. Astron. 2 860. [Unfound]

See the full article here.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Meet CERN in a variety of places:

Quantum Diaries

Cern Courier

THE FOUR MAJOR PROJECT COLLABORATIONS

ATLAS

ALICE

CERN/ALICE Detector

CMS

LHCb

LHC

CERN map

OTHER PROJECTS AT CERN

CERN AEGIS

CERN ALPHA

CERN ALPHA

CERN ALPHA-g Detector

CERN ALPHA-g Detector

CERN AMS

CERN ACACUSA

CERN ASACUSA

CERN ATRAP

CERN ATRAP

CERN AWAKE

CERN AWAKE

CERN CAST

CERN CAST Axion Solar Telescope

CERN CLOUD

CERN CLOUD

CERN COMPASS

CERN COMPASS

CERN DIRAC

CERN DIRAC

CERN GBAR

CERN GBAR

CERN ISOLDE

CERN ISOLDE

CERN LHCf

CERN LHCf

CERN NA62

CERN NA62

CERN NTOF

CERN TOTEM

CERN UA9

CERN Proto Dune

CERN Proto Dune

From CERN: “International collaboration publishes concept design for a post-LHC future circular collider at CERN”

From CERN

15 January, 2019

The proposed layout of the future circular collider (Image: CERN)

Today, the Future Circular Collider (FCC) collaboration submitted its Conceptual Design Report (CDR) for publication, a four-volume document that presents the different options for a large circular collider of the future. It showcases the great physics opportunities offered by machines of unprecedented energy and intensity and describes the technical challenges, cost and schedule for realisation.

Over the next two years, the particle physics community will be updating the European Strategy for Particle Physics, outlining the future of the discipline beyond the horizon of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The roadmap for the future should, in particular, lead to crucial choices for research and development in the coming years, ultimately with a view to building the particle accelerator that will succeed the LHC and will be able to significantly expand our knowledge of matter and the universe. The new CDR contributes to the European Strategy. The possibility of a future circular collider will be examined during the strategy process, together with the other post-LHC collider option at CERN, the CLIC linear collider.

The FCC study started in 2014 and stems directly from the previous update of the European Strategy, approved in May 2013, which recommended that design and feasibility studies be conducted in order for Europe “to be in a position to propose an ambitious post-LHC accelerator project at CERN by the time of the next Strategy update”. The FCC would provide electron-positron, proton-proton and ion-ion collisions at unprecedented energies and intensities, with the possibility of electron-proton and electron-ion collisions.

“The FCC conceptual design report is a remarkable accomplishment. It shows the tremendous potential of the FCC to improve our knowledge of fundamental physics and to advance many technologies with a broad impact on society”, said CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti. “While presenting new, daunting challenges, the FCC would greatly benefit from CERN’s expertise, accelerator complex and infrastructures, which have been developed over more than half a century.”

The discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC opened a new path for research, as the Higgs boson could be a door into new physics. Detailed studies of its properties are therefore a priority for any future high-energy physics accelerator. The different options explored by the FCC study offer unique opportunities to study the nature of the Higgs boson. In addition, experimental evidence requires physics beyond the Standard Model to account for observations such as dark matter and the domination of matter over antimatter. The search for new physics, for which a future circular collider would have a vast discovery potential, is therefore of paramount importance to making significant progress in our understanding of the universe.

The FCC design study was a huge effort, possible only thanks to a large international collaboration. Over five years and with the strong support of the European Commission through the Horizon 2020 programme, the FCC collaboration involved more than 1300 contributors from 150 universities, research institutes and industrial partners who actively participated in the design effort and the R&D of new technologies to prepare for the sustainable deployment and efficient operation of a possible future circular collider.

(Video: CERN)

“The FCC’s ultimate goal is to provide a 100-kilometre superconducting proton accelerator ring, with an energy of up to 100 TeV, meaning an order of magnitude more powerful than the LHC”, said CERN Director for Accelerators and Technology, Frédérick Bordry. “The FCC timeline foresees starting with an electron-positron machine, just as LEP preceded the LHC. This would enable a rich programme to benefit the particle physics community throughout the twenty-first century.”

Using new-generation high-field superconducting magnets, the FCC proton collider would offer a wide range of new physics opportunities. Reaching energies of 100 TeV and beyond would allow precise studies of how a Higgs particle interacts with another Higgs particle, and thorough exploration of the role of the electroweak-symmetry breaking in the history of our universe. It would also allow us to access unprecedented energy scales, looking for new massive particles, with multiple opportunities for great discoveries. In addition, it would also collide heavy ions, sustaining a rich heavy-ion physics programme to study the state of matter in the early universe.

“Proton colliders have been the tool-of-choice for generations to venture new physics at the smallest scale. A large proton collider would present a leap forward in this exploration and decisively extend the physics programme beyond results provided by the LHC and a possible electron-positron collider.” said CERN Director for Research and Computing, Eckhard Elsen.

A 90-to-365-GeV electron-positron machine with high luminosity could be a first step. Such a collider would be a very powerful “Higgs factory”, making it possible to detect new, rare processes and measure the known particles with precisions never achieved before. These precise measurements would provide great sensitivity to possible tiny deviations from the Standard Model expectations, which would be a sign of new physics.

The cost of a large circular electron-positron collider would be in the 9-billion-euro range, including 5 billion euros for the civil engineering work for a 100-kilometre tunnel. This collider would serve the worldwide physics community for 15 to 20 years. The physics programme could start by 2040 at the end of the High-Luminosity LHC. The cost estimate for a superconducting proton machine that would afterwards use the same tunnel is around 15 billion euros. This machine could start operation in the late 2050s.

