Thursday, Aug. 21, 2014
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Have a safe day!

Thursday, Aug. 21

9 a.m.-5:30 p.m.
Fermilab-CERN Hadron Collider Physics Summer Symposium

1-6 p.m.
Nature Guiding Theory Workshop

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

THERE WILL BE NO THEORETICAL PHYSICS SEMINAR THIS WEEK

Friday, Aug. 22

9 a.m.-2:40 p.m.
Fermilab-CERN Hadron Collider Physics Summer Symposium

9 am.-5 p.m.
Nature Guiding Theory Workshop

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

4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Raman Sundrum, University of Maryland
Title: Super-Natural versus Other-Worldly in Fundamental Physics

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

Ongoing and upcoming conferences at Fermilab

Weather
Weather Thunderstorms
83°/73°

Extended forecast
Weather at Fermilab

Current Flag Status

Flags at full staff

Wilson Hall Cafe

Thursday, Aug. 21

- Breakfast: Canadian bacon, egg and cheese Texas toast
- Breakfast: corned beef hash and eggs
- Carolina pulled pork sandwich
- Smart cuisine: barbecue chicken breast
- Honey baked ham
- Buffalo chicken tender wrap
- Roast beef carvery
- White chicken chili
- Chef's choice soup
- Assorted pizza by the slice

Wilson Hall Cafe menu

Chez Leon

Friday, Aug. 22
Dinner
- Gazpacho salad
- Spicy flank steak
- Habanero pilaf
- Calabacitas
- Banana taco with papaya and strawberry salsa

Wednesday, Aug. 27
Lunch
- Skillet pork with warm pineapple salsa
- Basmati rice
- Haricots verts
- Profiteroles

Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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Feature

Experiment, theory meet at collider summer school

Students are meeting at Fermilab for two weeks for this year's Hadron Collider Physics Summer School. Photo: Reidar Hahn

The Hadron Collider Physics Summer School (HCPSS) made its biannual visit to Fermilab over the past two weeks, with a goal of uniting collider physics theory and experiment in the minds of graduate students and young postdocs.

"Experimentalists and theorists really work hand in hand on two ends of the same problem. There's a lot of interaction there," said the school's co-chair Richard Cavanaugh, of Fermilab and the University of Illinois at Chicago. "It's the marriage of these two communities that is really important to help the field progress."

Cavanaugh and school co-chair John Campbell, of Fermilab's Theory Group, hope this approach will help students understand their respective work with a broader perspective, which may be especially important at this stage in their careers.

"You spend a lot of time doing your particular thing for a Ph.D.," Campbell said. "You get to know the details of your subdetector or your analysis code or your calculation. Sometimes you can lose a little bit of the big picture."

Eighty students, the majority of whom come from outside the United States, have joined this year's series of lectures, discussions and activities, led by both Fermilab and visiting scientists and covering a spectrum of collider physics topics. Social activities have allowed participants to network within each other's areas of study. Feedback from the students has been positive, said Campbell and Cavanaugh, and the lectures have generated lots of questions and discussion.

Fermilab and CERN jointly produce HCPSS and alternate hosting the annual event. When Fermilab last hosted HCPSS in 2012, the Higgs particle discovery had only just been announced, so a major theme of lectures this year has been teaching the students about the reality of the Higgs and how it has shifted our understanding of particle physics.

"The school will definitely evolve in new directions as we understand the new data from the LHC," Cavanaugh said.

The two co-chairs will now join previous HCPSS chairs on its international advisory committee to help plan future incarnations of the school. Both are eager to find out what discoveries will be discussed in two years when it returns to Fermilab.

Troy Rummler

Photo of the Day

On the rocks

An American toad settles on the rocks by MI-62. Photo: Jamie Clemons, AD
In Brief

Fermilab retiree medical changes

Recently, Fermilab sent a letter to our retirees about upcoming changes to retiree medical benefits. The changes described in the letter will take effect Jan. 1, 2015, and will apply only to retirees and/or their spouses who are eligible for Medicare. This change does not apply to anyone who is covered under the Fermilab medical plans as an active employee, regardless of age or Medicare eligibility.

Fermilab is partnering with Towers Watson OneExchange to provide our Medicare-eligible retirees with a wide range of medical, prescription drug, dental and vision plans. Fermilab will provide each retiree with funds to be used to purchase these plans. OneExchange will help our Medicare-eligible retirees choose the best plan from the available options to meet their personal circumstances. This new program replaces the current HMO and PPO options available to Medicare-eligible retirees. This change does not apply to retirees or their spouses who are not eligible for Medicare.

The retiree announcement letter includes a schedule of retiree education meetings, which will be hosted by the WDRS Benefits Office and OneExchange. The meetings will help explain the new program to our Medicare-eligible retirees and ensure they understand the actions they need to take in the next few months to enroll in the new program.

A meeting is planned for active employees who wish to learn more about the program on Monday, Sept. 8 at 10 p.m. in the Big Room, which is in the CDF building.

Additional meetings and information for active employees about the new program will be provided during annual enrollment for benefits in October.

