Tuesday, April 23, 2013
spacer
Search
spacer
Calendar

Have a safe day!

Tuesday, April 23

3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over

4 p.m.
Accelerator Physics and Technology Seminar (NOTE LOCATION) - Curia II
Speaker: Duncan Scott, Fermilab
Title: Main Injector and Recycler: Ready for NOvA and Beyond

Wednesday, April 24

2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar (NOTE DATE AND LOCATION) - One North
Speaker: Yuval Grossman, Cornell University
Title: Few Remarks About the Higgs

3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over

4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - One West
Speaker: Pieter Faber, University of Chicago
Title: Next Generation Sequencing at the University of Chicago Genomics Core

Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.

Ongoing and upcoming conferences at Fermilab

Campaigns

Take Five

Weather
Weather Showers
58°/35°

Extended forecast
Weather at Fermilab

Current Security Status

Secon Level 3

Current Flag Status

Flags at full staff

Wilson Hall Cafe

Tuesday, April 23

- Breakfast: All-American breakfast
- Hungarian pork goulash soup
- Twin chili cheese dogs
- Cuban steak with black-bean salsa
- Smart cuisine: Mediterranean baked tilapia
- Rachel melt panini
- Personal pizza
- Chicken BLT ranch salad

Wilson Hall Cafe menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, April 24
Lunch
- Chopped-shrimp Waldorf salad
- Strawberry cheesecake

Friday, April 26
Dinner
Closed

Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

Archives

Fermilab Today

Director's Corner

Frontier Science Result

Physics in a Nutshell

Tip of the Week

User University Profiles

Related content

Info

Fermilab Today
is online at:
www.fnal.gov/today/

Send comments and suggestions to:
today@fnal.gov

Visit the Fermilab
home page

Unsubscribe from Fermilab Today

In Brief

Fermilab Users Meeting registration now open

The 2013 Fermilab Users Meeting takes place from June 12-13. Registration is now open.

Registration for the 46th annual Fermilab Users Meeting is now open. The meeting will take place from June 12-13.

Topics to be covered at the Users Meeting include collider physics, astroparticle physics, neutrino physics, accelerator physics and future plans.

The New Perspectives conference, organized by the Fermilab Student and Postdoc Association, will be held before the Users Meeting, from June 10-11. Its poster session will take place during the Users Meeting banquet on the evening of June 12.

This year's meeting features two special events. One is the official handover of the International Linear Collider Technical Design Report on June 12. The second is a farewell symposium for Fermilab Director Pier Oddone on June 13.

The meeting will also feature a public lecture on June 12 by Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology.

For more information, visit the Users Meeting Web page. You can also view the meeting agenda.

From ESH&Q

ESH&Q Earth Day Fair - Thursday, April 25 in atrium

The ESH&Q Earth Day Fair takes place Thursday in the Wilson Hall atrium.

Earth Day aims to create awareness and appreciation for the environment and for Earth-friendly behaviors you can practice at work and home. To get some good ideas on how you can be a good steward of the Earth, come to the lab-wide, ESH&Q Section-sponsored Earth Day Fair from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Thursday, April 25, in the Wilson Hall atrium. There will be giveaways and a chance to win great raffle items.

Personnel from all around the lab help support the event with their efforts. At the fair, they'll present these topics of interest: Gardening Club, Fermilab Natural Areas, Bicycle Commuting, E-Services and Going Green via our Abri Credit Union, Accessible & Sensory Gardening, NEPA, Take 5, Science at Work, Water Taste Test, Outdoor Safety, Seasonal Stockroom Enviro-Friendly Items, and Is it Trash or "Treasure."

Video of the Day

Bison celebrate after April showers

Fermilab's bison frolic in the water after last week's heavy rain. View the video. Video: Derek Plant, TD
In the News

Synopsis: Quantum-ness put on the scale

From Physics, April 18, 2013

How much weirder would it be to see Schrödinger's living/dead cat than to observe a tiny cluster of atoms interfering with itself in a double-slit experiment? That judgment might be in the eye of the observer, but physicists are interested in quantifying the effective size of macroscopic quantum objects in order to explore the border between quantum and classical physics. A new definition for this quantum size, or so-called macroscopicity, is based on how much leeway a given experiment leaves for quantum mechanics to be modified at a fundamental level. In a paper in Physical Review Letters, Stefan Nimmrichter of the University of Vienna, Austria, and Klaus Hornberger of the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, apply this formalism to a wide range of experiments, both completed and hypothetical.