The complex instruments required for particle physics inspire new concepts, innovation and groundbreaking technologies, which benefit other research disciplines and eventually find their way into many applications that have a significant impact on the knowledge economy and society. A future circular collider would offer extraordinary opportunities for industry, helping to push the limits of technology further. It would also provide exceptional training for a new generation of researchers and engineers.

CDR to be publicly available here: https://cern.ch/fcc-cdr
Photos: https://cds.cern.ch/ record/2653532
Background information: https://cern.ch/fcc-cdr/webkit
More information: https://cern.ch/fcc

See the full article here.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Meet CERN in a variety of places:

Quantum Diaries

Cern Courier

THE FOUR MAJOR PROJECT COLLABORATIONS

ATLAS

ALICE

CERN/ALICE Detector

CMS

LHCb

LHC

CERN map

From Fermi National Accelerator Lab via HostingAdvice.com: “The World-Class Computing Resources Behind the DOE’s Fermilab”

FNAL Art Image by Angela Gonzales

From Fermi National Accelerator Lab , an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to scientific research world wide.

via

HostingAdvice.com

December 14, 2018
Christine Preusler

Fermilab, a DOE-sponsored particle physics and accelerator laboratory, is raising the bar on innovative and cost-effective computing solutions that help researchers explore high-energy physics. As a repository for massive sets of scientific data, the national laboratory is at the forefront of new computing approaches, including HEPCloud, a paradigm for provisioning computing resources.

It’s common knowledge that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. But if you’re not a quantum physicist, you may be surprised to learn that he accomplished the feat while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), a prominent scientific organization that operates the largest particle physics lab on the globe.

“It was the field of high-energy physics for which the web was started to provide a way for physicists to exchange documents,” said Marc Paterno, Assistant Head for R&D and Architecture at Fermilab, a premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research that serves as the American counterpart to CERN.

Marc told us the particle physics field as a whole has been testing the limits of large-scale data analyzation since it first gained access to high-throughput computational resources. Furthermore, the high-energy physics community is responsible for developing some of the first software and computing tools suitable to meet the demands of the field.

“Of course, Google has now surpassed us in that its data is bigger than any particular set of experimental data; but even a small experiment at Fermilab produces tens of terabytes of data, and the big ones we are involved with produce hundreds of thousands of petabytes of data over the course of the experiment,” Marc said. “Then there are a few thousand physicists wanting to do analysis on that data.”

The lab is named after Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi, who made significant contributions to quantum theory and created the world’s first nuclear reactor. Located near Chicago, Fermilab is one of 17 U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratories across the country. Though many DOE-funded labs serve multiple purposes, Marc said Fermilab works toward a single mission: “To bring the world together to solve the mysteries of matter, energy, space, and time.”

And that mission, he said, is made possible through high-powered computing. “For scientists to understand the huge amounts of raw information coming from particle physics experiments, they must process, analyze, and compare the information to simulations,” Marc said. “To accomplish these feats, Fermilab hosts high-performance computing, high-throughput (grid) computing, and storage and networking systems.”

In addition to leveraging high-performance computing systems to analyze complex datasets, Fermilab is a repository for massive sets of priceless scientific data. With plans to change the way computing resources are used to produce experimental results through HEPCloud, Fermilab is continuing to deploy innovative computing solutions to support its overarching scientific mission.

Pushing the Envelope on High-Throughput Computing

While Fermilab wasn’t built to develop computational resources, Marc told us “nothing moves forward in particle physics without computing.” That wasn’t always the case: When the lab was first founded, bubble chambers were used to detect electrically charged particles.

“They were analyzed by looking at pictures of the bubble chamber, taking a ruler, and measuring curvatures of trails to figure out what the particles were doing inside of a detector,” he said. “Now, detectors are enormous, complicated contraptions that cost tens of millions to billions of dollars to make.”

Experiments at Fermilab typically involve massive datasets.

Marc said Fermilab is in possession of a large amount of computing resources and is heavily involved with CERN’s Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), a general-purpose detector at the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

CERN/CMS Detector

LHC

CERN map

CERN LHC Tunnel

CERN LHC particles

The CMS has an extensive physics agenda ranging from researching the Standard Model of particle physics to searching for extra dimensions and particles that possibly make up dark matter.

The Standard Model of elementary particles (more schematic depiction), with the three generations of matter, gauge bosons in the fourth column, and the Higgs boson in the fifth.

Standard Model of Particle Physics from Symmetry Magazine

“Fermilab provides one of the largest pools of resources for the CMS experiment and their worldwide collection,” Marc said.

Almost every experiment at Fermilab includes significant international involvement from universities and laboratories in other countries. “Fermilab’s upcoming Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) for neutrino science and proton decay studies, for example, will feature contributions from scientists in dozens of countries,” Marc said.

FNAL LBNF/DUNE from FNAL to SURF, Lead, South Dakota, USA

These international particle physics collaborations require Fermilab to transport large amounts of data around the globe quickly through high-throughput computing. To that end, Fermilab features 100Gbit connectivity with local, national, and international networks. The technology empowers researchers to quickly process these data to facilitate scientific discoveries.

A Repository for Large Sets of Valuable Scientific Data

Marc told us Fermilab also has mind-boggling storage capacity. “We’re the primary repository for all the data for all of the experiments here at the laboratory,” he said.

