Wednesday, March 19, 2014
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Wednesday, March 19

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

4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - One West
Speaker: George Zweig, MIT
Title: Concrete Quarks - The Beginning of the End

Thursday, March 20

11 a.m.
Intensity Frontier Seminar Series - WH8XO
Speaker: Alex Sousa, University of Cincinnati
Title: Planning for Future Neutrino Experiments

2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: André Walker-Loud, College of William and Mary
Title: Mn-Mp

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

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a weekly calendar with links to additional information.

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46°/27°

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Secon Level 3

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Flags at full staff

Wilson Hall Cafe

Wednesday, March 19

- Breakfast: breakfast casserole
- Breakfast: ham, egg and cheese English muffin
- Chopped barbecue pork sandwich
- Smart cuisine: herbed pot roast
- Roasted turkey
- Greek wrap with chicken
- Chicken fajitas plate
- Chunky broccoli cheese soup
- Texas-style chili
- Assorted calzones

Wilson Hall Cafe menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, March 19
Lunch
- Ham and gruyere crepes
- Cabbage salad
- Caramel macchiato cheesecake

Friday, March 21
Dinner
- Mixed greens with herb vinaigrette
- Fig and chili-glazed pork tenderloin
- Potato cakes
- Sauteed green beans
- Pecan rum cake

Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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Press Release

International team of LHC and Tevatron scientists announces first joint result

The ATLAS, CDF, CMS and DZero experiments have pooled their data to arrive at the world's best value for the mass of the top quark.

Chicago, United States, and Geneva, Switzerland — Scientists working on the world's leading particle collider experiments have joined forces, combined their data and produced the first joint result from Fermilab's Tevatron and CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), past and current holders of the record for most powerful particle collider on Earth. Scientists from the four experiments involved — ATLAS, CDF, CMS and DZero — announced their joint findings on the mass of the top quark today at the Rencontres de Moriond international physics conference in Italy.

Together the four experiments pooled their data analysis power to arrive at a new world's best value for the mass of the top quark of 173.34 ± 0.76 GeV/c2.

Experiments at the LHC at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Tevatron collider at Fermilab near Chicago in Illinois, USA, are the only ones that have ever seen top quarks — the heaviest elementary particles ever observed. The top quark's huge mass (more than 100 times that of the proton) makes it one of the most important tools in the physicists' quest to understand the nature of the universe.

The new precise value of the top quark mass will allow scientists to test further the mathematical framework that describes the quantum connections between the top quark, the Higgs particle and the carrier of the electroweak force, the W boson. Theorists will explore how the new, more precise value will change predictions regarding the stability of the Higgs field and its effects on the evolution of the universe. It will also allow scientists to look for inconsistencies in the Standard Model of particle physics — searching for hints of new physics that will lead to a better understanding of the nature of the universe.

Read more

The new best measurement of the top quark mass is 173.34 ± 0.76 GeV/c2.
Photo of the Day

Awaiting a warmer future

The Muon g-2 ring sits on a small patch of concrete cleared of snow by the Test Beam Facility. Once the MC-1 Building is complete, the ring will have a new indoor home. Fermilab Today periodically runs updates on the construction of the MC-1 Building. Photo: Julius Borchert, BSS
In the News

Telescope captures view of gravitational waves

From Nature, March 17, 2014

Astronomers have peered back to nearly the dawn of time and found what seems to be the long-sought "smoking gun" for the theory that the Universe underwent a spurt of wrenching, exponential growth called inflation during the first tiny fraction of a second of its existence.

Using a radio telescope at the South Pole, the US-led team has detected the first evidence of primordial gravitational waves, ripples in space that inflation generated 13.8 billion years ago when the Universe first started to expand.

The telescope captured a snapshot of the waves as they continued to ripple through the Universe some 380,000 years later, when stars had not yet formed and matter was still scattered across space as a broth of plasma. The image was seen in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the glow that radiated from that white-hot plasma and that over billions of years of cosmic expansion has cooled to microwave energies.

