Friday, Jan. 30, 2015
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Have a safe day!

Friday, Jan. 30

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

4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Hugh Lippincott, Fermilab
Title: Recent Results from PICO - Searching for Dark Matter with Bubble Chambers

Monday, Feb. 2

2 p.m.
Particle Astrophysics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Alvaro Chavarria, KICP – University of Chicago
Title: Status of DAMIC at SNOLAB

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

4 p.m.
All Experimenters' Meeting - Curia II

Visit the labwide calendar to view Fermilab events

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26°/18°

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Friday, Jan. 30

- Breakfast: big game breakfast
- Breakfast: chorizo and egg burrito
- Tailgaters' backyard pulled pork burger
- Mediterranean baked talapia
- Southern fried seahawk
- Gameday sub sandwich
- Super Bowl burrito
- New England clam chowder
- Texas-style chili
- Assorted pizza by the slice

Wilson Hall Cafe menu

Chez Leon

Friday, Jan. 30
Dinner
- Zucchini fitters with yogurt dill sauce
- Grilled swordfish with marmalade-ginger glaze
- Spinach risotto
- Lemon cheesecake

Wednesday, Feb. 4
Lunch
- Cornish hen with garlic and rosemary
- Parsley potatoes
- Brussels sprouts
- Pumpkin pie

Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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Feature

Two take on new leadership roles on U.S. CMS program

Lothar Bauerdick
 
Vivian O'Dell

In March, the Large Hadron Collider will start up again, colliding particles at unprecedented high energies and opening up new worlds of discovery.

In preparation for the LHC’s restart, the U.S. CMS group (consisting of the roughly 1,000 U.S. scientists working on the CMS experiment) has announced a new leadership team, including one new position.

Patricia McBride, recent U.S. CMS operations program manager, moved to become the head of Fermilab’s Particle Physics Division last year. Lothar Bauerdick, who was deputy head of Fermilab’s Scientific Computing Division and in charge of U.S. CMS Software and Computing, replaced McBride as the new U.S. CMS operations program manager. Vivian O’Dell, who was earlier in charge of U.S. CMS Detector Operations, has assumed the newly created position of U.S. CMS Phase II upgrade project manager. Both Bauerdick and O’Dell assumed their new positions the first week in January.

As operations program manager, Bauerdick oversees approximately 50 Fermilab employees, more than 100 university personnel involved directly with the U.S. CMS program, and many others who participate in some way in U.S. CMS.

“It is a very exciting time for me, working with the nearly 1,000 people involved in U.S. CMS across some 50 U.S. institutions,” Bauerdick said.

In her new position, O’Dell will lead the U.S. contributions to the Phase II upgrade for CMS, to ready the CMS detector for high-luminosity collisions beginning in 2025. The LHC is expected to collect the bulk of its data, about 3,000 inverse femtobarns, in about 10 years.

Of the newly created position, O’Dell said, “It was a decision by the director that this was an important enough project that we need someone to be paying attention now. And he is absolutely right.”

O’Dell says that she expects to be heavily involved with consulting partners, especially university colleagues.

“I will be traveling to the universities and listening to my university colleagues’ thoughts about contributing to the Phase II upgrade and what kind of expertise they want to develop,” O’Dell said.

Bauerdick‘s immediate priority is readying the whole team for the restart of LHC operations in the spring.

“Both Fermilab’s Computing and Particle Physics divisions are contributing vital resources to the CMS experiment,” he said.

“This year the LHC is going to collide protons at 13 TeV, which is the new energy frontier after the previous 8 TeV LHC run, and a huge discovery opportunity,” Bauerdick said. “We found the Higgs boson in the last run, and we think there must be some new physics around the corner. We get a glimpse around that corner this year.”

Rich Blaustein

Photo of the Day

Curves

The Meson Building's distinctive half-pipe roof is one of the outstanding architectural features at Fermilab. Photo: Elliott McCrory, AD
In the News

Particle physics: a new awakening?