Fermilab’s tape libraries, fully automated and manned by robotic arms, provide more than 100 petabytes of storage capacity for data from particle physics and astrophysics experiments. “This includes a copy of the entire CMS experiment dataset and a copy of the dataset for every Fermilab experiment,” Marc said.

Fermilab also houses the entire dataset of The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), a collaborative international effort to build the most detailed 3D map of the universe in existence.

Universe map Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey

The data-rich project has measured compositions and distances of more than 3 million stars and galaxies and captured multicolor images of one-third of the sky.

The lab’s data management capabilities protect precious scientific data.

“SDSS was the first time there was an astronomical survey in which all data were digitized, much bigger than any survey done before,” Marc said. “In fact, even though the data collection has stopped, people are still actively using that dataset for current analysis.”

Marc said much of the particle physics research is done in concert with the academic community and can involve a significantly lengthy process.

“For example, the DUNE experiment is a worldwide collaboration that researchers have been developing for more than 10 years,” he said. “We are starting on the facility where the detector will go. The lifetime of a big experiment these days is measured in tens of years; even a small experiment with 100 collaborators easily takes 10 years to move forward.”

HEPCloud: A New Paradigm for Provisioning Computing Resources

HEPCloud will enable scientists to put computing resources to better use.

Particle physics has historically required extensive computing resources from sources such as local batch farms, grid sites, private clouds, commercial clouds, and supercomputing centers — plus the knowledge required to access and use the resources efficiently. Marc told us all that changes with HEPCloud, a new paradigm Fermilab is pursuing in particle physics computing. The HEPCloud facility will allow Fermilab to provision computing resources through a single managed portal efficiently and cost-effectively.

“HEPCloud is a significant initiative to both simplify how we use these systems and make the process more cost-effective,” Marc said. “Here at Fermilab, trying to provision enough resources to meet demand peaks is just too expensive, and when we’re not on peak, there’d be lots of unused resources.”

The technology will change the way physics experiments use computing resources by elastically expanding resource pools on short notice — for example, by renting temporary resources on commercial clouds. This will allow the facility to respond to peaks without over-provisioning local resources.

“HEPCloud is not a cloud provider,” Marc said. “It’s an intelligent brokerage system that can take a request for a certain amount of resources with a certain amount of data; a portal to use cloud resources, the open science grid, and even supercomputing centers such as the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).”

Marc said the DOE funds a number of supercomputing sites across the country, and Fermilab’s goal is to make better use of those resources. “It’s not feasible for us to keep on growing larger with traditional computing resources,” Marc said. “So a good deal of our applied computing research is looking at how to do the kind of analysis we need to do on those machines.”

At the end of the day, Marc recognizes the importance of letting the public know how scientists, engineers, and programmers at Fermilab are tackling today’s most challenging computational problems. “This is taxpayer money, and we ought to be able to provide evidence that what we are doing is valuable and should be supported,” he said.

Ultimately, its solutions will help America stay at the forefront of innovation.

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Fermilab is America’s premier laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Thousands of scientists from universities and laboratories around the world
collaborate at Fermilab on experiments at the frontiers of discovery.

FNAL/MINERvA

FNAL DAMIC

FNAL Muon g-2 studio

FNAL Short-Baseline Near Detector under construction

FNAL Mu2e solenoid

Dark Energy Camera [DECam], built at FNAL

FNAL DUNE Argon tank at SURF

FNAL/MicrobooNE

FNAL Don Lincoln

FNAL/MINOS

FNAL Cryomodule Testing Facility

FNAL Minos Far Detector

FNAL LBNF/DUNE from FNAL to SURF, Lead, South Dakota, USA

FNAL/NOvA experiment map

FNAL NOvA Near Detector

FNAL ICARUS

FNAL Holometer

From Fermi National Accelerator Lab: “How to build a towering millikelvin thermometer”

FNAL Art Image by Angela Gonzales

From Fermi National Accelerator Lab , an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to scientific research world wide.

November 15, 2018
Jim Daley

Cary Kendziora had expected the long, slender temperature profile monitor to droop a bit, but not as much as this. As part of a joint project with the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Kendziora, a mechanical engineer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab, had designed the device to measure the variation in temperature inside a massive neutrino detector located at the European laboratory CERN. The detector, the size of a small house, is filled with liquid argon. The temperature profile monitor is a solid piece of metal about 8 meters tall — about two stories tall — and as thin as a curtain rod. It bowed considerably when it was horizontal.

Kendziora said he’d never worked with such a long, solid piece of metal that was also so narrow.

“It turned out to be a lot more flexible than I imagined because of its length,” Kendziora said. “That was a surprise.”

As a workaround, he helped build an exoskeleton support to keep the device rigid while it was being installed.

The detector, one of two known as the ProtoDUNE detectors, contains 770 tons of liquid argon maintained at temperatures around 90 Kelvin.

CERN Proto Dune

Cern ProtoDune

That’s a chilling minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit. As particles pass through the detector, they occasionally smash into the nuclei of argon atoms. The particles emerging from these collisions release electrons from argon atoms as they pass by. These electrons drift toward sensors that record their tracks. The tracks, in turn, give scientists information about the particle that started the reaction.

The temperature profiler from one of the ProtoDUNE detectors stands 8 meters tall. Photo: Cary Kendziora

The ProtoDUNE detectors are prototypes for the international, Fermilab-hosted Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. The DUNE detector, expected to be complete in the mid-2020s, will be mammoth, comprising four modules that are each nearly as long as a football field.

