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Have a safe day!
Friday, Feb. 11
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Shabnam Jabeen, Brown University
Title: Three Tales of Two Tops
Sunday, Feb. 13
Gallery Chamber Series - 2nd Flr Art Gallery
Performer: The Three Celli
Tickets: $17
Monday, Feb. 14
2:30 p.m.
Particle Astrophysics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Oliver King, California Institute of Technology
Title: The C-Band All-Sky Survey: Mapping the Polarized Radio Sky
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
All Experimenters' Meeting - Curia II
Special Topics: TD: 3-D Printer; Accelerator Studies in the Tevatron
5 p.m.
Budker Seminar - Music Room, Users' Center
Speaker: Meghan McAteer, University of Texas, Austin
Title: Measurement and Correction of the Beta Functions in the Booster
Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.
Upcoming conferences
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Friday, Feb. 11
- Breakfast: Chorizo burrito
- New England clam chowder
- Carolina cheeseburger
- Tuna casserole
- Dijon meatballs over noodles
- Bistro chicken and provolone panini
- Assorted sliced pizza
- *Carved top round of beef
*carb-restricted alternative
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu
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Friday, Feb. 11
Valentine's Day dinner
Guest Chef: Joe Walding
Special Time: 6 p.m.
- Moules marinière
- Marinated lamb chops with honey and coriander
- Winter vegetable tagine
- Blueberry and pear frangipane with thyme ice cream
Wednesday, Feb. 16
Lunch
- Chili chicken skewers with cilantro pesto
- Chunky banana sweet-potato mash
-Keylime and tequila pie
Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
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Fermilab photography exhibit artist reception 5-7 p.m. today
From 5-7 p.m. today, the Fermilab Art Gallery will host a public reception for the latest art exhibit: “Through the Lens,” an exhibit of photographs by Reidar Hahn and the Particle Physics Photowalk participants.
The exhibit showcases the equipment and people who make physics discoveries possible. For 23 years, Fermilab photographer Reidar Hahn has explored the colorful world of particle physics. The exhibit, which begins today and runs through April 8, features 31 of Hahn’s photographs alongside 20 photos from the 2010 Global Particle Physics Photowalk, which took place in August 2010 at laboratories in Asia, Europe and North America.
Learn more.
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Marcela Carena wins Humboldt award
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Marcela Carena |
Fermilab theoretical physicist Marcela Carena has received an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, a prestigious award recognizing a lifetime of achievement in research.
"I am deeply honored by the community's appreciation toward the work that I have done," Carena said.
Matthias Neubert, Chair of Theoretical Particle Physics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, nominated Carena for this award. Neubert's nomination cited Carena's important contributions to physics at the weak scale, highlighting her work on:
- detailed predictions for the Higgs boson masses in supersymmetric models,
- electroweak baryogenesis in the minimal supersymmetric Standard Model,
- important contributions to gauge-coupling and bottom-tau unification in supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model,
- and her work during the past 10 years on the phenomenology of supersymmetric theories and models with extra spatial dimensions.
As part of her award, Carena will spend a total of six-12 months at various institutions in Germany. She plans to divide that time into short segments, spending one to two months per year starting in 2011. During her stay in Germany, Carena hopes to further her research in the area of phenomenology by developing new ideas and collaborations with her German colleagues.
Carena, who received her Ph.D. at the University of Hamburg and completed a postdoc fellowship at the Max Planck Institute für Physik - Werner-Heisenberg-Institut, is excited to return to her physics roots.
"I hope that this will open doors for new collaborations and new ideas," Carena said.
Carena will receive her award at a ceremony in Berlin in June. More information on the award can be found here.
- Rhianna Wisniewski
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URA Visiting Scholars Program to continue
Last month, the Universities Research Association Council of Presidents, consisting of 86 member universities, approved continuation of the URA Visiting Scholars at Fermilab Program for an additional five years. The program is supported by a $5,000 yearly assessment of its members during the five year period.
