Highlights

Do we live in a hologram? The number of large spacial dimensions is a question that has periodically resurfaced over the years. Theories derived from black hole thermodynamics state that the area of an event horizon is sufficiently large to hold all of the quantum information of the particles that conspired to make the black… More »

Weak lensing tomography is becoming a competitive method of constraining cosmology and dark energy. Tomography, as opposed to cosmic shear, concerns itself with the change in lensing shear with the redshift of the source (background) galaxies. This becomes particularly powerful when used on fields containing massive galaxy clusters whose mass can be constrained in multiple… More »

DM-Ice is a new experimental initiative.  By building a 250 kg array of NaI crystals within the volume of the IceCube neutrino detector, DM-Ice will provide a direct check of the DAMA dark matter result.  DAMA/LIBRA and its predecessor, DAMA/NaI, are the only experiments that claim to have observed dark matter interacting with ordinary matter. … More »

Recent results from the CDF collaboration have found a 3.2 sigma deviation from the predictions of the Standard Model in the lepton + missing energy + di-jet channel. With Joachim Kopp and Ethan Neil of Fermilab’s Theoretical Physics group, Matthew Buckley and Dan Hooper of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group have proposed that this anomaly is… More »

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) will probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. A 570M-pix camera, the DECam, is being built for this project and  comprehensive tests were successfully accomplished at Fermilab’s telescope simulator (pictured above). … More »

The COUPP program puts a new twist on an old technology, bubble chambers, to search for dark matter. Recently, COUPP has been able to discriminate between potential dark matter signals and one of the most troublesome backgrounds, alpha decays, by listening to the sound of bubble formation – alphas are louder. Results showing this effect… More »

COUPP Program

The COUPP program puts a new twist on an old technology, bubble chambers, to search for the dark matter that physicists think constitutes the majority of the matter in the Universe. Recently, COUPP has been able to discriminate between potential dark matter signals and one of the most troublesome backgrounds, alpha decays, by listening to… More »

SDSS Update

The project is called the Sloan Bright Arcs Survey and is mostly people from Fermilab: Sahar Allam, James Annis, Tom Diehl, Josh Frieman, Liz Buckley-Geer, Jiangang Hao, Huan Lin, Marcelle Soares-Santos, and Doug Tucker. We search images of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey for objects that we think are possible strong lenses. We then confirm… More »

The Pierre Auger Observatory measures the longitudinal air shower profile of ultra high energy cosmic rays which gives information on composition and hadronic interaction properties. Eun-Joo Ahn and colleagues use this data to obtain the proton-air cross section. Preliminary results show a surprising rise in the cross section with energy, which is not predicted by… More »

Chameleon

A common explanation for the observed acceleration of the Universe is a scalar field (i.e., scalar particles). However, experiments such as tests of gravity and measurements of fundamental constants place stringent constraints on such particles. At this time there are only three classes of scalar particles that can simultaneously accelerate the Universe and be consistent… More »