Computing Division passes 24-hour mark with no outage

Where there’s smoke….On a day with no IT mishaps, Computing Division staff took a break from solving system failures to burn Service Desk tickets.

Chief Information Officer Vicky White announced yesterday that the Fermilab Computing Division had completed an entire day with no major power outages, server failures, breaker trips or other labwide malfunctions in IT services.

“This is an extraordinary achievement for the whole division,” White said. “It took incredible teamwork and dedication, and I am very proud of all of the people whose individual efforts made it possible for us to achieve this milestone.”

Fermilab Director Pier Oddone added his congratulations. “Twenty-four consecutive hours without a labwide IT problem is truly a breakthrough,” Oddone said. “I congratulate the Computing Division on this stunning success.”

With no emergencies to handle, CD personnel turned to the backlog of Service Desk tickets.

“We burned them,” said Service Desk Manager Eileen Berman. “It’s the quickest and most efficient way to deal with service requests in a timely manner. Many of the tickets that come in are essentially duplicates, and this way we can address all of them at once.”

Car wash benefits DUSEL project

Fermilab physicists held a car wash Wednesday, March 25, to raise money for the proposed Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory in South Dakota. Jim Strait, head of the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment, which would send beams of neutrinos from Fermilab to the underground lab, said the project is key to the laboratory's future but will require substantial resources to construct. Strait praised the enthusiasm of car wash leaders Kevin McFarland and Mike Lindgren, pictured above. The LBNE group plans a bake sale and raffle later this year.

High energy collisions reveal a paleoparticle

From CERN, April 1, 2010

Physicists working on the LHC results have announced their first discovery: a hideous particle from the prehistory of the Universe

The news is historic, or rather "prehistoric" to be more precise! It has taken two physicists studying the collisions at 7 TeV in the centre of mass on 30 March only two days to make an astonishing discovery. From their precise analysis of four events, Alain Grand and Ricarda Owen have found evidence of a new, massive neutral particle thought to have existed in the very early Universe.

"It's awful", explains Alain Grand, still shocked by the discovery. "It left horrible tracks inside the detector that made the physicists on duty at the time feel quite sick". No wonder. The particle consists of two strange quarks and one top quark but no beauty or charm quark. The physicists have nicknamed it the "neutrinosaurus" because of its repulsive appearance and prehistoric origins.

Hints of the new particle had already been glimpsed in two events at Fermilab but the statistics were too low to be published. The four events observed at the LHC generated an exponential increase (2²=4) in the statistics, allowing the physicists to announce the discovery unequivocally. The discovery of the particle, which had hitherto been postulated only by an impassioned physicist doing a bit of theory in his spare time, has the potential to turn current theory on its head and to send the entire theory community back to the drawing board.

There will have been a protonosaurus ancestor for the proton (not to be confused with the many-protoned brontosaurus), the electron will have descended from the electronosaurus, and so on. It remains to be seen whether these paleoparticles had antimatter doubles, such as antineutrinosauruses and other antiparticulosauruses.

"That's what we're going to be concentrating our efforts on finding now", says Alain Grand. "If they existed, we expect them to be the exact opposite of the paleoparticles we've found so far, in other words extremely elegant".

Whatever happens, the discovery has opened up paleoparticle physics as a unique and exciting new field of research!

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