Friday, Sept. 6, 2013
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Friday, Sept. 6

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

4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Bryce Littlejohn, University of Cincinnati
Title: A Relative Spectral Measurement of Neutrino Oscillation at Daya Bay

Monday, Sept. 9

THERE WILL BE NO PARTICLE ASTROPHYSICS SEMINAR THIS WEEK

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, Sept. 6

- Breakfast: chorizo and egg burrito
- Breakfast: strawberry-stuffed French toast
- Texas Pete buffalo-style wings
- Smart cuisine: beef burgundy ragout
- Tuna noodle casserole
- Gourmet chicken salad croissant
- Chicken fajitas plate
- Cream of butternut squash soup
- Texas-style chili
- Assorted pizza by the slice

Wilson Hall Cafe menu
Chez Leon

Friday, Sept. 6
Dinner
Closed

Wednesday, Sept. 11
Lunch
- Vietnamese caramelized pork and rice noodle salad
- Pomegranate poached pear

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Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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From symmetry

Dark Energy Survey begins

Over the next five years, scientists will capture some of the grandest images of the cosmos ever seen and use them to probe the mystery of dark energy. Image courtesy of the Dark Energy Survey

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Dark Energy Survey. Its five-year mission: to map a portion of the southern sky in unprecedented detail. To use the world's most powerful digital camera to probe the mystery of dark energy. To boldly photograph where no astrophysicist has photographed before.

The Dark Energy Survey officially began on Saturday, Aug. 31. Using the Dark Energy Camera, a 570-megapixel imaging device built at Fermilab, scientists plan to take clear, dazzling pictures of the largest number of galaxies ever studied in such a survey. The camera is mounted on a telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, which offers a mountaintop vista perfect for obtaining crystal-clear, high-resolution images.

"With the start of the survey, the work of more than 200 collaborators is coming to fruition," says Fermilab physicist Josh Frieman, director of the Dark Energy Survey, in a press release. "It's an exciting time in cosmology, when we can use observations of the distant universe to tell us about the fundamental nature of matter, energy, space and time."

Over five years, scientists will capture full-color photographs of 300 million galaxies, 100,000 galaxy clusters and 4,000 new supernovae. The camera is powerful enough to see light from more than 8 billion light-years away. The Dark Energy Camera's 62 charge-coupled devices will provide a previously unheard-of level of sensitivity to red light. This will help determine the distances to galaxies—those that appear red are generally farther away, while those that appear blue are nearer.

But the survey is not just about collecting pretty pictures. Scientists are searching for the answer to a fascinating mystery: Why is the expansion of the universe accelerating? The Dark Energy Survey will use four methods to probe dark energy, the phenomenon believed to be pushing the universe apart.

Read more

Andre Salles

Photo of the Day

Bounty in the Jetta

On Labor Day, AD's Elliott McCrory packed the back of his Volkswagen with fruits and vegetables from his Fermilab garden plot. Among the yield were cherry tomatoes, onions, shallots, beets, yellow bell peppers, serrano hot peppers and 28 quarts of tomatoes. Photo: Elliott McCrory, AD
In the News

Ultracold big bang experiment successfully simulates evolution of early universe

From UChicagoNews, Aug. 28, 2013

Physicists have reproduced a pattern resembling the cosmic microwave background radiation in a laboratory simulation of the Big Bang, using ultracold cesium atoms in a vacuum chamber at the University of Chicago.

"This is the first time an experiment like this has simulated the evolution of structure in the early universe," said Cheng Chin, professor in physics. Chin and his associates reported their feat in the Aug. 1 edition of Science Express, and it will appear soon in the print edition of Science.

Chin pursued the project with lead author Chen-Lung Hung, PhD'11, now at the California Institute of Technology, and Victor Gurarie of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Their goal was to harness ultracold atoms for simulations of the Big Bang to better understand how structure evolved in the infant universe.