From The Economist, Jan. 29, 2015

For more than 80 years particle physicists have had to think big, even though the things they are paid to think about are the smallest objects that exist. Creating exotic particles means crashing quotidian ones (electrons and protons) into each other. The more exotic the output desired, the faster these collisions must be. That extra speed requires extra energy, and therefore larger machines.

Read more

In the News

How "second sound" helps the Large Hadron Collider work

From Io9, Jan. 29, 2015

Superfluids have many extraordinary properties. One of them is called "second sound" even though it doesn't have anything to do with sound waves. It does have something to do with making the Large Hadron Collider work, though. Find out why.

Superfluids are special materials that, when cooled to a certain point, have no viscosity. Viscosity means internal friction, and it restricts the flow of the fluid. Without any restrictions to their internal flow, superfluids can do all kinds of crazy things, like climbing the walls of a container.

Read more

Frontier Science Result: CMS

One measurement, many implications

Distribution of mass calculations for pairs of jets: Black points are real data and colored peaks show what two sample models would look like (W' and excited quarks). See the paper for detailed plots.

Four months ago, I wrote about a CMS result that had implications for three distinct theories of new physics. I spoke too soon — a new result constrains seven.

In this new measurement, CMS scientists identified proton collisions that produce two jets and, assuming that these jets are the only products of a single-particle decay, they computed the mass of that particle. In most cases, the two jets don't really come from a particle with a well-defined mass, so this interpretation produces a smooth distribution of masses.

Many theories of new physics predict new kinds of particles, and many of them would decay into pairs of jets. If one of these new particles exists, it would show up in the two-jet-mass plot as a narrow peak at a single mass on top of the smooth distribution. In a recent paper, CMS scientists extended the search for peaks up to 5 TeV. Since they didn't see any, they systematically excluded theoretical models within that mass range.

I have oversimplified the search procedure a bit: the scientists used additional tools, such as methods to determine the jets came from b quarks, and tuned some searches for special cases, such as wide jets. This paper actually represents a constellation of new physics searches based on the central theme of peaks in the two jet mass distribution.

tar

In rapid succession, the models are: (1) resonances from string theory, on the assumption that the energy scale for string theory is much lower than it appears to be; (2) scalar diquarks from grand unified theories; (3) excited quarks from oscillations of smaller particles that might be inside of the quarks; (4) axigluons and colorons, which would be heavy cousins of gluons in extended models of the strong force; (5) W' and Z' bosons, heavy cousins of the W and Z bosons that comprise the weak force; (6) Randall-Sundrum gravitons, or gravitons oscillating between our string-theory brane and another; and (7) microscopic black holes. Yes, these are the hypothetical black holes that caused so much controversy just before the LHC turned on, and there's still no sign of them.

Jim Pivarski

The above physicists contributed to this analysis.
The above members of Fermilab's Visual Media Services are instrumental in making a series of videos that describe particle physics concepts to a general audience.
Announcements

Today's New Announcements

MS Office 2013/Office 365: Transition from Office 2010 on Feb. 17

Artist reception - Feb. 4

English country dancing at Kuhn Barn - Feb. 1 and March 1

Windows users: Adobe software upgrade and licensing change - Feb. 3

Vaughan Athletic Center membership rates effective Feb. 3

Artist Reception - Feb. 4

Barnstormers Delta Dart Night - Feb. 11

Writing for Results: Email and More - Feb. 27

Fermilab Functions - March 3, 5, 11

Interpersonal Communication Skills course - March 10

Managing Conflict course - March 24

2015 FRA scholarship applications accepted until April 1

URA Thesis Award competition

Microsoft Office 2013 ebooks

Windows 8.1 approved for use

GSA updates mileage rate to 57.5 cents for 2015

Fermi Singers seek new members in new year

Abri Credit Union appreciates our members

The Take Five challenge and poster winter 2014/2015

Scottish country dancing Tuesday evenings at Kuhn Barn

Indoor soccer