Thursday, Sept. 12, 2013
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Thursday, Sept. 12

2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Roberto Franceschini, University of Maryland
Title: Post-LHC R-Parity Violating Supersymmetry

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

Friday, Sept. 13

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

4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Ken Herner, Fermilab
Title: Probing the Spin/Parity of the Higgs using H→bb at DZero

8 p.m.
Fermilab Lecture Series - Auditorium
Speaker: Michael Meyer, NASA
Title: The Potential for Life on Mars: Past, Present, Future?
Tickets: $7

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Thursday, Sept. 12

- Breakfast: Canadian bacon, egg and cheese Texas toast
- Breakfast: Greek omelet
- Chicken fajita club sandwich
- Asian beef and vegetables
- Chicken cacciatore
- Italian loaf sandwich
- Chicken carbonara
- Chef's choice soup
- Vegetarian chili

Wilson Hall Cafe menu

Chez Leon

Friday, Sept. 13
Dinner
- Gazpacho
- Chili-glazed halibut with avocado tomatillo sauce
- Lemongrass rice
- Sauteed pea pods
- Pineapple flan

Wednesday, Sept. 18
Lunch
- Southern-style barbecue ribs
- Black-eyed pea salad
- Honey corn bread muffins
- Peach cobbler

Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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Feature

New lecture series illuminates future experiments at Fermilab, begins next week

The search for dark matter is just one of the topics that will be covered by a new lecture series at Fermilab titled "The Allure of Ultrasensitive Experiments."

Beginning Sept. 17, Fermilab's Theory Group will kick off a new academic lecture series on the exciting experimental opportunities that lie in Fermilab's future. The lecture series, titled "The Allure of Ultrasensitive Experiments," will take place on select Tuesdays and Thursdays in the fall from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in One West and Curia II.

Fermilab has proposed some remarkably precise experiments that have the potential to unveil new physics beyond the Standard Model. They can be sensitive to new particles at, and sometimes above, the TeV scale, as well as to dark matter. The academic lecture series will illuminate the purpose of these experiments, how they work and why their findings would be important.

The talks are aimed at graduate students and postdocs in the Fermilab area, as well as at anyone who is simply curious. There also will be an opportunity for theorists and experimentalists whose careers may have focused on a specific project to broaden their horizons and learn about other experiments in greater detail.

Fermilab and the U.S. particle physics community are in the process of making decisions about the future directions our programs will take. It is important for us all to be informed not only about our own respective niches, but about the field as a whole.

Local and guest experts will give the lectures, which will start with a series of four talks in September on the Muon g-2 experiment and its related theory. In October there will be four talks on searches for charged-lepton flavor violation and the Mu2e experiment. In December we will learn about dark-matter direct-detection experiments. The rest of the program is taking shape. We plan to cover neutrino experiments, searches for electric dipole moments and quark flavor violation. We welcome comments and suggestions.

View the Allure of Ultrasensitive Experiments Web page for the fall schedule and for more information.

Roni Harnik and Chris Quigg, lecture series organizers

Photo of the Day

Moments of silence

On Wednesday, in honor of the Sept. 11, 2001, anniversary, the Fermilab Fire Department observed two moments of silence, one for each of the Twin Towers attacks. Photo: Chris Fioretto, BSS
Special Announcement

Interior window washing at Wilson Hall - Sept. 16 - 27

Next week, Clorica Management workers will wash Wilson Hall's interior windows. The cleaning schedule is as follows:

Monday, Sept. 16: floors 14, 15

Tuesday, Sept. 17: floors 11, 12, 13

Wednesday, Sept. 18: floors 7, 8, 9, 10

Thursday, Sept. 19: floors 3, 4, 5, 6

Friday, Sept. 20: floors 1, 2, mezzanine

The insulated interior windows on floors 13, 14 and 15 will be removed in order to be cleaned.

In the evenings from Sept. 23 to 27, Clorica will wash the atrium windows.

Please clear all items from in front of windows on days work is scheduled for your floor. Contact Enixe Castro at x2798 with questions.

In the News

WIMPs: masters of elusion

From ICTP News Highlights, Aug. 29, 2013

Dark matter particles are the Harry Potters of our universe—always hiding underneath a cloak of invisibility. They do not emit light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation and therefore are undetectable to the human eye and telescopes.

Read more

Frontier Science Result: DZero

Muons point toward proton's inner workings

When protons and antiprotons collide, W bosons are produced asymmetrically, since the up quark carries more momentum than the down. By looking at the directions of positively (blue) and negatively (red) charged muons from W decay, we gain deeper understanding about the quark interactions.

The inside of a proton is a tough place to see, but that doesn't stop us from trying to learn more about the quarks and gluons that make it up.

A proton contains two up quarks and a down quark, as well as a sea of virtual quark-antiquark pairs that are continually appearing and disappearing. Scientists at the DZero experiment have now performed a study to probe how much momentum each of these quarks carries within the proton. To do this, they look at charged W bosons produced in proton-antiproton collisions.

A W+ boson is produced when an up quark from the proton collides with an anti-down quark from the antiproton. The up quark carries more momentum than the down quark, so the W+ bosons tend to travel in the same direction as the proton. For the same reason, any W- bosons produced tend to travel in the same direction as the antiproton. By looking at the distributions of the bosons, we are actually learning about the structure of the proton.

However, it's not as easy as it sounds. In order to observe the W bosons, the analyzers look for their decays into muons, more massive relatives of the electron. In these decays, an unknown amount of energy is lost in the form of an undetectable neutrino, meaning that the W direction cannot be measured directly. Instead, scientists use the muon direction, and the main challenge of the measurement is in understanding how the detector influences the final results, and then making corrections for these effects.

A small fraction of the time, the muon charge is mis-measured, and there can also be different probabilities of detecting positive and negative muons. Thanks to the design of the DZero experiment, these effects are very small, less than 1 percent, and this allows the final muon asymmetry measurement to be made very precisely. The results show that the down quark carries slightly more of the proton momentum than was previously thought, and this helps us to better understand how the quarks inside the proton behave and how often important events, such as Higgs boson production, occur at the Tevatron and the LHC.

Mark Williams

These physicists, all from Florida State University, made major contributions to this analysis.
This week marks a transition in the DZero Frontier Science Result authors. We thank Mike Cooke for his insightful and fun contributions over the past two years and wish him the best of luck at his fellowship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Mark Williams will do his best to fill his shoes as DZero's resident columnist.
Announcements

Today's New Announcements

Nominate a colleague for the Director's Award by Sept. 25

Life on Mars - Fermilab Lecture Series - Sept. 13

Annual ICW flush - through Sept. 13

NALWO Annual Potluck Luncheon - Sept. 16

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

Artist Reception for VIEWS exhibit - Sept. 20

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

Power Writing Workshop - Oct. 24

Access 2010 classes scheduled

MS Excel and Word classes offered this fall

Interpersonal Communication Skills class scheduled for Dec. 4

Writing for Results: Email and More class offered Dec. 11

Accelerate to a Healthy Lifestyle

Abri Credit Union special offers

Butts and Guts is back

International folk dancing meets Thursday evenings in Auditorium

Outdoor soccer at the Village

Chicago Blackhawks preseason discounts