Friday, June 28, 2013
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Friday, June 28

9:30 a.m.
All-Hands Meeting - Auditorium
Speaker: Nigel Lockyer

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

4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Yanyan Gao, Fermilab
Title: Recent Studies of the Higgs Boson at CMS

Monday, July 1

Noon
Farewell reception - Wilson Hall atrium
Cake and ice cream with Pier Oddone

PARTICLE ASTROPHYSICS SEMINARS WILL RESUME IN THE FALL

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

4 p.m.
All Experimenters' Meeting - Curia II
Special Topic: Holometer Report

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Friday, June 28

- Breakfast: chorizo and egg burrito
- Breakfast: French bistro breakfast
- Beer-battered fish sandwich
- Smart cuisine: herb and lemon fish
- Vegetable lasagna
- Cuban panini sandwich
- Italian pasta bar
- Tomato basil bisque
- Texas-style chili

Wilson Hall Cafe menu
Chez Leon

Friday, June 28
Dinner
Guest chefs: Grace and Gary Leonard
- Asparagus salad
- Halibut en papillote
- Pasta with cilantro pesto
- Grilled pound cake with seasonal fruit and pomegranate molasses

Wednesday, July 3
Lunch
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Special Announcement

All-hands meeting with Nigel Lockyer - today at 9:30 a.m.

All Fermilab employees and users are invited to attend an all-hands meeting with Fermilab's next director Nigel Lockyer today at 9:30 a.m. in Ramsey Auditorium. The meeting will also be webcast.

From symmetry

50-foot physics experiment on the move

Symmetry writer Andre Salles tells you everything you always wanted to know about moving a gigantic electromagnet but were afraid to ask. Photo: Andre Salles

Day One: Friday, June 21
"Trust me, you won't be able to miss it."

Those words were ringing in my head as I drove around Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island for the first time, searching for a massive electromagnet. They were spoken by Justin Eure of the Brookhaven Media and Communications Office, and he seemed pretty sure. But surer men than he had been foiled by my hideous sense of direction.

I needn't have worried. A few winding turns, and there it was, the reason I'd flown 900 miles and braved two hours of New York traffic. A 17-ton, 50-foot-wide ring of aluminum stuffed with superconducting coils, covered in white shrink wrap, attached to a vast metal stabilizing apparatus and loaded up on the trailer of the biggest truck I'd ever seen. It took me a while to truly fathom how vast it was, how much bigger it was than I had imagined.

This magnet is the centerpiece of Fermilab's new experiment, called Muon g-2. It will build on a similar experiment conducted in the 1990s here at Brookhaven, which found tantalizing hints of new physics waiting just beyond our current understanding. The ring will capture and store muons, subatomic particles that live for about two millionths of a second, and allow scientists to study their magnetic wobble. If that wobble differs from theoretical predictions, it could point to the existence of undiscovered particles. At Brookhaven, the Muon g-2 experiment found hints that this was so.

I'm fond of saying that particle physicists build very big things to study very small things. This electromagnet is a very big thing. And, improbably, I was there to see it move, to begin a 3,200-mile land and sea journey from Long Island to the Chicago suburbs. This trip is the product of years of planning by an international collaboration and the result of cooperation between two national laboratories. I was just there to watch, but I felt caught up in the excitement anyway.

Moments after I ambled out of my rental car, Justin joined me, and we spent a few minutes just staring up at the ring, mouths agape.

"That's big," I said.

"It's definitely big," he replied.

Read more

Andre Salles

Photo of the Day

Swallows swell with song

Barn swallows, not yet fledged, chirp as they sit comfortably in their nest at BEG. Photo: Barb Kristen, PPD
In the News

A precision U.S. particle physics experiment is moving home

From The Guardian, June 25, 2013

Most experimental particle physicists, when not twitching in front of a computer cursing the ROOT manual or chasing Grid Jobs, spend their time deep underground, with their detectors and accelerators blissfully unaffected by the weather above. But for the next five weeks a number of us will be completely preoccupied by the weather, and will be hitting refresh on the NOAA Hurricane website, hoping that nothing nasty crops up on the Eastern seaboard of the USA.