FNAL LBNF/DUNE from FNAL to SURF, Lead, South Dakota, USA

SURF DUNE LBNF Caverns at Sanford Lab

FNAL DUNE Argon tank at SURF

In liquid-argon detectors like DUNE and the ProtoDUNE detector, monitoring the variation in internal temperature is important because it’s correlated to the argon’s purity. ProtoDUNE contains 770 tons of liquid argon. DUNE will hold 70,000 tons. At this scale, the purification efficiency has to be checked regularly. If the argon doesn’t mix properly, it begins to stratify into layers of different temperatures, which can affect how far electrons can drift.

“If the argon is pure, the electrons can drift the distance to the ProtoDUNE sensors, no problem,” said Jelena Maricic, an associate professor of physics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who leads the group that worked on the design, construction and installation of the ProtoDUNE dynamic temperature profile monitor, along with Kendziora.

But impurities have a great affinity for electrons and can trap them on their way to the sensors. And if they’re trapped, they won’t be detected, or at least not as easily.

The temperature profile monitor hangs vertically from the detector’s ceiling near one corner of the detector, taking readings of the circulating liquid argon. By monitoring the argon’s temperature, scientists will be able to tell right away whether any problems are developing in the detector.

Calibration by cross-reference

Designing and building a temperature profile monitor that is accurate to within tens of millikelvin inside a massive liquid-argon detector is no small feat. While the degree of bowing was an unexpected problem, it was hardly the most difficult challenge to overcome. Kendziora ticked off a laundry list of them.

“It had to be electrically and thermally isolated, and leak-tight,” he said. “And it’s a high-purity application, so all the materials had to be selected based on their not contributing any contaminants to the liquid. All the little threaded holes that the components are screwed into had to be vented so they wouldn’t trap any gas that would give off oxygen over a long period of time. All the parts had to be cleaned.”

The entire design of the profile monitor also needed to address a unique question: How do you calibrate a probe that is sealed inside a giant box full of liquid argon? Erik Voirin, an engineer at Fermilab, and Yujing Sun, a postdoc in Maricic’s lab, independently hit upon the same, elegant idea.

The team designed the profile monitor with an array of 23 motor-driven, remotely moveable sensors along its 8-meter height. Each takes a reading of the argon immediately surrounding it. And since they’re moveable, not only can a sensor take the temperature in multiple locations, but a single location’s temperature can be read out by more than one sensor.

The profile monitor is outfitted with an array of 23 motor-driven, remotely moveable sensors along its 8-meter height. Each takes a reading of the argon immediately surrounding it. Photo: Cary Kendziora

Voirin, a thermal-fluids engineer, performed the computational fluid dynamics simulations for ProtoDUNE. Sun tested and demonstrated the idea to work with the prototype using just four sensors in 2017, deploying the rod in the 35-ton liquid-argon detector.

“Our system allows you to move the sensors along the vertical axis and perform cross-calibration,” Maricic said.

One could use sensor A to take the temperature at, say, the 3-meter mark, and then check its reading against sensor B’s at the same location. That way, scientists can determine if any sensor is out of whack.

Maricic said that the University of Hawaii group team, will be performing the cross-calibration in the late November or early December.

The DUNE far detector will require a similar temperature profile monitor that adheres to the same set of strict requirements that the ProtoDUNE detector needed – but with one difference. DUNE is much larger than ProtoDUNE, so its profile monitor needs to be scaled up accordingly. It will be 15 meters long — nearly double the length of the prototype profile monitor.

“I don’t have a solution for the long length,” Kendziora says, other than to construct another extensive support infrastructure.

Another engineering effort for DUNE— and he’s on top of it.

See the full article here .

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Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Fermilab is America’s premier laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Thousands of scientists from universities and laboratories around the world
collaborate at Fermilab on experiments at the frontiers of discovery.

FNAL/MINERvA

FNAL DAMIC

FNAL Muon g-2 studio

FNAL Short-Baseline Near Detector under construction

FNAL Mu2e solenoid

Dark Energy Camera [DECam], built at FNAL

FNAL DUNE Argon tank at SURF

FNAL/MicrobooNE

FNAL Don Lincoln

FNAL/MINOS

FNAL Cryomodule Testing Facility

FNAL Minos Far Detector

FNAL LBNF/DUNE from FNAL to SURF, Lead, South Dakota, USA

FNAL/NOvA experiment map

FNAL NOvA Near Detector

FNAL ICARUS

FNAL Holometer

From CERN: “Final lap of the LHC track for protons in 2018”

From CERN

24 Oct 2018
Corinne Pralavorio

View of the LHC accelerator in 2018. (Image: Maximilien Brice, Julien Ordan/CERN)

Today, protons said their goodbyes to the Large Hadron Collider during a last lap of the track. At 6 a.m., the beams from fill number 7334 were ejected towards the beam dumps. It was the LHC’s last proton run from now until 2021, as CERN’s accelerator complex will be shut down from 10 December to undergo a full renovation.

LHC Page1, showing the operational state of the accelerator at 6.02 a.m. on Wednesday 24 October. The spiral represents the proton bunches stopped by the beam dump (Image: CERN)

Now is the time for the scientists who read the collisions meter to make a first assessment. The integrated luminosity in 2018 (or the number of collisions likely to be produced during the 2018 run) reached 66 inverse femtobarns (fb-1) for ATLAS and CMS, which is 6 points better than expected. About 13 million billion potential collisions were delivered to the two experiments. LHCb accumulated 2.5 fb-1, more than the 2.0 predicted, and ALICE 27 inverse picobarns. The remarkable efficiency of the LHC this year is due to excellent machine availability and an instantaneous luminosity that regularly exceeded the nominal value. Since the start of the second run at a collision energy of 13 TeV, the integrated luminosity was 160 fb-1, higher than the 150 fb-1 expected.

