Friday, July 15, 2011
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Have a safe day!

Friday, July 15
2 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - Auditorium
Speaker: Julia Thom, Cornell University
Title: First Two Sided Limit of Bs to µµ Decays at CDF
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Wick Haxton, University of California, Berkeley/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Title: Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics: Aspirations for the Next Decade

Monday, July 18
PARTICLE ASTROPHYSICS SEMINARS WILL RESUME IN THE FALL
2 p.m.
LHC Physics Center Topic of the Week Seminar - Sunrise WH11NE
Speaker: Daniel Elvira, Fermilab
Title: SUSY Searches III: CMS Results
2:30 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One west
Speaker: Mark Hartz, University of Toronto/York University
Title: Results from T2K: Indication of Electron Neutrino Appearance in a Muon Neutrino Beam
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
All Experimenters' Meeting - Curia II

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Friday, July 15

- Breakfast: Chorizo burrito
- Smart cuisine: Chunky vegetable soup w/ orzo
- Buffalo chicken wings
- Cajun-breaded catfish
- Smart cuisine: Teriyaki pork stir-fry
- Honey mustard ham & Swiss panini
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Smart cuisine: Carved Turkey

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Friday, July 15
Dinner
- Fresh corn blinis with smoked salmon & chive cream
- Crusty pan-seared rib eye steak
- Buttery mashed potatoes
- Vegetable of the season
- Chocolate soufflé w/ crème anglaise

Wednesday, July 20
Lunch
- Yogurt marinated beef kabobs w/ wasabi aioli
- Greek chick pea salad
- Baklava

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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From ILC Newsline

How to keep cavities blemish-free

Worrying about blemishes on the skin is not just an issue for people who pursue personal physical beauty, but also for accelerator scientists. Scientists and engineers at KEK have found a way to deal with unwanted stains on the inner surface of superconducting cavities, which might be one of the causes of performance limitation.

Since the development of the Kyoto camera, a high-resolution camera that enables the optical inspection of the inner surface of niobium superconducting cavities, scientists have noticed that brownish stains exist on the cavity walls. When they were vertically tested to evaluate their performance, the stains were sometimes found around the spots where heating is observed.

The inner surface of the superconducting cavities is polished to a mirror-like finish, since any defects of debris inside of cavity will interfere with its performance.

Fabricated cavities are at first coarsely electropolished, then annealed. This is followed by inspection and tuning. It is then given another electropolish finish for micro-level smoothness. Scientists suspected the brown spots probably formed at some point during this procedure.

To understand what they are, Motoaki Sawabe and his colleagues at KEK’s STF surface research group decided to reproduce the stain. First, they dripped two microlitres of electropolishing solution on the chemically polished niobium plates. The plates were left for an hour, rinsed with pure water and dried at 50 degrees Celsius. They were able to reproduce the stain, but not every time.

Read more

— Rika Takahashi

Photo of the Day

New employees - June 20

First row, from left: Kyle Harmon, FESS; Sarah Derylo, PPD; Joy Augustin, WDRS; Toi Bowers, WDRS; Jasmine Scholefield, WDRS; Anna Eng, WDRS; Kyla Price, WDRS; Maritza Chavez, WDRS. Second row, from left: James Browne, CD; Vicente Lugo, WDRS; Culin Thompson, WDRS; Andrew Shin, WDRS; Malik Washington, WDRS; Jalissa Gomez, WDRS; Amanda Burk, TD; Astrid Rodrigues, CD. Third row, from left: Corey Conway, WDRS; Gerard Israel, WDRS; Arturo Schmitz, WDRS; Max Puidak, WDRS; H. Hope Head, Sara Karbeling, PPD. Photo: Reidar Hahn

New employees - July 5

From left: Sergey Antipov, TD; Ivan Litvinov, AD; Ashley WennersHerron, DIR; Evgeny Koval, AD; Jared Gaynier, AD. Photo: Cindy Arnold
In the News

Galaxy sized twist in time pulls violating particles back into line

From the University of Warwick newsroom, July 14, 2011

A University of Warwick physicist has produced a galaxy sized solution which explains one of the outstanding puzzles of particle physics, while leaving the door open to the related conundrum of why different amounts of matter and antimatter seem to have survived the birth of our Universe.