The reason for this new obsession is the move of a $30m, 17 tonne, 15 metre diameter magnet from Long Island to Chicago. This is the vital part of an experiment that will measure the internal magnetic workings of a muon to a precision of 1 part in 10 million. Since the muon doesn't have any discernible size, decays in a few millionths of a second and is difficult to produce in the large numbers required for this precision, this is more than a little bit tricky.

Read more

In the News

'Nuclear pasta' in neutron stars: new type of matter found

From Space.com, June 26, 2013

A rare state of matter dubbed "nuclear pasta" appears to exist only inside ultra-dense objects called neutron stars, astronomers say.

There, the nuclei of atoms get crammed together so tightly that they arrange themselves in patterns akin to pasta shapes—some in flat sheets like lasagna and others in spirals like fusilli. And these formations are likely responsible for limiting the maximum rotation speed of these stars, according to a new study.

Read more

Frontier Science Result: CMS

Supersymmetric glue

CMS physicists searched for the gluino, the supersymmetric cousin of the gluon. The red box shows where the gluino is listed.

One of the biggest unanswered questions of particle physics is why the mass of the Higgs boson is relatively small when the Standard Model suggests a more natural value would be many thousands of trillions times higher. We don't know the answer to that question, but a popular proposed explanation invokes the idea of supersymmetry. Theories that include supersymmetry can very easily explain the Higgs boson's low mass.

A theory that includes supersymmetry comes with a price. These theories predict that for every known particle, a cousin supersymmetric particle exists. These cousins have the same properties as the familiar ones, except they have a different subatomic spin. There's only one problem. None of these cousins has been observed. The simplest form of supersymmetry has been definitively ruled out.

Since the simplest scenario is impossible, physicists turn to theories in which supersymmetry is almost true. Physicists say that in these modified theories, the symmetry of supersymmetry is "broken," which in layman's terms simply means that the supersymmetric cousins are heavier than the familiar particles. Under this assumption, supersymmetry is alive and well.

But "alive and well" doesn't mean confirmed. For that, you still have to find the cousins. Unfortunately, supersymmetric theories give us very little guidance as to the masses of the cousins. Thus we have to make some sensible assumptions, look at the data and see what it tells us.

In today's article, I describe the outcome of a search for particles called gluinos, which are the supersymmetric cousins of the gluon. If gluinos exist and aren't too massive, they should be made easily at the LHC. Physicists assumed that gluinos existed and were among the lightest of the supersymmetric cousins. If that is so, then we can ignore the production of other supersymmetric particles. But "among the lightest" is still pretty heavy. These gluinos can make pairs of the top quark, which is the heftiest of the Standard Model particles. Gluinos can also make bottom quarks and all the familiar quarks. In order to make the analysis tractable, physicists only studied events in which the gluinos decayed into top quarks or bottom quarks. Finally, because the gluino is a supersymmetric particle, it must have a daughter particle that is also supersymmetric. The lightest of the supersymmetric particles is electrically neutral and escapes detection. We only see it by noticing that energy is missing.

CMS physicists looked for events with missing energy and in which either four bottom quarks or four top quarks were present. If more were observed than expected, they'd be on to something. Unfortunately, the results were entirely consistent with the Standard Model, meaning gluinos were not observed. However, we now can say that if gluinos exist, they must have masses more than a thousand times heavier than a proton and six times heavier than the top quark.

—Don Lincoln

These U.S. physicists contributed to this analysis.
These US CMS physicists are making a big impact on the Run II data acquisition system.
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Today's New Announcements

English country dancing at Kuhn Barn - June 30

Closure on Main Ring Road - July 2-3

Batavia Road gate closed July 5-6

Registration for FEMA assistance due July 9

Behavioral interviewing course scheduled for July 18

Fermilab Prairie Plant Survey (Quadrat Study) - July 19

Chris Lintott: How to Discover a Planet From Your Sofa - July 19

Summer intern Friday tours

Sitewide domestic water flushing

Housing Office now accepting requests for fall & spring on-site housing

10K Steps drawing winner

Swim lessons session 2 due

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Ultimate Frisbee Mondays and Wednesdays

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