However, this does not mean that the LHC runs are finished for this year. The show will go on for four more weeks, during which time the collider will master another kind of particle, lead atoms. After a few days of machine tests, the teams will inject heavy ions, which have been prepared over recent months in the injectors. The LHC will therefore be able to carry out collisions of lead ions – lead atoms formed of 208 protons and neutrons that have been ionised, meaning they have had about 30 electrons removed. These collisions allow studies to be conducted on quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter that is thought to have existed a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang.

This graph shows the integrated luminosity delivered to the ATLAS and CMS experiments during different LHC runs. The 2018 run produced 65 inverse femtobarns of data, which is 16 points more than in 2017. (Image: CERN)

See the full article here.

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Meet CERN in a variety of places:

Quantum Diaries

Cern Courier

THE FOUR MAJOR PROJECT COLLABORATIONS

ATLAS

ALICE

CERN/ALICE Detector

CMS

LHCb

LHC

CERN map

OTHER PROJECTS AT CERN

CERN AEGIS

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CERN ALPHA

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CERN AWAKE

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CERN CAST Axion Solar Telescope

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CERN CLOUD

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CERN COMPASS

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CERN ISOLDE

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CERN LHCf

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CERN NA62

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CERN Proto Dune

From CERN: “European Strategy for Particle Physics”

From CERN

The European Strategy for Particle Physics is the cornerstone of Europe’s decision-making process for the long-term future of the field. Mandated by the CERN Council, it is formed through a broad consultation of the grass-roots particle physics community, it actively solicits the opinions of physicists from around the world, and it is developed in close coordination with similar processes in the US and Japan in order to ensure coordination between regions and optimal use of resources globally.

The European Strategy process was initiated by the CERN Council in 2005, resulting in a document being adopted by the Council in 2006. Unsurprisingly, this document placed the LHC at the top of Europe particle physics’ scientific priorities, with a significant luminosity upgrade already being mooted. A ramp-up of R&D into future accelerators also featured high on the priority list, followed by coordination with a potential International Linear Collider, and participation in a global neutrino programme.

ILC schematic, being planned for the Kitakami highland, in the Iwate prefecture of northern Japan

The original Strategy also foresaw increased collaboration with neighbouring fields such as astroparticle and nuclear physics, and it recognised the importance of complementary issues such as communications and technology transfer.

The original European Strategy prescribed regular updates to take into account the evolution of the field. The first of these was prepared in 2012 and adopted in 2013. By this time, the LHC had proved its capacity with the discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson, evidence for the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism through which fundamental particles acquire their mass.

CERN CMS Higgs Event

CERN ATLAS Higgs Event

Again, it came as no surprise that the LHC topped the list of scientific priorities for European particle physics, with the high-luminosity upgrade increasing in importance, and preparations for the post-LHC future taking shape. “Europe”, said the Strategy document, “needs to be in a position to propose an ambitious post-LHC accelerator project at CERN by the time of the next Strategy update.”

Post LHC map

The remainder of the updated recommendations represented logical and evidence-based evolutions of those contained in the initial European Strategy. All have been, or are in the process of being, implemented.

As the second update of the European Strategy gets underway, the stakes are high. Europe, in collaboration with partners from around the world, is engaged in R&D projects for a range of ambitious post-LHC facilities under the CLIC and FCC umbrellas.

CERN/CLIC

It is time to check progress on these, matching their expected performance to physics needs. The discussions will be based on scientific evidence gleaned from the impressive results coming in from the LHC, as well as from technological and resourcing considerations.

In other areas of particle physics, much has changed since the last strategy update. Europe, through CERN, is now contributing fully to a globally-coordinated neutrino programme with experiments to be carried out in the USA and Japan. The International Linear Collider, which would be complementary to the LHC, remains on the table with a site having been identified in Japan and a decision on whether to go forward expected soon. There are ambitious plans to build a large collider in China. And at CERN, a study to investigate the potential for physics beyond colliders, maximising the potential for CERN’s unique accelerator complex, was launched in 2016. All of these factors will feed into the deliberations soon to get underway to update the European Strategy for Particle Physics.

The current update of the European Strategy was initiated by the CERN Council in December 2016 to be carried out between 2018 and 2020, a date deemed optimal for the major decisions that need to be taken for the future of particle physics in Europe. A call for input was made in March 2018, with dates being fixed for the key information gathering and drafting stages in August 2018.

Strategic planning in European particle physics is an open, inclusive and evidence-driven process. Follow the current strategy update as it evolves, and join us on the unfolding adventure of research at the frontier of knowledge.

See the full article here.

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Meet CERN in a variety of places:

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THE FOUR MAJOR PROJECT COLLABORATIONS

ATLAS

ALICE

CMS

LHCb

LHC

CERN map

OTHER PROJECTS AT CERN

CERN AEGIS

CERN ALPHA

CERN ALPHA

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CERN AWAKE

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CERN CAST Axion Solar Telescope

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CERN CLOUD

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CERN Proto Dune

From Interactions.org: “First particle tracks seen in prototype for international neutrino experiment”

From Interactions.org

CERN and Fermilab announce big step in Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.

