Have a safe day!
Wednesday, April 10
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - One West
Speaker: Thomas Knight, Ginkgo Bioworks Inc.
Title: Life with Four Billion Atoms
Thursday, April 11
1 p.m.
Computing Techniques Seminar - One West
Speaker: Rajkumar Kettimuthu, Argonne National Laboratory/University of Chicago
Title: Hosted Services and Application-Aware Protocols to Accelerate Data-Intensive Science
2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Patrick Meade, Stony Brook University
Title: New EW States in Plain Sight
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY
Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.
Ongoing and upcoming conferences at Fermilab
|
|
Wednesday, April 10
- Breakfast: crustless quiche casserole
- Cuban black-bean soup
- Teriyaki chicken sandwich
- Seafood newburg
- Smart cuisine: braised beef with vegetables
- Grilled-veggie panini
- Assorted calzones
- Mandarin pecan chicken salad
Wilson Hall Cafe menu |
|
Wednesday, April 10
Lunch
- Grilled five-spice chicken
- Thai rice pilaf
- Sugar snap peas
- Pineapple upside-down cake
Friday, April 12
Dinner
Closed
Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
|
|
Arturo Gomez: Life among the telescopes
 |
Arturo Gomez has spent more than 40 years working with visiting astronomers at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Photo: Reidar Hahn
|
Ascending the mountain road to Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory at sunrise can reveal the destructive power of light.
The dry landscape, 2200 meters above sea level, looks as if it has been left in the sun for too long. Long-armed cacti, squat scrub brush and hay-colored tufts of grass take root among brittle rocks in shades of gray, red and purple. At intervals, the winding path pitches vehicles at just the right angle to flood their windshields with sunshine, blocking drivers' views with a panel of glaring white.
Arturo Gomez, leader of the observer support group at CTIO—home to the Dark Energy Camera—has spent the last 43 years protecting a collection of giant telescopes from the sun and other distractions to help astronomers record the much fainter light from distant stars and galaxies.
"For me this is a beautiful, special, fantastic job," Gomez says. "I saw the evolution of the technology," from developing photographic plates by hand to taking digital images and operating machinery by computer—sometimes from across the ocean.
Gomez had been studying to become a teacher of physics and mathematics when, in his early 20s, he saw on television a notification about job openings at the observatory. Now he spends every other week there, taking the overnight bus from his home six hours away in Santiago. He shifts to a nocturnal schedule, sleeping during the day in mountaintop lodging and eating his work lunches at midnight. In the winter, when nights stretch the longest, he works about 12 hours per day. In the summer, he works about eight.
Read more
—Kathryn Jepsen
|
Augustana College
NAME:
Augustana College
HOME TOWN:
Sioux Falls, SD
MASCOT:
Ole the Viking
COLORS:
Navy and yellow
COLLABORATING AT FERMILAB SINCE:
2006
WORLDWIDE PARTICLE PHYSICS COLLABORATIONS:
CUBED (Sanford Underground Research Laboratory), DarkSide (Fermilab and Gran Sasso National Laboratory), DZero, PHENIX (Brookhaven National Laboratory)
NUMBER OF SCIENTISTS AND STUDENTS INVOLVED:
Two faculty and about six students
PARTICLE PHYSICS RESEARCH FOCUS:
The group focuses on the strong and weak forces. In our weak-force activities we have examined diboson production and now focus on direct detection of WIMPs. Our strong-force activities have focused on studies of jets and their modification in the nuclear environment as well as the modification of the gluon wave function of the nucleus at low x.
WHAT SETS PARTICLE PHYSICS AT AUGUSTANA APART?
The Augustana College particle physics group is one of only a few groups in which undergraduate education is the primary focus. Our goal is to give our exceptional students a balanced education that not only prepares them for graduate coursework but also introduces them to research so they are ready to participate in research activities when they arrive at graduate school. We are proud that, since the group started in 2006, we have sent students to graduate programs at Arizona State University, Iowa State University, Kansas State University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the University of Minnesota.
FUNDING AGENCIES:
NSF, Research Corporation, State of South Dakota, NASA Space Grant
View all university profiles.
|
Nomination hearing for Ernest Moniz to be next Secretary of Energy
From FYI: The AIP Bulletin of Science Policy News, April 9, 2013
There is every indication from today's hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that committee members will approve Ernest Moniz's nomination to be the next Secretary of Energy and send it to the full Senate for confirmation.
Read more |
A hunt for dark matter in a former gold mine
From the Los Angeles Times, April 8, 2013
The scientists don hard hats, jumpsuits and steel-toed boots to pile into a metal cage for a rumbling 11-minute descent into an abandoned South Dakota gold mine. They step over old mine-cart rails, through rough-walled tunnels and into a bright white room. There, they cast off their dusty garb and enter a lab hidden nearly a mile beneath the Earth.
Read more |
|
The Tevatron's beam-beam legacy
 |
|
Vladimir Shiltsev
|
Vladimir Shiltsev, director of the Accelerator Physics Center, wrote this column.
Although the Tevatron was shut down more than 18 months ago, scientists continue to analyze the data it produced, discover important results and publish papers. When you read this, you probably think immediately of the scientists who are still sifting through the high-energy physics data. Well, accelerator physicists are sifting through Tevatron data as well. While the CDF and DZero collaborations continue to extract a wealth of results from the proton-antiproton collisions the Tevatron produced, we in the Accelerator Physics Center continue to analyze and learn new things from the Tevatron beam data.
From the point of view of an accelerator scientist, the Tevatron collider was arguably the most complex accelerator facility in the world because of a combination of factors such as the use of superconducting magnet technology, the acceleration of both protons and antiprotons and the rather complicated beam dynamics in the machine.
Beam-beam effects (BB)—usually unpleasant phenomena stemming from the electromagnetic interaction of colliding bunches—were a significant part of the Tevatron's everyday life and subject of careful studies by a number of physicists. During Tevatron Run I (1987-1996), some 15 people were involved in BB studies and optimization, if one counts those who authored corresponding scientific publications. During Tevatron Run II (2001-2011), more than 25 people were involved.
Several APC members took part in a recent ICFA mini-workshop on beam-beam effects in hadron colliders, which was held at CERN from March 18 to 22. That workshop was the successor to similar workshops held at CERN in April 1999 and at Fermilab in June 2001. Alex Valishev, Giulio Stancari and I reviewed the past and present theoretical understanding of BB effects in the Tevatron, compared it with experimental observations, showed our fascinating progress in BB modeling tools and discussed numerous results from the beam-beam compensation experiments carried out with Tevatron electron lenses. All these aspects are important for planning additional research with the goal of further improving the already strong performance of the LHC and for studies that are needed for the planned LHC upgrade projects, such as the high-luminosity LHC and the proposed LHeC for proton-electron collider experiments. They are also important for our own future accelerator projects, including a future muon collider.
|
What's your position?
 |
This survey monument, located at Fermilab's Buffalo Farm, and several similar monuments on site form a GPS surface geodetic control network established to determine the accurate position of each monument. These coordinates are then used to establish a control network for aligning dipoles, quadrupoles and other components in the laboratory's tunnels. Photo: O'Sheg Oshinowo, PPD |
|
ESH&Q weekly report,
April 9
This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ESH&Q section, contains two incidents.
An employee had a foreign object removed from his left eyelid. This is a previously pending claim.
Helium over-pressurization caused a bladder inside a gas storage trailer to rupture. No people were near the incident.
Find the full report here. |
|
Thunderstorms
