Thursday, Dec. 4, 2014
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Have a safe day!

Thursday, Dec. 4

2 p.m.
Neutrino Seminar Series - WH8XO
Speaker: Ornella Palamara, Fermilab
Title: Fermilab Short-Baseline Neutrino Program

2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Bridget Bertoni, University of Washington
Title: Dark Matter-Neutrino Interactions: Implications of Solving Small-Scale Structure Problems

3:30 p.m.
Director's Coffee Break - WH2XO

Friday, Dec. 5

3:30 p.m.
Director's Coffee Break - WH2XO

4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Martijn Mulders, CERN
Title: Recent Results on Top Quark Physics from CMS

Visit the labwide calendar to view Fermilab events

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35°/28°

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Thursday, Dec. 4

- Breakfast: Canadian bacon, egg and cheese Texas toast
- Breakfast: Greek omelet
- Ranch house steak sandwich
- Mediterranean baked tilapia
- Barbecue pork spareribs
- Rustic club flatbread sandwich
- General Tso's chicken
- Beef and rice soup
- Chef's choice soup
- Assorted pizza by the slice

Wilson Hall Cafe menu

Chez Leon

Friday, Dec. 5
Dinner
- Spinach and strawberry salad
- Lobster tail with champagne butter sauce
- Spaghetti squash with scallions
- Grilled asparagus
- Cold lemon souffle

Wednesday, Dec. 10
Lunch
- Salmon Wellington
- Parmesan orzo
- Lemon Napoleon

Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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Feature

Hasan Padamsee earns APS Wilson Prize

Hasan Padamsee

Hasan Padamsee, chief technology officer and head of the Technical Division, is now also the recipient of the American Physical Society's Robert R. Wilson Prize. The 2015 award, which will be presented at the IPAC 2015 meeting in May, recognizes his outstanding achievement in the physics of particle accelerators.

Specifically, the citation acknowledges his "leadership and pioneering world-renowned research in superconducting radio-frequency physics, materials science and technology, which contributed to remarkable advances in the capability of particle accelerators."

That's no modest wording, and Padamsee is honored to accept it.

"The people who have gotten this award in the past are people who have done wonderful things. I feel humbled to be in their company," Padamsee said.

Sergei Nagaitsev, who chaired the selection committee, says the award is well-deserved.

"The main criteria we were looking for were a high impact in both particle and accelerator physics and unquestionable respect in both communities," said Nagaitsev, head of Fermilab's Accelerator Division and chief accelerator officer.

Padamsee came to Fermilab in June from Cornell University, where he contributed 40 years of research to the field of superconducting radio-frequency cavities. There, he initiated the 1990 organization of TESLA (TeV Energy Superconducting Linear Accelerator), a scientific community commissioned to study the application of SRF cavities to linear colliders. Many of his doctoral students have also made key contributions of their own within SRF fields.

Notably, Padamsee accomplished a solution to "breakdown," when superconducting cavities spontaneously become normal conductors above an RF magnetic field threshold. Minute imperfections such as inclusions on the RF surface, he realized, carry RF current by induction and heat up, warming the surrounding surface to the superconducting critical temperature at a limiting field. Although such defects can be reduced, they can't be completely eliminated — especially on a large scale. Instead, he proposed increasing the bulk material's thermal conductivity to carry away heat effectively and prevent thermal breakdown. His solution has led to significant improvements in the quality of niobium and performance of SRF cavities.

"Without his contributions, SRF technology would not be ready today for the most modern accelerators that are under construction and development," Nagaitsev said.

As head of the Technical Division, Padamsee anticipates great advances in SRF technology at Fermilab.

"Fermilab is in a strong position," he said. "Having built up a powerful infrastructure, we can now build SRF-based accelerators. At the same time we have gathered a lot of intellectual muscle to push the field even further towards its ultimate limits."

Troy Rummler

In Brief

Schedule change: Pace Batavia Call-n-Ride afternoon departures from Fermilab

Effective Monday, Dec. 8, the Pace Batavia Call-n-Ride trip that operates from Fermilab to the Metra Geneva train station at 4:17 p.m. will depart five minutes earlier, at 4:12 p.m.

The earlier 4:12 p.m. departure time will help improve schedule reliability.

Updated schedules will be posted on the Pace bus website.

In Brief

Retirement savings plans move to Fidelity Feb. 2, 2015

Effective Feb. 2, 2015, Fidelity will be the sole provider of retirement savings plan administration and record-keeping services. This includes the 401a, 403b and 457b plans. A new menu of well-diversified investment options in our retirement plans will be available. The new investment menu is not limited to the Fidelity family of mutual funds.

