Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2013
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Wednesday, Aug. 14

2:30 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar (NOTE DATE, TIME) - One West
Speaker: Joao Coelho, Tufts University
Title: Three- and Four-Flavor Neutrino Results from MINOS

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

4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - One West
Speaker: Graham Ross, Oxford University
Title: Whither SUSY?

Thursday, Aug. 15

2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Chia-Cheng Chang, University of Illinois at Chicago and Fermilab
Title: Local D0 Hadronic Matrix Elements from 2+1 Lattice QCD

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

4 p.m.
Accelerator Physics and Technology Seminar (NOTE DATE) - One West
Speaker: Daniele Pelliccia, Monash University
Title: Hard X-Ray Diffraction Imaging at Modern Synchrotrons and Free Electron Lasers: Role of Iterative Phase Retrieval Methods

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Wednesday, Aug. 14

- Breakfast: breakfast pizza
- Breakfast: ham, egg and cheese English muffin
- Ranch house steak sandwich
- Smart cuisine: Thai peanut chicken
- Italian lasagna
- California club
- Chicken and bacon carbonara
- Tomato florentine soup
- Texas-style chili

Wilson Hall Cafe menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, Aug. 14
Lunch
- Cumin-crusted pork soft tacos
- Refried beans
- Spanish rice
- Hummingbird cake

Friday, Aug. 16
Dinner
Closed

Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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Feature

Archiving accelerator history

Archivists Adrienne Kolb (left) and Valerie Higgins stand behind a plaster sculpture of J. Robert Oppenheimer in the History Room. Photo: Laura Dattaro

In a box on the third floor of Wilson Hall is a thick book with a soft, faded green cover that contains the words that Robert R. Wilson, Fermilab's first director, used to convince Congress to approve funds to build the lab's first accelerator: "It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending."

The book is the official transcription of an April 17, 1969, Congressional hearing, and it belongs to a collection within the Information Resources Department's Fermilab History and Archives Project, which since the late 1970s has been quietly preserving the history of not only the lab but of accelerators around the world. Its home is a small room adjacent to the library, its doorway emblazoned with the words "Milton G. White History of Accelerators Room," full of books, papers, cassette tapes with oral history interviews and a white plaster likeness that Wilson sculpted of his Manhattan Project Director J. Robert Oppenheimer.

"Wilson wanted a history resource to offer the community of high-energy physicists so that they could come and relax and enjoy the history of their field and their endeavors," said Adrienne Kolb, Fermilab historian and archivist. "They could become renaissance men like him by reading and studying."

Kolb, who will retire in 2015, joined the lab in 1983 to help physicist Lillian Hoddeson archive the existing historical collections, which contain documents such as correspondence, meeting minutes, logbooks, annual reports and photographs (technical publications are preserved elsewhere in the lab). In August 2012, Valerie Higgins, who is professionally trained in archiving, became Fermilab's first full-time archivist, working to, among other things, create online research guides called finding aids.

A finding aid functions roughly like an introduction and a table of contents for a collection, documenting the context within which the collection was created, the contents of the collection and the items contained in each box. The materials are stored in the History Room, the Archives House in the Village or an off-site location.

"Having these finding aids online lets people see for themselves what we have," Higgins said. "They're discovery tools."

Some of the project's most substantial collections include the personal papers of Leon Lederman, the lab's second director; of John Linsley, a pioneer in the study of cosmic rays; and of Wilson himself. The project is also home to the papers of David Ritchie, who worked in Fermilab computing from 1971 to 2011; logbooks documenting the early operations of the Main Ring; and the early records of the Arts and Lectures series, as well as many other collections. In 1995, the project received the Superconducting Super Collider collection, which is currently being processed.

"We encourage people to think of the History and Archives Project as an asset that can help them, that they are welcome to explore," Kolb said. "We can be of assistance in a wider, broader way for public appreciation of particle physics. This research is not just this arcane subject that a few people study. It's for the betterment of mankind, like Wilson said."

Laura Dattaro

Accelerator Update

Accelerator update, Aug. 11, 2013

Linac
Operators and experts operated the Linac accelerator, and contractors installed a roof hatch for moving a new transformer into the Linac enclosure at a later date.

Booster
Operators and experts operated the Booster accelerator and moved magnets for orbit. The studies after the moves confirm successful moves.

Main Injector and NuMI
Operators and experts operated the accelerator and successfully sent low-intensity beam to the NuMI beamline hadron monitor. In order to increase intensity to NuMI, the poor vacuum in the MI-30 region needs to be improved. Since the tunnel had some cool-off time, it was decided to repair the vacuum in this region before running more beam. Investigations continue to locate the cause of vacuum problems in the MI-30 section. The Accelerator Division expects to provide beam for NuMI horn scans in the near future.