Read more

In the News

What does a scientist look like?

From Cool Mom Tech, March 14, 2014

I am utterly taken with this website that features drawings of scientists by kids before and after meeting them. The seventh graders visited a Fermilab site, and it's amazing to see some of the changes.

While some of the kids had a good sense of what a scientist may look like before the visit, quite a few kids wrote things like "scientists live in their own world," and described them as " kind of crazy, talking always quickly." Or that he has "hair standing straight up." Back to the Future, anyone?

Read more

From the Center for Particle Astrophysics

From quantum to cosmos

Craig Hogan

Craig Hogan, head of the Center for Particle Astrophysics, wrote this column.

On Monday morning, cosmologists around the world felt a wave of ecstasy as they learned of a breathtaking discovery: a particular pattern of light coming from the early universe, imprinted on the cosmic expansion during its first moments. It feels like a love letter from Mother Nature has invited us to share her deepest secrets.

All forms of matter and energy come in quanta — the "particles" of particle physics. For the first time, we have now detected a quantum behavior of space and time. The new result invokes an interplay among all the scales of physical universe, from the smallest to largest, from the beginning to the present day. It spectacularly confirms many of the "inner space/outer space" connections pioneered over several decades by Fermilab's astrophysics theory group. This includes the amazing idea that quantum fluctuations can be amplified to enormous size by cosmic expansion and lead not only to gravitational waves, but ultimately to the formation of all cosmic structures, including galaxies, stars, planets and life.

The now discovered polarization of cosmic background light displays a faint but distinctive pattern of swirls that can be created only by an extraordinarily exotic process known as inflation, a stretching of space-time (gravitational waves), caused by its own subatomic, quantum fluctuations. This unique signature reaches us intact across all the vast stretches of space since the beginning of time and can now be studied in precise detail.

The discovery, published in this paper, came sooner than anyone expected. Theorists, including Fermilab's Albert Stebbins, proposed long ago the possibility of isolating the distinctive swirling signature used to make the discovery, but everyone was surprised this week that the signal in the real universe is so strong. The implications for cosmology are immediate and profound. We now know far more reliably what conditions were during the cosmic inflation that created our expansion; for example, the new data directly measures how fast things were expanding back then. We can now delve much more concretely into the new physics that governs cosmic origins and how it connects to the unification of the Standard Model particles and forces studied at the Tevatron and the LHC. Cosmic polarization experiments may even provide real data addressing the quantum system underlying unification of the Standard Model with gravity — the "theory of everything."

The discovery was inspired by theory but propelled in recent years by new transformational technology, in particular, a new generation of sensors being developed at Argonne, Berkeley, Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NIST. Large focal plane arrays of antennas are fabricated on silicon wafers, together with superconducting detectors that achieve quantum-noise-limited performance. In experiments, they are deployed in advanced telescopes at the world's best site for peering deep into space, the South Pole.

The newly discovered effect is strong enough to confirm soon with other experiments, perhaps even using data already obtained. The next step will be to improve the quality of the measurements with a larger area of sky, more frequency bands and higher angular resolution. That will require larger focal planes with more detection elements and a larger telescope.

Read more

Safety Update

ESH&Q weekly report, March 18

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

Find the full report here.

Announcements

Today's New Announcements

International folk dancing special workshop at Kuhn Barn - March 20

LabVIEW seminars scheduled on April 10

FermiPoint doctor-is-in booth in atrium - today and tomorrow

Emergency drills in Village - March today and tomorrow

URA Thesis Award competition deadline - March 20

Walk 2 Run begins March 20

Photography contest - through March 21

Two yoga classes offered - register by March 24

Weight Management registration deadline March 27

2014 FRA Scholarship applications due April 1

MySQL relational database management course - April 22-23

West bike rack area closed

Portions of west atrium stair closed for construction

Indoor soccer