The initial five year URA commitment to the program, undertaken under the current DOE contract, was to expire at the end of 2011. The program, whose extension was approved with overwhelming support of the Council, will now function at the discretion of the Council.
The Visiting Scholars Program was established in 2007 to support visits by researchers from URA institutions. Visiting researchers work at Fermilab for periods of up to one year. Qualified researchers may be students, postdocs, or faculty doing research in areas such as high energy physics experiments, astrophysics, theory, accelerator physics, materials science and computer science, related to the Fermilab mission. Visits range from attendance at a conference and summer school programs to year-long stays.
Applications for the spring 2011 Visiting Scholars Program at Fermilab will be accepted through Friday, Feb. 18. Learn more and apply here.
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Firetrucks circle Tevatron's main ring
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AD’s Marty Murphy submitted this photo of fire trucks driving around the Main Ring. The photo was taken during the evening on Tuesday, Feb. 8, on a slow shutter speed.
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House republicans propose new FY2011 S&T budgets
From FYI: The AIP Bulletin of Science Policy News, Feb. 10, 2011
Next week the House of Representatives may vote on a funding bill that would make significant changes in some S&T agency budgets. Under an initial version of this bill:
- The budget for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science would be reduced by 18.0 percent or $882.3 million from the current level.
- Funding for the National Institute of Standards and Technology would be cut by 14.4 percent or $123.7 million.
- NASA’s budget would remain essentially level, declining 0.6 percent or $103 million.
- The budget for the U.S. Geological Survey would also remain level, declining 0.5 percent or $5.3 million.
- The National Science Foundation’s budget would increase 6.0 percent or $412.9 million.
These changes were in a list of seventy proposed budget recommendations released yesterday by the House Appropriations Committee that were projected to total $74 billion. Additional budget cuts will be made in the bill before it goes to the full House. Chairman Rogers just announced that these cuts will total $100 billion from what President Obama requested. That forthcoming bill – a continuing resolution or CR - would provide funding after an existing short-term bill expires on March 4.
Read more
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CMS joins the hunt for leptoquarks
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Particle collisions that look like this are used to search for leptoquarks. This figure is specifically for (electron + up/down quark) type collisions. |
Leptoquarks are theoretical particles. While there are theories that suggest these particles are real, we live in a world full of leptons (the electron is the most familiar example) and quarks (which are generally found in the nucleus of an atom.) We don’t understand why there are two types of particles (quarks and leptons) and we have a long history of realizing that sometimes two things that seem different are really the same. The classic example is when Newton realized that the force that makes my scale groan is exactly the same force that governs the motions of the planets. These ideas have led some to hypothesize that perhaps there is a kind of a particle called a leptoquark with properties of both leptons and quarks. An earlier Fermilab Today article described these objects.
An additional reason leptoquarks are an attractive idea is that some theories that merge all of the forces (also called grand unification theories or GUTs) only work if leptoquarks exist. So, observation of leptoquarks would be a substantial advance in our understanding of GUTs.
To help further our understanding, my CMS colleagues combed through our data, looking for leptoquarks. Before we took the measurement, we were unsure whether it would be competitive. For the measurements announced here, CMS recorded only about 3 percent of the total recorded beam compared to leading Tevatron measurements, but did so at three and a half times the Tevatron's energy.
It turns out that in the two different kinds of leptoquark searches attempted here and here, CMS has ruled out possible leptoquark masses between 20-25 percent higher than was announced by DZero. The extra beam energy matters much more in this kind of analysis than the relatively modest amount of delivered beam.
As CMS resumes proton operations in 2011 and the amount of recorded data increases dramatically, we will be able to make huge improvements in this effort. If leptoquarks exist, there is a very good chance that CMS could see them in the next year or two.
-- Don Lincoln
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These physicists are working two different leptoquark analyses, (electron + up/down quarks, University of Maryland) & (muon + charm/strange quarks, Northeastern University). |
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| These technicians are just some of those who contributed to the CMS experiment’s unparalleled silicon-based tracking detectors. |
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Cloudy