We will implement these retirement plan changes over the next few months. You are invited to attend on-site town hall meetings, which take place today at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. in One West and on Friday at 10 a.m. in Curia II. You may also schedule a one-on-one appointment with a Fidelity planning and guidance consultant by calling 800-642-7131.

Please review the transition guide and schedule of events mailed to you on Nov. 24, or visit the Fidelity transition website for more information.

In the News

New images refine view of infant universe

From The New York Times, Dec. 1, 2014

In a throwback to another era in cosmic history, astronomers on Monday discussed the birth of the universe at a meeting in a 15th-century palace, the Palazzo Costabili in Ferrara, Italy, where the amenities do not include Internet access.

The subject of Planck 2014, as the meeting is called, is a new baby picture — and all of the accompanying vital statistics — of the universe when it was 380,000 years old and space was as hot as the surface of the sun. The portrait taker was the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, which spent three years surveying a haze of microwave radiation left over from the last moments of the Big Bang with a bevy of sensitive radio receivers.

Read more

Frontier Science Result: CDF

Wading through the swamp to measure top quark mass

The black dots plot the distribution of the reconstructed top mass for events containing one or more b-tags. The distribution is compared to the expected yield for background and signal events, normalized to the best fit.

Even after the discovery of the Higgs boson, the top quark is still a focus of attention because of its peculiar position of being the heaviest quark in the Standard Model and for its possible role in physics beyond the Standard Model.

If the Standard Model is correct, the stability of the vacuum strongly depends on the mass of the Higgs boson and the top quark mass. In this context, scientists favor the scenario that the universe is in a metastable state. A precision measurement of the top quark mass helps to better determine the relative stability of that state in this scenario.

At the Tevatron, top quarks were produced, mostly in pairs, only once in about 10 billion collisions. They decayed right away into a W boson and a b quark. In the most abundant and yet most challenging scenario, the final state contains six collimated sprays of particles, called jets, two of which likely originated from the b quarks, with peculiar, identifiable characteristics (allowing them to be "b-tagged"). This decay mode is usually called the all-hadronic channel, for which the signal is swamped by a background associated to the production of uninteresting multijet events, which were about a factor of 1,000 more abundant than the signal events.

This new analysis uses the full CDF Run II data set.
The set contains nearly twice the number of top quark pairs as seen in our previous measurement. The analysis uses an improved simulation and relies on there being at least one b-tagged jet. An important part of the analysis is to minimize the uncertainty in our measurement of jet scale energies. Exploiting the expected behavior of top-antitop signal events, the huge background can be tamed through finely tuned requirements, yielding about 4,000 events, where about one event out of three is expected from the signal. The all-hadronic final state can then be fully reconstructed using the energies of the six jets, and the mass of the top quark can be derived comparing the data to simulations produced for different input values of the top quark mass (see the above figure).

This procedure yields a value of 175.1 ± 1.2 (stat) ± 1.6 (sys) GeV/c2 for the top quark mass, with a 1 percent relative precision. This measurement complements the results obtained by CDF in other channels. Our measurement is consistent with the current world average (which includes our previous measurement in the all-hadronic channel), obtained from measurements by ATLAS, CDF, CMS and DZero. The top quark mass world average is 173.3 ± 0.8 GeV/c2.

edited by Andy Beretvas

Learn more

From left: Luca Brigliadori and Andrea Castro, both from INFN, University of Bologna, are the primary analysts for this result.
Photo of the Day

Magnolia

Throwback Thursday to a previous season: These magnolias bloomed in 2004 by the pond west of Wilson Hall. Photo: Leticia Shaddix, PPD
Announcements

Today's New Announcements

English country dancing Sunday afternoons at Kuhn Barn - Dec. 7, Jan. 4

Budker Seminar - Dec. 8

New time for Pace Call-n-Ride departure from Fermilab starts Dec. 8

Goal Setting in FermiWorks course - today

Zumba Fitness registration due today

RSVP for Fermilab Family Holiday Party by Dec. 5

Reduced Shakespeare Company's Ultimate Christmas Show (abridged) - Dec. 6

Opera concert at Fermilab by international artists - Dec. 7

NALWO winter coffee and tea - Dec. 8

HEPAP meeting available by ReadyTalk - Dec. 8-9

Wilson Hall Super Science Stocking Stuffer Sale - Dec. 10-11

Artist reception - Dec. 12

No on-site prescription safety eyewear - Dec. 24 and 31

Fidelity town hall meetings this week

Scottish country dancing Tuesday evenings at Kuhn Barn

International folk dancing Thursdays evenings at Kuhn Barn

Indoor soccer

Norris Recreation Center discount for employees