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Symmetry is a collaborative project produced by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The funding for Symmetry comes from the US Department of Energy.

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New CERN course teaches particle physics basics online

Dec 3, 2024 | symmetrymagazine.org | Collin Blinder

Jeff Wiener manages a program that annually brings 1,000 teachers to CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, training them to teach particle physics in their classrooms back home. Julia Woithe coordinates lab workshops and online learning activities at CERN Science Gateway, an education and outreach center that welcomes 400,000 visitors each year. But apparently even the hundreds of thousands of people the two educators already reach aren’t enough.
The quantum chase

Nov 26, 2024 | symmetrymagazine.org | Laura Dattaro

Andy Jung had a secret. And he wasn’t the only one. Jung and many of his colleagues on the CMS experiment were in Traverse City, Michigan, at the 2023 International Workshop on Top Quark Physics. Jung was listening attentively as physicists announced an exciting finding: The ATLAS experiment—the other general purpose discovery experiment at the Large Hadron Collider—had measured entanglement at the LHC.
Students become scientists on International Cosmic Day

Oct 1, 2024 | symmetrymagazine.org | Chris Patrick

When Carolin Gnebner decided to pursue physics research, she assumed she’d eventually spend her days working in a lab, alone. But during grad school, she learned that, to the contrary, science is teamwork. She wanted to make sure other students knew. “There are so many nice people with great ideas working together,” she says. “I saw all the colors of science and I wanted to show young students that it is so much more than just measuring something.
LZ experiment sets new record in search for dark matter

Aug 26, 2024 | symmetrymagazine.org | Lauren Biron

Figuring out the nature of dark matter, the invisible substance that makes up most of the mass in our universe, is one of the greatest puzzles in physics.
Scaling up the dark matter search

Jun 18, 2024 | symmetrymagazine.org | Laura Dattaro

Imagine all the matter in the universe is a set of billiard balls on a pool table, each awaiting the cue ball’s strike. If you wanted to maximize the odds of hitting any ball, you could make the cue ball enormous, essentially guaranteeing it would bump into something on its lumbering path. But if you couldn’t change the size of the cue ball, another option would be to blanket the table in billiard balls in hopes that the regular-sized cue ball couldn’t sneak past.
Tomorrow’s physics test: machine learning

May 7, 2024 | symmetrymagazine.org | Laura Dattaro

When Radha Mastandrea started her undergraduate physics program at MIT in 2015, she knew she was going to need some new computing skills. As she made her way through her coursework, she took a class in the computer language Python and taught herself some coding. But when she landed an internship at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, her supervisors asked her to take on a task she had not anticipated.
A physicists’ guide to the ethics of artificial intelligence

May 6, 2024 | symmetrymagazine.org | Laura Dattaro

In 2017, Savannah Thais attended the NeurIPS machine-learning conference in Long Beach, California, hoping to learn about techniques she could use in her doctoral work on electron identification. Instead, she returned home to Yale with a transformed worldview. At NeurIPS, she had listened to a talk by artificial intelligence researcher Kate Crawford, who discussed bias in machine-learning algorithms.
AI for control rooms

May 1, 2024 | symmetrymagazine.org | David Krause

One of the first versions of AI was a computer that played chess. Developed in the 1950s, it could play a full game without the input of a human—except, of course, the moves of its opponent. It took the computer about eight minutes to make each of its own moves, but the computational breakthrough was the beginning of the end of a world without AI. Today, AI tools are taking on a variety of tasks, including helping to operate complex machines in particle physics and astrophysics.
A collaborative ecosystem

Apr 23, 2024 | symmetrymagazine.org | Emily Ayshford

When physicists talk about machine learning, it’s not uncommon to hear them refer to old techniques used “back in 2010.”That’s not because the field is new. The notion of training an algorithm to take data and use it to make decisions on its own—the definition of machine learning—has been around for at least 70 years.
‘This is our Muon Shot’

Apr 10, 2024 | symmetrymagazine.org | Laura Dattaro

In the spring of 2022, Karri DiPetrillo was gearing up for the final step of the Snowmass particle physics community planning process. It would be a once-a-decade meeting at which physicists in the United States would discuss the future of the field. For DiPetrillo, who earned her PhD from Harvard in 2019, such a discussion could define the direction of the majority of her professional life. She and other early-career scientists wanted to be sure their voices were heard.