Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2013
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Wednesday, Nov. 20

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

4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - One West
Speaker: Gerald Gabrielse, Harvard University
Title: Testing the Symmetries and Most Precise Prediction of the Standard Model with a Single Particle or Antiparticle

Thursday, Nov. 21

11 a.m.
Academic Lecture Series - Curia II
Speaker: Gerald Gabrielse, Harvard University
Title: The Electric Dipole Moment of the Electron

Noon
Particle Astrophysics Seminar (NOTE DATE, TIME) - WH6W
Speaker: Vincent Vennin, Institut D'Astrophysique De Paris
Title: The Best Inflationary Models After Planck

2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Sean Tulin, University of Michigan
Title: Beyond Collisionless Dark Matter

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: Janet Conrad, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Title: New Cyclotrons for Nu Physics

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

Ongoing and upcoming conferences at Fermilab

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Current Security Status

Secon Level 3

Current Flag Status

Flags at full staff

Wilson Hall Cafe

Wednesday, Nov. 20

- Breakfast: crustless quiche casserole
- Breakfast: ham, egg and cheese English muffin
- Western barbecue burger
- Smart cuisine: braised beef with vegetables
- Stuffed pork chops
- Zesty turkey pastrami sandwich
- Buffalo chicken salad
- Cuban black-bean soup
- Texas-style chili
- Assorted calzones

Wilson Hall Cafe menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, Nov. 20
Lunch
- Rouladen
- Buttered egg noodles
- Dill baby carrots
- Apple walnut cake with spiced cream

Friday, Nov. 22
Dinner
Closed

Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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From symmetry

Building NOvA

Building particle detector parts for a new neutrino experiment gives students an edge in the post-graduation job hunt. Photo: Reidar Hahn

Most of the time, Sean Geldert is a typical student at the University of Minnesota. But a few hours a week, Geldert leaves his campus behind and joins a team working to build the most advanced neutrino detector in the world.

Secret identity? Hardly. When he's not studying physics, Geldert is part of a group of about 250 students employed by the university to work on the NOvA experiment, a collaboration with Fermilab and more than 30 other institutions around the globe. Geldert works in the NOvA module facility, situated in a nondescript warehouse near campus, playing a vital part in the creation of something extraordinary.

About 300 miles north, near Minnesota's Ash River, crews are assembling the NOvA detector, a 14,000-ton plastic structure that will be roughly 200 feet long and 50 feet high and wide. When it's finished, scientists will use the detector to discover properties of neutrinos, perhaps the most elusive of the known subatomic particles.

But without Geldert and his fellow students, none of this would be possible. At the module facility, students assemble the plastic components of the detector — large white PVC sheets made of hollow tubes with fiber optics run through them. These components make up both the detector and the detector's support structure.

Read more

Andre Salles

In Brief

SLAC to host next P5 meeting

SLAC will host the second Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) meeting from Dec. 2-4, and you are invited to attend. The meeting, which will focus on the Cosmic Frontier, will be streamed live (details on how to access the feed will be posted to the meeting website soon). Although there won't be a way for online viewers to comment or ask questions in real time, the P5 committee welcomes feedback via its online form.

P5 held the first town hall at Fermilab in early November and will follow the SLAC meeting with another at Brookhaven National Laboratory Dec. 15-18.

Learn more about P5 and Fermilab's participation in the P5 process.

In Brief

Accelerate to a Healthy Lifestyle concludes

The Accelerate to a Healthy Lifestyle Program concluded on Oct. 31. ESH&Q would like to thank all participants for their commitment. We commend you for your efforts.

In order to ensure all participants are accounted for, please record your activity by Nov. 22. The deadline to collect your participation reward is Nov. 27.

ESH&Q will continue to provide logging capability as a means of keeping past and future participants motivated to exercise. Effective Nov. 1, any laboratory employee who wants to track his or her exercise activity is invited to visit our website. (Please note that participation rewards only apply to those who participated between Aug. 1 and Oct. 31.) To access the log, visit the ESH&Q website. Under Quick Links, select Accelerate to a Healthy Lifestyle. This will take you to the log where you can track your activity — all in an effort to maintain a healthier you.

Accelerator Update

Accelerator update, Nov. 18

Proton Source
AD personnel performed maintenance and tuning studies as needed and worked on Booster RF issues.

Main Injector/NuMI
Between Nov. 11 and 18, the Main Injector provided 146 hours of proton beam to the NuMI target for the production of neutrinos for MINERvA, MINOS and NOvA. The machine delivered an integrated intensity of 6.71 x 1018 protons on target.

Recycler
AD personnel worked on Recycler commissioning, rescanned tight aperture locations and worked on smoothing the orbit of the beam around the Recycler.