18 September 2018 – The largest liquid-argon neutrino detector in the world has just recorded its first particle tracks, signaling the start of a new chapter in the story of the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).

DUNE collaboration

FNAL LBNF/DUNE from FNAL to SURF, Lead, South Dakota, USA

FNAL DUNE Argon tank at SURF

Surf-Dune/LBNF Caverns at Sanford

SURF building in Lead SD USA

DUNE’s scientific mission is dedicated to unlocking the mysteries of neutrinos, the most abundant (and most mysterious) matter particles in the universe. Neutrinos are all around us, but we know very little about them. Scientists on the DUNE collaboration think that neutrinos may help answer one of the most pressing questions in physics: why we live in a universe dominated by matter. In other words, why we are here at all.

The enormous ProtoDUNE detector – the size of a three-story house and the shape of a gigantic cube – was built at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, as the first of two prototypes for what will be a much, much larger detector for the DUNE project, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the United States. When the first DUNE detector modules record data in 2026, they will each be 20 times larger than these prototypes.

CERN Proto Dune

ProtoDune

Cern ProtoDune

It is the first time CERN is investing in infrastructure and detector development for a particle physics project in the United States.

The first ProtoDUNE detector took two years to build and eight weeks to fill with 800 tons of liquid argon, which needs to be kept at temperatures below -184 degrees Celsius (-300 degrees Fahrenheit). The detector records traces of particles in that argon, from both cosmic rays and a beam created at CERN’s accelerator complex. Now that the first tracks have been seen, scientists will operate the detector over the next several months to test the technology in depth.

“Only two years ago we completed the new building at CERN to house two large-scale prototype detectors that form the building blocks for DUNE,” said Marzio Nessi, head of the Neutrino Platform at CERN. “Now we have the first detector taking beautiful data, and the second detector, which uses a different approach to liquid-argon technology, will be online in a few months.”

The technology of the first ProtoDUNE detector will be the same to be used for the first of the DUNE detector modules in the United States, which will be built a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. More than 1,000 scientists and engineers from 32 countries spanning five continents – Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America – are working on the development, design and construction of the DUNE detectors. The groundbreaking ceremony for the caverns that will house the experiment was held in July of 2017.

“Seeing the first particle tracks is a major success for the entire DUNE collaboration,” said DUNE co-spokesperson Stefan Soldner-Rembold of the University of Manchester, UK. “DUNE is the largest collaboration of scientists working on neutrino research in the world, with the intention of creating a cutting-edge experiment that could change the way we see the universe.”

When neutrinos enter the detectors and smash into the argon nuclei, they produce charged particles. Those particles leave ionization traces in the liquid, which can be seen by sophisticated tracking systems able to create three-dimensional pictures of otherwise invisible subatomic processes. (An animation of how the DUNE and ProtoDUNE detectors work, along with other videos about DUNE, is available here: https://www.fnal.gov/pub/science/lbnf-dune/photos-videos.html.)

“CERN is proud of the success of the Neutrino Platform and enthusiastic about being a partner in DUNE, together with Institutions and Universities from its Member States and beyond” said Fabiola Gianotti, Director-General of CERN. “These first results from ProtoDUNE are a nice example of what can be achieved when laboratories across the world collaborate. Research with DUNE is complementary to research carried out by the LHC and other experiments at CERN; together they hold great potential to answer some of the outstanding questions in particle physics today.”

DUNE will not only study neutrinos, but their antimatter counterparts as well. Scientists will look for differences in behavior between neutrinos and antineutrinos, which could give us clues as to why the visible universe is dominated by matter. DUNE will also watch for neutrinos produced when a star explodes, which could reveal the formation of neutron stars and black holes, and will investigate whether protons live forever or eventually decay. Observing proton decay would bring us closer to fulfilling Einstein’s dream of a grand unified theory.

“DUNE is the future of neutrino research,” said Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer. “Fermilab is excited to host an international experiment with such vast potential for new discoveries, and to continue our long partnership with CERN, both on the DUNE project and on the Large Hadron Collider.”

To learn more about the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility that will house the experiment, and the PIP-II particle accelerator project at Fermilab that will power the neutrino beam for the experiment, visit http://www.fnal.gov/dune.

Footnotes:
DUNE comprises 175 institutions from 32 countries: Armenia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Greece, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, Madagascar, Mexico, Netherlands, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and United States. The DUNE interim design report provides a detailed description of the technologies that will be used for the DUNE detectors. More information is at dunescience.org.
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s leading laboratories for particle physics. The Organization is located on the French-Swiss border, with its headquarters in Geneva. Its Member States are: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom. Cyprus, Serbia and Slovenia are Associate Member States in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Lithuania, Pakistan, Turkey and Ukraine are Associate Member States. The European Union, Japan, JINR, the Russian Federation, UNESCO and the United States of America currently have Observer status.

Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC, a joint partnership between the University of Chicago and the Universities Research Association, Inc. Visit Fermilab’s website at http://www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter at @Fermilab.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov

See the Fermilab article here .
See the Symmetry article here.
See the Berkeley lab article here .
See the CERN article here .

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From CERN: “Taking the temperature of protoDUNE”

From CERN

24 Aug 2018
Sarah Charley

This 7.5-metre thermometer can measure 48 different temperatures simultaneously, enabling scientists to monitor the cooling and filtration system of the liquid-argon protoDUNE-SP detector. (Image: Roberto Acciarri)

When crane operators at CERN lowered a custom 7.5-metre thermometer into one of the prototypes for the planned Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) earlier this month, it looked like a silver straw sliding into a giant juice carton. But designing and installing this intricate instrument was far from child’s play.

