The Fermilab colloquium introduces staff and users to a wide range of scientific and science-related topics presented by notable speakers from across the country and around the world.
Colloquia are open only to badged Fermilab personnel. Unless otherwise advertised, talks are held at 4 p.m. on Wednesday afternoons in One West in Wilson Hall (WH1W).
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 all laboratory staff and users.
Appropriate for physicists Appropriate for all lab staff
Feb. 15, 2023, 4:00 pm US/Central
Cosmic surveys use observations of stars and galaxies to help ascertain the fundamental laws that govern the Universe. Over the last several decades, cosmic surveys using large optical and near-infrared telescopes, advanced digital cameras, and intricate spectroscopic instruments have revolutionized our understanding of the Universe. Measurements of the cosmic expansion history and the growth of cosmic structure have been shown to be sensitive to physics beyond the Standard Model, including the nature of dark energy, the properties of dark matter, the mass of neutrinos, and the initial conditions of the Universe (e.g., inflation). I will summarize some recent results from cosmic surveys and discuss the exciting future on the horizon.
Feb. 22, 2023, 4:00 pm US/Central
Fermilab and the worldwide particle physics community are in the process of launching the most ambitious and exciting accelerator-based neutrino program in the world. The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) enabled by the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) is the flagship neutrino program in the U.S. that is bringing the world together to perform cutting edge neutrino physics. LBNF/DUNE will include intense wideband beams of neutrinos and antineutrinos, massive liquid argon detectors positioned 800 miles away and a mile underground in South Dakota, as well as innovative near detectors that will precisely characterize the neutrinos closer to their source at Fermilab. Nothing quite like this exists any place else in the world. This talk will provide an overview and status of this endeavor with a focus on the physics we hope to uncover and the technological advances making this possible.
March 1, 2023, 4:00 pm US/Central
“The Engineering & Commissioning of the James Webb Space Telescope” will describe the history of JWST from the very early days, all the way through final integration and test, launch, and commissioning and will provide the viewers with insight into what it took to put the Observatory together.
March 29, 2023, 4:00 pm US/Central
Measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have been fundamental in establishing the cosmological standard model, ΛCDM, which describes the evolution of the universe from the earliest moments to the present day. Upcoming measurements with increasingly powerful cameras are now poised to search for physics beyond the standard model, including new particles that could leave... More »
April 26, 2023, 4:00 pm US/Central
In this talk I will attempt to outline where I think computational science is going over the next twenty years and how the emergence of new platforms that complement and challenge traditional HPC may impact the types of problems the community works on, the platforms that centers design and deploy and the research that gets funded. As we launch into the post-exascale epoch we face a computing landscape that is quite different from the one that motivated the international push for exascale HPC systems. We see the emergence of powerful AI methods, from generative language models that are transforming research, teaching (and exams!), to AI-HPC hybrid (or surrogate) models that promise orders of magnitude performance gains for some problems and the promise of a potentially transformative future enabled by quantum computers and quantum algorithms. I will focus on trying to weave together how these emerging capabilities will change the landscape of problems researchers pursue and when and how the large-scale scientific computing community is likely to evolve as it both absorbs new approaches and sorts through what is real and works and what is not yet ready for doing science. Future platforms need to be designed so that they are well suited for the problems that the community wants to solve in the near term but also need to help lead the community to new approaches that offer sustained impact across many disciplines.