Thursday, Nov. 21, 2013
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Have a safe day!

Thursday, Nov. 21

10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
nuSTORM Workshop - WH7X

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

Friday, Nov. 22

9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
nuSTORM Workshop - WH7X

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

4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Boris Kayser, Fermilab
Title: Neutrinos and the Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry of the Universe

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Thursday, Nov. 21

- Breakfast: Canadian bacon, egg and cheese Texas toast
- Breakfast: Mexican omelet
- Steak soft tacos
- Smart cuisine: spinach and jack cheese enchiladas
- Beef stew in a bread bowl
- Grilled-vegetable sandwich
- Sweet and sour chicken
- Beef barley soup
- Chef's choice soup
- Assorted pizza by the slice

Wilson Hall Cafe menu

Chez Leon

Friday, Nov. 22
Dinner
Closed

Wednesday, Nov. 27
Lunch
- Cheese fondue
- Mixed green salad
- Cold lemon souffle

Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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From symmetry

Scientist detects danger with physics

Munir Muniruzzaman has used his physics know-how to help in hospitals and war zones alike. Image: Sandbox Studio

Inspired by physics in high school, Munir Muniruzzaman never dreamed he would one day use it in a wide variety of ways, including detecting bombs and mending people with cancer.

"You cannot imagine how rewarding it is that my knowledge in physics can be applied to improve people's lives," Muniruzzaman says.

Muniruzzaman started on his path as an undergraduate studying physics at a university in his native Bangladesh. After graduation, he went on to earn a masters-degree-like diploma from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy, which educates scientists from the developing world.

Muniruzzaman decided to switch from theoretical to experimental physics when he began graduate school at the University of California, Riverside, to do more work with his hands. For his graduate thesis, he tracked a signature from the universe's earliest moments, recreated in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. This required commuting from California to the lab on Long Island, New York, as well as helping to build a detector and developing Monte Carlo computer simulations to understand the data.

Read more

Heather Rock Woods

In Brief

nuSTORM workshop - today and tomorrow in WH7X

Today and Friday, the nuSTORM collaboration will meet in WH7X to discuss recent results and the status of the nuSTORM facility. The workshop sessions take place today from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and tomorrow from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. View the agenda.

In Brief

DOE Google+ hangout on Edison and Tesla today

DOE hosts a Google+ hangout on Edison and Tesla today at 11:30 a.m.

More than engineers, scientists, businessmen and rivals, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were two of the greatest energy inventors of all time. Some of their most significant contributions — the battery, power plants, alternating current, the electric motor — came to light more than a century ago, and yet they still influence how we use energy in our everyday lives. That's why DOE has dedicated the entire week on Energy.gov to Edison and Tesla. It will host a Google+ hangout today to answer questions about these two storied inventors. The hangout is at 11:30 a.m. CT. Send questions here.

Photos of the Day

Robins and berries

A pair of robins hides among the branches of a hawthorn tree. Photo: Lori Limberg, BSS
The berries themselves are worth a close-up. Photo: Lori Limberg, BSS
In the News

How close are we to finding dark matter?

From BBC News, Nov. 18, 2013

Given all the progress we've made in modern physics over the past century, you may be forgiven for thinking that physicists are approaching a complete understanding of what makes up everything in our universe.

For example, all the publicity surrounding the discovery of the Higgs boson last year seemed to be suggesting that this was one of the final pieces of the jigsaw — that all the fundamental building blocks of reality were now known.

So it might come as something of a shock to many people to hear that we still don't know what 95 percent of the universe is made of.

Read more

Frontier Science Result: CDF

An improved search for a dijet resonance

Dijet invariant mass distribution with fit results overlaid for events passing all selection criteria (top) and the same background-subtracted distribution with the fitted diboson contribution overlaid (bottom).

In an older Fermilab Today article, CDF reported the observation of an unusual excess of events in which a W boson appeared together with two jets (which are among the most commonly produced particles at the Tevatron). The jets appeared to match well with the possibility of being produced through a totally unexpected new particle. While the CDF collaboration was cautious in its interpretation of the data, the scientific community was shocked by the story the data seemed to be telling. A few months later, collaborators at the DZero experiment, on the opposite side of the collider, repeated exactly the same study using their own data, finding no such excess. This was an apparent impasse that required further action in order to shed light on a clearly compelling case.

The CDF collaboration recently reported another study of collisions giving rise to a W or Z boson and two quarks (jets). Scientists purposefully selected the data to be completely independent of the data that gave rise to the excess in the earlier study. The original data set required a lepton with a high transverse momentum; the current analysis vetoes any event with a high-transverse-momentum lepton. The idea was to cross-check earlier results and, at the same time, to probe the scenario in which the hypothetical new particle would truly exist and would also appear together with a Z boson, as suggested by several scientists. In this new analysis, scientists applied additional corrections to reconstructed jets in simulated events. These corrections more accurately model particle showers that are initiated by both quarks and gluons.

The original selection resulted in more than 2 million events. The principal background is multi-jet events, which are produced by the strong interaction. After using up-to-date analysis tools, the number of multi-jets was reduced to 6,280 ± 1190 (see above figure). The experiment finds 2,900 ± 183 diboson events (WW, WZ, ZZ). This number of diboson events translates into a measured cross section of 13.8 +3.0/-2.7 picobarns. This number is in agreement with the Standard Model value of 16.8 ± 1.0.

The most important result of this analysis is that no anomalies (no second peaks) are observed in the dijet mass spectrum. This story summarizes beautifully many of the salient features of the scientific journey: the appearance of an experimental anomaly in a well-established framework, leading to great excitement; the process of independently checking the validity of the result; and finally the improved understanding of nature that inherently follows either its confirmation or disproval. Here, what appeared to be a potential game changer to particle physics ended up producing a sounder understanding of important physics processes.

Learn more

edited by Andy Beretvas

These CDF physicists contributed to this data analysis. Top row from left: Daniela Bortoletto and Qiuguang Liu, both from Purdue University. Bottom row from left: Fabrizio Margaroli from Rome Sapienza University and INFN; Karolos Potamianos from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Announcements

Today's New Announcements

nuSTORM workshop - today and tomorrow

Fermilab Family Holiday Party - RSVP by Dec. 8

Revised submission date for the Take Five 2013 Challenge - Dec. 18

Book Fair - today

University of Chicago Tuition Remission program deadline - today

Timecard for week of Nov. 18-24 due early

School's Day Out - Nov. 25-27

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

Certified Administrative Professional Study Group registration deadline - Dec. 10

Abri Credit Union - rake in the savings