Read more

In the News

UCSC's Steve Ritz moves on from NASA Fermi Telescope project

From Santa Cruz Sentinel, Aug. 30, 2013

SANTA CRUZ — As NASA's Fermi Telescope project enters the second half of its 10-year mission this month, physics professor Steve Ritz, his colleagues Bill Atwood and Robert Johnson, and their team of UCSC graduate students and post-doctorate scientists are at work analyzing the data.

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope uses gamma-rays, a high-energy form of light, to give scientists a full-sky view of extreme phenomena such as black holes and neutron stars.

"If you were to look at the sky using gamma-ray vision, it would look totally different," said Ritz, who described a dynamic picture of the night sky full of explosions and light billions of times more energetic than the human eye can see.

Read more

Frontier Science Result: CMS

The biggest microscope

Understanding the performance of your detector is critical in making important physics measurements. The muon detection system (shown in yellow and red) has been studied in great detail, resulting in a paper of more than 100 pages in length.

Fermions and bosons. Mesons and baryons. Electrons and protons. Researchers of the subatomic world must know the identity and understand the behavior of dozens of different kinds of particles. However, not all particles are equal. While all are interesting in their own ways, certain ones have a more widespread utility. One such particle is the muon.

The muon is a cousin of the electron. Like the electron, it has a negative charge and an antimatter partner with positive charge. However the muon is much heavier than the electron—more than 200 times heavier than its svelte cousin. Also, the muon is less stable, living for two millionths of a second before decaying into an electron and two neutrinos. That lifetime seems very short, but for muons traveling near the speed of light, this is long enough for them to travel hundreds of feet or even more. This means that they live long enough to hit a detector.

While many types of post-collision particles hit a detector, interact with the atoms inside it and are absorbed, muons have a special property. Because they do not experience the strong nuclear force, muons slip by most atomic nuclei unimpeded. And because they are very heavy, they don't easily emit photons. Thus muons can pass through a great deal of matter without stopping.

Scientists exploit this behavior of muons to their advantage. Essentially, it makes them easy to identify. Because muons are often created in interesting collisions, they are one of the ideal particles to isolate to study all sorts of fascinating bits of physics, including, for example, the discovery of the Higgs boson. The importance of the muon is made even more evident when you recall what the CMS acronym stands for: Compact Muon Solenoid.

Given the importance of the muon, it is imperative that particle physics experiments have excellent muon detectors. By virtue of the muon's ability to pass through a lot of matter, muon detectors are always the outermost detectors of an experiment. Practically all the other particles are stopped in the innermost layers. Thus the muon detectors are the big bits you see in photographs of CMS and even ATLAS (CMS' sister experiment at the LHC).

The CMS muon detector consists of three distinct technologies and comprises more than 670,000 electronics channels. After years of work to generate a detailed understanding of the performance of the muon detector, CMS has recently submitted a paper more than 100 pages long describing the equipment's capabilities. The position of muons can be measured to a precision of about a tenth of a millimeter, and muons can be identified with excellent efficiency. The robust performance of the muon detectors bodes well for the future CMS research program.

Don Lincoln

These US CMS scientists contributed to this analysis.
These physicists are among those who ensure that the very large amount of computer code written by collaborators meets the physics and performance goals and guidelines required for integration into the official CMS software. These programs are then used by the entire collaboration.
Announcements

Today's New Announcements

Nigel Lockyer meets with users today and Tuesday

"Got Debt? Let's Manage It!" free webinar - Sept. 18

Second City: Happily Ever Laughter at Fermilab Arts Series - Sept. 21

Barn dance - Sept. 8

Annual ICW flush begins Sept. 9

Life on Mars - Fermilab Lecture Series - Sept. 13

TRAIN has two new enhancements

Access 2010 classes scheduled

MS Excel and Word classes offered this fall

Interpersonal Communication Skills class scheduled for Dec. 4

Accelerate to a Healthy Lifestyle

Abri Credit Union special offers

International folk dancing meets Thursday evenings in Auditorium

Chicago Blackhawks preseason discounts

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