Read more

In the News

What's new with the ILC?

From Physics World, April 19, 2013

Are you suffering from particle-collider withdrawal symptoms now that the LHC has begun its long shutdown? If so, you will be pleased to learn that you can focus your attention elsewhere.

The International Linear Collider Collaboration has posted an updated version of its 2013 Technical Design Report on the arXiv preprint server. It's a short and sweet overview of the collider's design, including "detailed descriptions of the accelerator baseline design for a 500 GeV e+e- linear collider, the R&D program that has demonstrated its feasibility, the physics goals and expected sensitivities, and the description of the ILD and SiD detectors and their capabilities."

Read more

Director's Corner

Progress on NOvA

Fermilab Director
Pier Oddone

Last week, the NOvA collaboration held a vibrant meeting at Fermilab. The construction of NOvA is going well: Production and assembly rates are encouraging, leading us to believe that we will be able to complete the detector on budget and on schedule. This goal is important for the laboratory since we need to establish excellence in project management given the number of projects that are ahead of us. If we continue on track, NOvA will be the third project in a row that we have completed on budget and on schedule.

This was not the situation last fall when the contingency did not appear adequate to finish the job. The laboratory took many steps to up our game, control contingency and complete ongoing work well within expected cost parameters. Now, as we look at the current situation, much more work has been completed, nearly 14 percent contingency remains, and essentially all known remaining construction risks are retired except for the price of oil. While we have adequate contingency to cover significant market fluctuations in the price of oil, a world crisis could lead to an extraordinary fluctuation, which is impossible to plan for. Of course, this is not the time to let our guard down and we will not do so until the project is completed.

Last month we completed a comprehensive review of project management at Fermilab. We were fortunate to enlist four top managers who are highly regarded within the DOE lab system. Their team's report, which is posted on the Web, includes six overarching recommendations. The report is obligatory reading for anyone doing projects at Fermilab, and we are being quite open about the issues and challenges we are addressing so that other DOE labs may also benefit from our experiences. While the report did reveal areas for improvement, the team was very complimentary of the capabilities and commitment of our project managers and of the program improvements deployed over the past year. I have asked our COO Jack Anderson to prepare a laboratory plan to address the committee recommendations and integrate them into our improvement agenda.

Construction Update

Upgrading Master Substation

Workers are rerouting some of the electrical power that usually passes through Master Substation, making it more accessible for repairs and long-term upgrades. Photo: Fermilab

The Master Substation Bypass Project is the first phase in upgrading the lab's high-voltage electrical power distribution system.

The lab runs two on-site electrical substations, the 45-year-old Master Substation and the 15-year-old Kautz Road Substation. Fermilab normally operates with both substations in service. During times of outage and maintenance on Master Substation, power is routed from Kautz Road Substation to areas normally served by Master Substation. The route that power takes includes portions of Master Substation. This route through Master Substation does not allow for a complete shutdown for maintenance and repair without incurring site power outages.

This project will isolate Master Substation from electrical power when running off Kautz Road Substation, making it more accessible for repairs and long-term upgrades.

The second phase of the upgrade will replace the aging Master Substation under the Science Laboratories Infrastructure program's FNAL Utilities Upgrade Project in the near future. This project will also provide for the upgrade of the lab's industrial cooling water system.

Announcements

Today's New Announcements

National Day of Prayer Observance - May 2

LabVIEW classes scheduled - May 10 and June 13

English country dancing Sunday afternoons at Kuhn Barn - May 5 and May 19

International folk dancing meets Thursday evenings in Kuhn Barn

Scottish country dancing meets Tuesday evenings in Kuhn Village Barn

Engineering Group to hold seminars at Fermilab - April 26

Changes to U.S. visa procedures - begin April 30

Permanent residence presentation by Chicago attorneys - May 1

Hubbard Street 2 Dance - Fermilab Arts Series - May 11

Lecture: Big Science, Big Challenges - May 16

Fermilab-CERN Hadron Collider Physics Summer School open for applications

Indoor soccer

Fermilab Golf League

Indian Creek Riding Club

Chicago Fire discount tickets