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 »
Highlights
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
FCPA Research Associate Jiangang Hao has provided a new way to view galaxy clusters taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data set. He created color images and added them to the ‘sky’ mode of the popular Google Earth application, providing a highly interactive environment for visualizing the sky. You can now fly through galaxy… More »