Please review these frequently asked questions about this retiree medical program change for active employees. If you have questions, please attend the meeting on Sept. 8. You may also email the Benefits Office with questions.

In the News

Space science: Dark Energy Survey into second year of chasing mysterious substance

From International Business Times, Aug. 19, 2014

The Dark Energy Survey has begun its second year of unravelling the mysterious, unknown stuff that makes up 68.3 percent of the universe.

Mapping the southern sky using the Dark Energy Camera, a 570-megapixel imaging device attached to a telescope in Chile, the survey completed its first year of survey just recently.

Read more

In the News

First indirect evidence of so-far undetected strange baryons

From Interactions.org, Aug. 19, 2014

New supercomputing calculations provide the first evidence that particles predicted by the theory of quark-gluon interactions but never before observed are being produced in heavy-ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a facility that is dedicated to studying nuclear physics. These heavy strange baryons, containing at least one strange quark, still cannot be observed directly, but instead make their presence known by lowering the temperature at which other strange baryons "freeze out" from the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) discovered and created at RHIC, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility located at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Read more

Frontier Science Result: CDF

Testing the Higgs boson's spin and parity with CDF

Best-fit signal strengths μ for two cases. Left: the Standard Model versus graviton-like boson (spin 2, positive parity) versus the Standard Model Higgs boson (spin 0, positive parity). Right: the pseudoscalar boson (spin 0, negative parity) versus the Standard Model Higgs boson.

Since the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN and the three-standard-deviation excess seen by the CDF and DZero experiments here at Fermilab, the experimental community has been focusing on measuring the properties of this new particle. It's important to determine whether there is just one new particle or if two or more are contributing to the observed data. The answer at the Tevatron could be different from that at the LHC, as the mixture of production mechanisms and the decays contributing to the most sensitive searches are different.

The Standard Model's predictions are that the Higgs boson has all the properties of a heavy piece of the vacuum — there's no electric charge, or any other kind of charge for that matter. It should have no intrinsic spin, and it should look the same when reflected in a mirror. In short, the only non-zero properties it is expected to have are its mass and its interaction rates with other particles.

But what if the particle is not the Standard Model Higgs boson but rather an exotic impostor? A Higgs-like particle could have spin, like a graviton. Or, like a pion, it could be a pseudoscalar — that is, its wave function could change sign (from positive to negative or vice versa) when viewed in a mirror. A group of theorists recently suggested that collisions at the Tevatron producing such Higgs impostors in association with the vector bosons W or Z would have very different measurable properties from those predicted for Standard Model Higgs events. The exotic Higgs bosons would have more kinetic energy on average than their Standard Model twins, and the recoiling vector bosons would also be going faster.

CDF has adapted its sophisticated searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson in the WH→lνbb, the ZH→llbb, and the VH→METbb modes to search for exotic Higgs bosons — the pseudoscalar boson, labeled 0- in the above figure, and a graviton-like spin-2 boson, labeled 2+. The exotic particles were assumed to be produced either in place of the Standard Model Higgs boson or in addition to it. The figure shows the best-fit signal strength parameters μ, which are scaled to the Standard Model Higgs boson signal strength, for both the 0- and 2+ searches.

In neither combined search is there any hint of the presence of an exotic Higgs boson, and we observe consistency with the presence of the Standard Model Higgs boson.

Tom Junk and Andy Beretvas

Learn more

These CDF physicists contributed to this data analysis. Top row, from left: Matteo Cremonesi (U. Oxford), Tom Junk (Fermilab), Azeddine Kasmi (Baylor). Second row, from left: Hao Liu (U. Virginia), Qiuguang Liu (Purdue), Yuri Oksuzian (U. Virginia). Third row, from left: Shalhout Shalhout (UC Davis), Michelle Stancari (Fermilab) and Costas Vellidis (Fermilab).
In Brief

Fun at the Instrumentation Department picnic

Randy Thurman-Keup (left) and Jim Zagel (throwing) participated in the Accelerator Division Instrumentation Department picnic with a friendly beanbag toss game. Photo: Elliott McCrory, AD

In addition to eating hamburgers, bratwursts and other traditional picnic foods, members of the Accelerator Division Instrumentation Department held a beanbag toss tournament at their summer picnic. Instrument Department Head Nathan Eddy, pictured below, was the clear winner of the tournament. His victory is reported not to have dampened the fun had by the other picnickers.

Nathan Eddy, Instrumentation Department head, tosses a red beanbag for the win. He competes with John Diamond, right. Photo: Elliott McCrory, AD
Announcements

Today's New Announcements

Road closure at Main Ring Road - Aug. 25-26

Strength Training registration due Aug. 28

Particle Fever screening for students, staff and users - today

Butts and Guts registration due Aug. 27

Walk 2 Run offers two time slots in August

NBI 2014 Workshop - Sept. 23-26

eBook by head of Technical Division available at the Fermilab Library

International folk dancing Thursday evenings at Ramsey through August

Scottish country dancing Tuesday evenings at Ramsey through August

English country dancing at Kuhn Barn

Bowlers wanted

Outdoor soccer

Batavia Smashburger employee discount