Switchyard
AD personnel worked on extraction and beamline tuning. They also worked on DC current transfer problems, which were affecting beam extraction.

Fixed-target area: Test Beam Facility
AD personnel worked on beam tuning and front-end readback issues for the experiments in the Fermilab Test Beam Facility. They worked with TD personnel to repair a water leak on a magnet in the M03/4 enclosure. A foil calibration was performed for the secondary-emission monitor in the MW1 enclosure.

Fixed-target area: SeaQuest
AD personnel worked on beam tuning and replaced the segmented wire ion chamber in NM1.

View the AD Operations Department schedule.

In the News

Fermilab gears up for an intense future

From CERN Courier, Nov. 18, 2013

When a beam of protons passed through Fermilab's Main Injector at the end of July, it marked the first operation of the accelerator complex since April 2012. The intervening long shutdown had seen significant changes to all of the accelerators to increase the proton-beam intensity that they can deliver and so maximize the scientific reach of Fermilab's experiments. In August, acceleration of protons to 120 GeV succeeded at the first attempt — a real accomplishment after all of the upgrades that were made — and in September the Main Injector was already delivering 250 kW of proton-beam power. The goal is to reach 700 kW in the next couple of years.

Read more

From the CMS Center

CMS Center news

Patricia McBride

Patricia McBride, head of the CMS Center, wrote this column.

The LHC is in the middle of a long shutdown period, and the CMS collaboration is busy preparing for the next run, which starts in 2015, while planning for detector upgrades during future long shutdowns. This week CMS scientists gathered at CERN to discuss plans and proposals for an upgrade to the CMS tracker for the high-luminosity LHC era. Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer plans to visit the CMS detector this Thursday and will have a chance to meet with Fermilab staff working at CERN.

The Fermilab CMS Center and LHC Physics Center have been a hub of activity over the past few weeks. Last week, the LPC hosted at Fermilab a workshop on "SUSY at the Near Energy Frontier." The workshop brought together more than 80 SUSY experts from the LHC and theory community. They reviewed the status of searches for supersymmetry and discussed ways to maximize the SUSY discovery potential of the LHC run that will start in 2015. Seema Sharma, a Fermilab CMS Center research associate and an LPC Fellow, led the organizing committee with assistance from LPC colleagues and the Fermilab conference office.

The LPC members also helped with the CMS Data Analysis School at the Sata Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP) in Kolkata, India, from Nov. 7-11. This popular school for CMS collaborators new to data analysis was first organized at Fermilab several years ago and is now held several times a year at various locations around the world, including Fermilab. A number of LPC fellows served as facilitators for the school. The Kolkata Data Analysis School team was led by Sudhir Malik, who is a Fermilab guest scientist at the LPC from the University of Nebraska, and former Fermilab scientist Sunanda Banerjee, a division director at SINP. The next CMS DAS at Fermilab will be held from Jan. 7-11.

Photos of the Day

Piece by piece

Workers are currently dismantling the CDF detector to make room for future projects. Shown here are the CDF detector end well and plug, which were recently stripped of cables, electronics and phototubes. The phototubes and scintillators from CDF are being reused in a number of experiments. Photo: Cindy Arnold
Shown here is an iron worker helping to remove the central outer tracker chamber on Sept. 18. Photo: Jamie Grado, PPD
Sparks fly as an iron worker cuts apart muon shielding steel. Photo: Jonathan Lewis, PPD
Safety Update

ESH&Q weekly report, Nov. 19

This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ESH&Q Section, contains no incidents.

Find the full report here.

In the News

Physicists plan to build a bigger LHC

From Nature, Nov. 12, 2013

When Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started up in 2008, particle physicists would not have dreamt of asking for something bigger until they got their US$5-billion machine to work. But with the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, the LHC has fulfilled its original promise — and physicists are beginning to get excited about designing a machine that might one day succeed it: the Very Large Hadron Collider (VLHC).

Read more

Announcements

Today's New Announcements

Timecard for week of Nov. 18-24 due early

School's Day Out - Nov. 25-27

Certified Administrative Professional Study Group registration deadline - Dec. 10

Artist reception for Fermilab Photography Club exhibit - today

Book Fair - today and tomorrow

University of Chicago Tuition Remission program deadline - Nov. 21

English country dancing at Kuhn Village Barn - Dec. 1

Argonne-Fermilab-UChicago event: Clean Energy 2030 - Dec. 4

LabVIEW seminars offered Dec. 5

Volunteer Opportunity - Community Outreach to Feed Children - Dec. 5

Labwide party - Dec. 6

Take 5 and win a prize by Dec. 18

Abri Credit Union - rake in the savings