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The Fermilab colloquium introduces a wide range of scientific and science-related topics presented by notable speakers from across the country and around the world.
The colloquium is open to the public. Talks are held at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday afternoons in One West in Wilson Hall (WH1W). To enter the site you will need a REAL ID-compliant identification.
Upcoming colloquia
An integral part of Fermilab’s academic culture, “orange” colloquium talks are aimed at a broad scientific and technical audience, while “green” talks are of general interest to everyone.
Appropriate for physicists Appropriate for all attendees
Sept. 24, 2025, 3:30 pm US/Central
Intelligent robotic systems are increasingly essential in space applications, industry, nuclear plants, and other harsh environments such as the particle accelerator complex and experiments at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). Robotics offers significant benefits for people, with its ultimate impact depending on how the technology is applied. At CERN, robots have been used successfully for many years to increase both machine maintainability and personnel safety. To improve machines availability and reduce risks, robots perform repetitive, unplanned, and hazardous tasks that humans prefer to avoid or are unable to carry out due to risks, size constraints, or extreme environmental conditions. Today, mechatronic systems use mature technologies that ensure robust and safe operation, even in collaboration with human workers. This presentation will describe the current status of robotic activities performed at CERN by the BE-CEM group. Several robotic solutions and custom-made devices have been deployed in recent years, with new concepts under development to further improve safety and availability. Ongoing and future R&D in robotics at CERN will be outlined, along with results from the commissioning of novel robotic control systems.
Oct. 8, 2025, 3:30 pm US/Central
Join us for a conversation between biographer Alec Nevala-Lee (author of Collisions: A Physicist's Journey From Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs) and theoretical physicist Chris Quigg as they explore the legacy of Luis W. Alvarez, the visionary Nobel laureate who revolutionized experimental physics with the hydrogen bubble chamber. From his collaboration with Ernest Lawrence at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley to his later innovations in high-energy physics, Alvarez played a central role in ushering the field into its modern age, developing techniques that enabled the discovery of numerous new particles and pioneering the analysis of scientific data on an industrial scale—an achievement that left him deeply conflicted about the role of individual genius in the world of "big science" that he and his colleagues had made.
Oct. 15, 2025, 3:30 pm US/Central
The ICARUS detector, which serves as the far detector for the Short Baseline Neutrino (SBN) program using the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB), is also sensitive to neutrinos produced by the Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) beam at 800 m and 100 mrad off-axis. Due to this location and the contribution to neutrino fluxes from both pion and kaon decays, NuMI neutrino interactions in ICARUS typically range from a few hundred MeV to a few GeV. Given that uncertainties related to neutrino interactions may be leading sources of uncertainty in upcoming neutrino oscillation experiments and given DUNE's oscillation peaks occur between approximately 2-3 GeV and near 1 GeV, NuMI neutrino interactions on argon in ICARUS can provide valuable insight leading up to the DUNE program and complementary to cross-section analysis in other experiments and targets and other neutrino-argon interaction measurements using the BNB beam. We report on the first ICARUS cross-section results, for which the signal is muon (anti-)neutrino charged-current interactions without pions in the final state, thus targeting charged-current quasi-elastic-like (CCQE-like) signatures. The measurement will be reported as a flux-averaged differential cross section as a function of a variety of kinematic variables, some of which exploit kinematic correlations between the outgoing muon and proton to maximize sensitivity to the poorly understood "nuclear effects" which can dominate systematic error budgets of oscillation measurements. This includes measurements of well-known observables that characterize the kinematic imbalance between the muon and proton on the plane transverse to the incoming neutrino. We will also highlight aspects of ICARUS and the broader physics and cross-section programs.