Physicists would like a neat universe where the laws of physics are so universal that every particle and its antiparticle behave in the same way. However in recent years experimental observations of particles known as Kaons and B Mesons have revealed significant differences in how their matter and anti matter versions decay. This “Charge Parity violation” or “CP violation” is an awkward anomaly for some researchers but is a useful phenomenon for others as it may open up a way of explaining why more matter than anti matter appears to have survived the birth of our universe.

However Dr. Mark Hadley, of the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick, believes he has found a testable explanation for apparent Charge Parity violation that preserves parity but also makes the Charge Parity violation an even more plausible explanation for the split between matter and antimatter.

Dr. Hadley’s paper (just published in EPL (Europhysics Letters) and entitled “The asymmetric Kerr metric as a source of CP violation”) suggests that researchers have neglected the significant impact of the rotation of our Galaxy on the pattern of how sub atomic particles breakdown.

Dr. Hadley says: “Nature is fundamentally asymmetric according to the accepted views of particle physics. There is a clear left right asymmetry in weak interactions and a much smaller CP violation in Kaon systems. These have been measured but never explained...”

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Special Result of the Week

Rare or medium rare?

The figure shows limits on the Bs decay rates at the Tevatron. CDF found at a 90 percent confidence level the rate is between 0.46 and 3.9 x 10-8. The central value is more than five times than predicted by the Standard Model.

When particles decay, they frequently do so in only a few different ways. However, once in a while, particles can decay in an unusual way. It is in these rare instances that scientists can catch a glimpse of something that they normally wouldn’t otherwise see.

These decays are important because they can shed light on subatomic processes that scientists cannot observe directly, either here at the Tevatron or at the LHC. One example of such a rare decay is the decay of a Bs meson, which is composed of a b quark and an s quark, into a pair of muons (Bs→ µ+ and µ-). The Standard Model predicts that the rate of this decay is so infrequent (3.2*10-9) that it would take more than 350 trillion collisions for scientists to see it.

So why look for it? The presence of new particles or new interactions can substantially increase how often these rare decays occur, making them worth studying. In fact, the Bs decay (Bs→ µ+ and µ-) is sensitive to contributions from a wide variety of new physics. This makes this rare decay an excellent place to look for deviations from the Standard Model.

The earlier results of this important experiment appeared in Fermilab Today in March 2004 and September 2007 and in International Science Grid This Week in February 2008. In 2009, CDF set the upper limit on these rare Bs decays at 43 out of a billion. With the newest result, CDF has further reduced that upper limit to 39 decays per billion and has set for the first time a lower limit of more than 4.6 Bs meson decays per billion.

To get this result, a team of CDF physicists sifted through 7 inverse femtobarns of data searching for Bs mesons decaying into muon pairs. CDF physicists saw a slight excess in the data, which may provide us with the first hints of this elusive decay. If the excess is real, it would correspond to a decay rate that is somewhat larger than, but not inconsistent with the Standard Model prediction.

A special Wine & Cheese seminar on this topic will take place at 2 p.m. today in the auditorium.

Read more

edited by Andy Beretvas and Doug Glenzinski

These physicists were responsible for this analysis. Top row, from left: Satoru Uozumi and Daejung Kong, Kyungpook National University, Korea; Teruki Kamon, Texas A&M/KNU; Matthew Herndon and David Sperka, Wisconsin University. Bottom row, from left: Walter Hopkins and Julia Thom, Cornell University; Doug Glenzinski, Fermilab; Slava Krutelyov, University of California - Santa Barbara; and Cheng-Ju Kin, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Announcements

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Habitat restoration at Fermilab - July 16

Call for applications for URA Visiting Scholars Program - Deadline Aug. 19

Argentine tango each Wednesday at Fermilab's Ramsey Auditorium - through Aug. 3

Visa Office powerpoint presentation on greencards for spouses and fiancées

This week's 10,000 steps-a-day winner announced

Windows 7 Introduction class - Aug. 9

Fermilab Prairie Quadrat Study - July 16, 28 and Aug. 16, 20

Employee Advisory Group wants to hear from you

Chicago Fire discount tickets

Muscle Toning - through Sept. 15

Housing Office now taking requests for fall and spring housing

Join Fermilab's new scuba diving club

Open badminton

Fermilab management practices courses presented this summer

SciTech summer camps - Through Aug. 12

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