Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2014
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Have a safe day!

Wednesday, Oct. 8

10 a.m.
Labwide celebration and NOvA presentation - Ramsey Auditorium

3 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium (NOTE TIME) - One West
Speaker: Venkat Selvamanickam, University of Houston
Title: Recent Advances in High Temperature Superconductors and Potential Applications

THERE WILL BE NO DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK TODAY

4 p.m.
Labwide celebration - Wilson Hall atrium

Thursday, Oct. 9

2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Yue Zhang, California Institute of Technology
Title: From the Higgs Boson to the Origin of Matter in the Universe

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

Visit the labwide calendar to view Fermilab events

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63°/45°

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Wednesday, Oct. 8

- Breakfast: breakfast pizza
- Breakfast: ham, egg and cheese English muffin
- Gyros
- Baked pork chops
- Chicken cacciatore
- California turkey wrap
- Chicken BLT salad
- Three bean overland soup
- Texas-style chili
- Assorted calzones

Wilson Hall Cafe menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, Oct. 8
Lunch
- Chicken schnitzel
- Smashed mustard potatoes
- Apple, fennel and celery slaw
- German chocolate cake

Friday, Oct. 10
Dinner
Guest chefs: Grace and Gary Leonard
- Mushroom and wild rice soup
- Tunisian fishcakes with aioli couscous
- Grilled asparagus
- Carottes rapees
- Praline pumpkin pie

Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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Special Announcement

Labwide celebration - today

Celebrate with your colleagues today!

A labwide celebration will kick off this morning at 10 a.m. in Ramsey Auditorium with a presentation by members of the NOvA team, followed by a coffee reception in the Wilson Hall atrium.

A dinner for all Fermilab employees and users will be held in the atrium beginning at 4 p.m. If you'd like to see the new ROC West up close, plan to attend the open house for the lab's neutrino operations center.

Feature

UEC elects William Louis as new committee chair

William Louis

In 1974, William Louis visited Fermilab for the first time as a graduate student performing neutrino experiments at the 15-foot bubble chamber. For the next 40 years he remained a recurring figure at the lab, frequently visiting as part of its vast community of scientific users. In September, Louis was elected chair of the Users Executive Committee.

"I think it's time for me to pay back to the community," he said, acknowledging the many committees who have supported his research in the past. Now he and the UEC want to back fellow researchers by finding ways to promote their work and improve their quality of life while here.

Louis succeeds Boston University's Lee Roberts as UEC chair and will serve a one-year term.

"Lee has done an outstanding job as UEC chair during the past, critical year, and he has had a huge impact on Fermilab and the nation's particle physics program," Louis said.

Roberts, who will remain a member of the committee for one more year, believes Louis will be an effective leader.

"The UEC will be in excellent hands this year," Roberts said. "Bill understands how to work with people and how to get things done. I look forward to working with him."

Louis represents Los Alamos National Laboratory in his work here on both long- and short-baseline neutrino experiments. But he's taking advantage of his new position to broaden his perspective of Fermilab research and understand the needs and accomplishments of its many sides. The committee's highest priorities for the coming year are promoting the entire Fermilab physics program in Washington, D.C., and abroad, improving the Fermilab research climate, and providing forums such as the annual Users Meeting to highlight outstanding research.

The more he's learned, the more impressed Louis has been with the work being done at Fermilab. He's convinced that Fermilab is poised to lead the way to the next generation of physics.

"The term 'new physics' is used often, but I think it's the case at Fermilab — whether it's in neutrinos, the Muon g-2 and Mu2e experiments, looking for dark matter and dark energy, or the CMS experiment at the LHC," Louis said. "I think all these programs have a great chance to discover and explore physics beyond the Standard Model."

Troy Rummler

The 2014-15 Users Executive Committee. Bottom row, from left: Fabio Happacher (INFN Frascati), Andre de Gouvea (Northwestern U), Sandra Biedron (Colorado State U), Linda Spentzouris (Illinois Institute of Technology), Thomas Strauss (U Bern), Bill Lee (Fermilab). Top row, from left: Fernand Garcia (Fermilab), William Louis (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Lee Roberts (Boston U), Tulika Bose (Boston University), Vivian O'Dell (Fermilab), Jesus Orduna (Brown U). Not pictured: Marcelle Soares-Santos (Fermilab). Photo: Cindy Arnold
In the News

New particle is both matter and antimatter

From Scientific American, Oct. 2, 2014

Since the 1930s scientists have been searching for particles that are simultaneously matter and antimatter. Now physicists have found strong evidence for one such entity inside a superconducting material. The discovery could represent the first so-called Majorana particle, and may help researchers encode information for quantum computers.