The thermometer was constructed by the Instituto de Física Corpuscular in Valencia, Spain, and then shipped to CERN in three delicate pieces. The thermometer is 12.5 cm in diameter and was lowered into place through a hole that has less than 2 cm of wiggle room. It is currently hanging from the ceiling of a colossal cryostat for protoDUNE-SP, one of the two prototype liquid-argon detectors for the DUNE experiment. DUNE will study subatomic particles called neutrinos by measuring the light and clouds of electrons that they leave behind as they pass through huge vats of liquid argon.

The purpose of the thermometer is to measure the temperature of the detector’s liquid-argon tank at 48 different depths, enabling scientists to make sure that the filtration and cooling system of the detectoris working as expected.

“The argon will constantly cycle through an external filtration and cooling system to keep it pure and chilled to around -196 degrees Celsius,” said Anselmo Cervera, a scientist from the Instituto de Física Corpuscular who helped design and build the thermometer. “It will take about 5.5 days for all the argon to make one complete pass through this system, so its temperature will always vary based on the depth. We know from simulations what the temperatures should be at each depth, and if the measurement matches the prediction, it’s a clear indication that the filtration and cooling system is working properly.”

According to Cervera, this is of the utmost importance because impurities (such as oxygen or water) will “eat” the electrons emitted by the passing neutrinos and destroy their signal. “We’re aiming to have less than 10 water molecules for every trillion argon atoms,” Cervera said.

The thermometer consists of a fibreglass skeleton with 48 platinum sensors spaced along its spine. The entire instrument is encased in a metallic structure known as a Faraday cage to avoid electrical discharges between the thermometer and other parts of the detector.

This thermometer can determine the relative temperatures of the liquid argon inside the cryostat at 48 depths with a precision of 0.003 degrees Celsius – approximately 100 times more precise than a standard household thermometer. “After extensively calibrating the platinum sensors, we can accurately calculate any changes in their temperature by measuring changes in their electrical resistance,” Cervera said.

Crane operators needed excellent precision to lower the 7.5-metre thermometer into a tiny opening with less than 2 cm of wiggle room. (Image: Roberto Acciarri)

The thermometer is one of two inside the protoDUNE-SP cryostat. The second thermometer, which is also 7.5 metres long and contains 22 sensors, was constructed by the University of Hawaii and Fermilab and uses a different technique to calibrate its sensors and obtain high-precision temperature measurements at different depths.

“Because we won’t be able to access the thermometer while it is inside the cryostat to verify its measurements, we’ve developed a way to continuously calibrate its temperature sensors by moving the thermometer up and down by 1.5 metres inside the liquid argon,” said Jelena Maricic, a professor at the University of Hawaii who helped design and build this thermometer. “We can then cross-reference the sensors’ measurements at various heights and verify if the sensors are correctly calibrated.”

Testing these two devices inside the protoDUNE-SP detector is an important step in perfecting the technology for DUNE, which will be 1.6 kilometres underground and consist of four detectors, each of which will be 20 times larger than the 8-metre-cubed prototypes.

See the full article here.

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Meet CERN in a variety of places:

Quantum Diaries

Cern Courier

THE FOUR MAJOR PROJECT COLLABORATIONS

ATLAS

ALICE

CMS

LHCb

LHC

CERN map

CERN Proto Dune

From Fermi National Accelerator Lab: “ICARUS neutrino detector installed in new Fermilab home”

FNAL Art Image by Angela Gonzales

From Fermi National Accelerator Lab , an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to scientific research world wide.

August 16, 2018
Leah Hesla

For four years, three laboratories on two continents have prepared the ICARUS particle detector to capture the interactions of mysterious particles called neutrinos at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

On Tuesday, Aug. 14, ICARUS moved into its new Fermilab home, a recently completed building that houses the large, 20-meter-long neutrino hunter. Filled with 760 tons of liquid argon, it is one of the largest detectors of its kind in the world.

With this move, ICARUS now sits in the path of Fermilab’s neutrino beam, a milestone that brings the detector one step closer to taking data.

It’s also the final step in an international scientific handoff. From 2010 to 2014, ICARUS operated at the Italian Gran Sasso National Laboratory, run by the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics. Then the detector was sent to the European laboratory CERN, where it was refurbished for its future life at Fermilab, outside Chicago. In July 2017, ICARUS completed its trans-Atlantic trip to the American laboratory.

The second of two ICARUS detector modules is lowered into its place in the detector hall. Photo: Reidar Hahn

“In the first part of its life, ICARUS was an exquisite instrument for the Gran Sasso program, and now CERN has improved it, bringing it in line with the latest technology,” said CERN scientist and Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia, who led the experiment when it was at Gran Sasso and currently leads the ICARUS collaboration. “I eagerly anticipate the results that come out of ICARUS in the Fermilab phase of its life.”

Since 2017, Fermilab, working with its international partners, has been instrumenting the ICARUS building, getting it ready for the detector’s final, short move.

“Having ICARUS settled in is incredibly gratifying. We’ve been anticipating this moment for four years,” said scientist Steve Brice, who heads the Fermilab Neutrino Division. “We’re grateful to all our colleagues in Italy and at CERN for building and preparing this sophisticated neutrino detector.”