Recycler
The Mechanical Support and Electrical Engineering Support departments installed and aligned a Lambertson magnet replacement.

Kautz Road Substation
FESS worked with contractors and installed surge arrestors at the Kautz Road Substation.

View the AD Operations Department schedule.

In the News

A black hole mystery wrapped in a firewall paradox

From The New York Times, Aug. 12, 2013

A high-octane debate has broken out among the world's physicists about what would happen if you jumped into a black hole, a fearsome gravitational monster that can swallow matter, energy and even light. You would die, of course, but how? Crushed smaller than a dust mote by monstrous gravity, as astronomers and science fiction writers have been telling us for decades? Or flash-fried by a firewall of energy, as an alarming new calculation seems to indicate?

Read more

From the CMS Center

Work on three fronts: analysis, upgrades and simulations

Kevin Burkett

Kevin Burkett, deputy head of the CMS Center, wrote this column.

With the LHC at CERN now in the middle of a shutdown that will last until 2015, members of the CMS collaboration are hard at work on many different fronts: analyzing 2012 data, working on detector components for this shutdown and writing up the Snowmass study on the physics of the high-luminosity LHC. The rapid pace of our work means working simultaneously on the past, present and future.

CMS scientists continue to harvest physics results from the LHC Run I data. One example is the recently discovered rare particle decay Bs→μμ. This result, which the CMS collaboration published simultaneously with the scientists working on the LHCb experiment, marks the culmination of more than two decades' work from multiple collaborations in pursuit of this extremely rare process.

Looking toward the future, two phases of upgrades are planned for the CMS detector. Fermilab personnel are key members of the teams that will implement the first phase of upgrades to the hadron calorimeter, forward pixel tracker and the trigger system after LHC Run II. The implementation of these upgrades should be completed by 2018.

R&D is in progress for a second phase of upgrades to operate in the high-luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). We expect to complete those upgrades around 2023. With improved detectors and accelerators, the HL-LHC aims to deliver data samples over 100 times larger than what was recorded during the past run, colliding protons at the LHC design energy of 14 TeV.

As part of the nine-month-long Snowmass Community Summer Study, which culminated in the recent Snowmass on the Mississippi meeting, scientists working at the Fermilab LHC Physics Center have studied how to follow up on the discovery of a Higgs boson. Only through precision measurements will we know if the Higgs boson we have observed at the LHC is the one predicted in the Standard Model. Using simulations of LHC collisions, we explored how well we can measure the Higgs' properties and how it couples to other particles. We also investigated what kind of results we can expect from the HL-LHC.

Other LPC scientists studied potential signatures of extra Higgs bosons and other new phenomena, including supersymmetry. The large data samples and high energy of the HL-LHC will allow us to extend our search for heavy, undiscovered particles far beyond the limits we've set so far. It will allow us to probe previously unexplored regions and put the Standard Model and alternative theories to the test.

Many of the the CMS contributions were included in the Energy Frontier summary talk at Snowmass by Chip Brock, and the complete set can be found in the CMS white paper.

With the compelling physics prospects of the HL-LHC, the CMS experiment can look forward to many exciting years to come.

Photo of the Day

Focusing beams

This is the beam-exit end of one of two NuMI horns. The horn creates a magnetic field that focuses charged particles into a beam as they pass through it (into the plane of the picture). Some of the particles from the resulting, now-focused beam then decay into neutrinos, which travel in a straight line through the earth to a distant detector for scientists to study. Read about how to make a neutrino beam in symmetry. Photo: Reidar Hahn
Safety Update

ESH&Q weekly report, Aug. 13

This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ESH&Q section, contains two incidents.

An employee stepping back to avoid some wasps tripped and fell backwards, causing an abrasion to his right shoulder. He received first-aid treatment.

An employee lacerated his left hand several times while helping to remove a bug zapper from its hanger. Six sutures were required and antibiotics were prescribed. This case is recordable.

Find the full report here.

Announcements

TIAA-CREF employee education opportunity: Tomorrow in Focus - Aug. 15

Employee massage day - Aug. 15

Fermilab Arts Series: The Congregation band - Aug. 17

UChicago Tuition Remission program deadline - Aug. 22

An Honest Approach to Weight Management - register by Aug. 22

URA Visiting Scholars program deadline - Aug. 26

Earned Value Management course scheduled for Aug. 28, 29

Kyuki-Do martial arts

Scottish country dancing meets Tuesday evenings in Auditorium

International folk dancing in Auditorium for summer

Chicago Fire discount tickets