Physicists think that every particle of matter has an antimatter counterpart with equal mass but opposite charge. When matter meets its antimatter equivalent, the two annihilate one another. But some particles might be their own antimatter partners, according to a 1937 prediction by Italian physicist Ettore Majorana. For the first time researchers say they have imaged one of these Majorana particles, and report their findings in the October 3 Science.

Read more

In the News

The strangest theory we know is true

From Medium, Sept. 30, 2014

When you think of the strangest scientific theory ever, you probably think of quantum mechanics. With its particle-wave duality and collapsing wavefunctions, it can certainly be considered a strange theory. But I would argue that even more bizarre is the theory of relativity. In quantum theory objects behave strangely in space and time, but in relativity the very nature of space and time is questioned. Despite all of its consequences such as curved space, time dilation and interchange of mass and energy, we know relativity to be true. Not just "kind of" true, but provably true to a high degree of precision.

Read more

From the Core Computing Division

Heating, cooling and energy-saving at the Grid Computing Center

Adam Walters

Adam Walters, computing data center manager, wrote this column.

Fermilab's Grid Computing Center is dedicated to supporting experiments in their scientific endeavors. It houses thousands of computers and is the most compute- and power-intensive data center at Fermilab.

The effort to maintain Fermilab's data centers' reliability is a challenging one. Data centers run quietly in the background of the lab's scientific program, and when they run well, you shouldn't even notice. When there's a hiccup — even a few minutes of down time in one of our data centers — it can jeopardize scientific computing operations significantly. Our goal in the Core Computing Division is to operate reliable, efficient data centers. Two recent projects have helped us achieve this.

A recent improvement project conducted in collaboration with FESS relocated cooling condensers from the ground level to the roof of the existing Grid Computing Center. It successfully addressed a complex cooling problem that limited the cooling capacity of the system. The normal operation of the data center generates a substantial amount of heat, which is removed from the space by the computer room air conditioning units located in the data center and associated exterior condensers. By relocating the condensers to the roof, the system is able to achieve the maximum cooling capacity. This effectively improves the operation and reliability of the overall cooling system and provides energy-saving benefits.

The second project, cold aisle containment, has also improved our energy efficiency, not only at GCC, but at the Feynman and Lattice computing centers as well. Reducing the potential for mixing of the cool air and warm air is the key to reducing electrical energy consumption in the data center. Over the past year, cold aisle containment systems were deployed to ensure that cold air has the most direct path to the front of the servers and that warm exhaust air has the most direct path to the return plenum of the cooling units. The return on investment for this project is huge: Energy savings for cold aisle containment at GCC will pay for the project within 18 months.

Although these are our latest projects, our efforts to provide dependable and energy-efficient data centers have been ongoing. GCC has been awarded the Environmental Protection Agency's ENERGY STAR award for four consecutive years and is the first facility on site to meet ENERGY STAR's Guiding Principles for High Performance and Sustainable Buildings.

We look forward to continuing to do our part to enable the future science program at Fermilab by providing reliable and energy-efficient data centers.

Photo of the Day

Light from the east

Light streams in from east of the Village. Photo: Rich Blaustein, Office of Communication
Safety Update

ESH&Q weekly report, Oct. 7

This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ESH&Q Section, contains one incident.

An employee reported feeling discomfort in his left shoulder on Sept. 23. He has continued to experience aches since and has been given restrictions keeping him from performing his normal job functions. Restrictions are being accommodated.

See the full report.

Announcements

Today's New Announcements

Today - cafeteria closes at 2 p.m.; Users Center opens at 6 p.m.

Barn Dance - Oct. 12

Zumba Toning registration due Oct. 14

Gallery talk - Oct. 15

Ultimate Core class registration due Oct. 15

Labwide celebration - today

Town hall: Kerberos upgrade/ CryptoCard end of life - Oct. 9

NALWO annual potluck luncheon - Oct. 9

Nominations for Director's Award close Oct. 10

School's Day Out camp - Oct. 10, 13

CryptoCard end of life - Oct. 11

Paul Taylor's Taylor 2 Dance in Ramsey Auditorium - Oct. 11

Mat Pilates class now offered at Fermilab - register by Oct. 13

Lecture Series: Success and Failure in Engineering - Oct. 24

Writing for Results: Email and More (morning only) - Oct. 30

Managing Conflict course (morning only) - Nov. 5

eBook on writing winning proposals available sitewide

NALWO Playgroup meets Wednesdays at Users Center

International folk dancing Thursday evenings at Kuhn Barn

Scottish country dancing Tuesday evenings at Kuhn Barn

English country dancing at Kuhn Barn

Indoor soccer