Neutrinos are famously fleeting. They rarely interact with matter: Trillions of the subatomic particles pass through us every second without a trace. To catch them in the act of interacting, scientists build detectors of considerable size. The more massive the detector, the greater the chance that a neutrino stops inside it, enabling scientists to study the elusive particles.

ICARUS’s 760 tons of liquid argon give neutrinos plenty of opportunity to interact. The interaction of a neutrino with an argon atom produces fast-moving charged particles. The charged particles liberate atomic electrons from the argon atoms as they pass by, and these tracks of electrons are drawn to planes of charged wires inside the detector. Scientists study the tracks to learn about the neutrino that kicked everything off.

Rubbia himself spearheaded the effort to make use of liquid argon as a detection material more than 25 years ago, and that same technology is being developed for the future Fermilab neutrino physics program.

“This is an exciting moment for ICARUS,” said scientist Claudio Montanari of INFN Pavia, who is the technical coordinator for ICARUS. “We’ve been working for months choreographing and carrying out all the steps involved in refurbishing and installing it. This move is like the curtain coming down after the entr’acte. Now we’ll get to see the next act.”

ICARUS is one part of the Fermilab-hosted Short-Baseline Neutrino program, whose aim is to search for a hypothesized but never conclusively observed type of neutrino, known as a sterile neutrino. Scientists know of three neutrino types. The discovery of a fourth could reveal new physics about the evolution of the universe. It could also open an avenue for modeling dark matter, which constitutes 23 percent of the universe’s mass.

ICARUS is the second of three Short-Baseline Neutrino detectors to be installed. The first, called MicroBooNE, began operating in 2015 and is currently taking data. The third, called the Short-Baseline Near Detector, is under construction. All use liquid argon.

FNAL/MicroBooNE

FNAL Short-Baseline Near Detector

Fermilab’s powerful particle accelerators provide a plentiful supply of neutrinos and will send an intense beam of the particle through the three detectors — first SBND, then MicroBooNE, then ICARUS. Scientists will study the differences in data collected by the trio to get a precise handle on the neutrino’s behavior.

“So many mysteries are locked up inside neutrinos,” said Fermilab scientist Peter Wilson, Short-Baseline Neutrino coordinator. “It’s thrilling to think that we might solve even one of them, because it would help fill in our frustratingly incomplete picture of how the universe evolved into what we see today.”

Members of the crew that moved ICARUS stand by the detector. Photo: Reidar Hahn

The three Short-Baseline Neutrino experiments are just one part of Fermilab’s vibrant suite of experiments to study the subtle neutrino.

NOvA, Fermilab’s largest operating neutrino experiment, studies a behavior called neutrino oscillation.

FNAL/NOvA experiment map

FNAL NOvA detector in northern Minnesota

FNAL Near Detector

The three neutrino types change character, morphing in and out of their types as they travel. NOvA researchers use two giant detectors spaced 500 miles apart — one at Fermilab and another in Ash River, Minnesota — to study this behavior.

Another Fermilab experiment, called MINERvA, studies how neutrinos interact with nuclei of different elements, enabling other neutrino researchers to better interpret what they see in their detectors.

Scientists at Fermilab use the MINERvA to make measurements of neutrino interactions that can support the work of other neutrino experiments. Photo Reidar Hahn

FNAL/MINERvA

“Fermilab is the best place in the world to do neutrino research,” Wilson said. “The lab’s particle accelerators generate beams that are chock full of neutrinos, giving us that many more chances to study them in fine detail.”

The construction and operation of the three Short-Baseline Neutrino experiments are valuable not just for fundamental research, but also for the development of the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) and the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF), both hosted by Fermilab.

DUNE will be the largest neutrino oscillation experiment ever built, sending particles 800 miles from Fermilab to Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. The detector in South Dakota, known as the DUNE far detector, is mammoth: Made of four modules — each as tall and wide as a four-story building and almost as long as a football field — it will be filled with 70,000 tons of liquid argon, about 100 times more than ICARUS.

FNAL LBNF/DUNE from FNAL to SURF, Lead, South Dakota, USA

FNAL DUNE Argon tank at SURF

Surf-Dune/LBNF Caverns at Sanford

SURF building in Lead SD USA

The knowledge and expertise scientists and engineers gain from running the Short-Baseline Neutrino experiments, including ICARUS, will inform the installation and operation of LBNF/DUNE, which is expected to start up in the mid-2020s.

“We’re developing some of the most advanced particle detection technology ever built for LBNF/DUNE,” Brice said. “In preparing for that effort, there’s no substitute for running an experiment that uses similar technology. ICARUS fills that need perfectly.”

Eighty researchers from five countries collaborate on ICARUS. The collaboration will spend the next year instrumenting and commissioning the detector. They plan to begin taking data in 2019.

See the full article here .

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Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Fermilab is America’s premier laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Thousands of scientists from universities and laboratories around the world
collaborate at Fermilab on experiments at the frontiers of discovery.

FNAL/MINERvA

FNAL DAMIC

FNAL Muon g-2 studio

FNAL Short-Baseline Near Detector under construction

FNAL Mu2e solenoid

Dark Energy Camera [DECam], built at FNAL

FNAL DUNE Argon tank at SURF

FNAL/MicrobooNE

FNAL Don Lincoln

FNAL/MINOS

FNAL Cryomodule Testing Facility

FNAL Minos Far Detector

FNAL LBNF/DUNE from FNAL to SURF, Lead, South Dakota, USA

FNAL/NOvA experiment map

FNAL NOvA Near Detector

FNAL ICARUS

FNAL Holometer