Fermilab TodayThursday, January 8, 2004  
Calendar
Thursday, January 8
2:30 p.m. Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: G. Kribs, Institute for Advanced Study
Title: The Supersymmetric Composite "Fat Higgs" Model
3:30 p.m. DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4:00 p.m. Accelerator Physics and Technology Seminar - 1 West
Speaker: R. Thurman-Keup, Lucent Technologies
Title: The World of Cellular Communications

Friday, January 9
3:30 p.m. DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4:00 p.m. Joint Experimental Theoretical Physics Seminar - 1 West
Speaker: K. Hicks, Ohio University
Title: Evidence for the Pentaquark: An Exotic Baryon

Cafeteria
Thursday, January 8
Old Fashioned Tomato soup
Honely glazed pork chop w/two market sides $4.75
Chicken curry w/wild rice and apricots $3.50
Roast beef w/grilled portabella mushrooms and fresh mozzarella $4.75
Buffalo style chicken wings w/celery sticks and bleu cheese or ranch for dipping $4.75
Hand rolled Hanabi sushi
Mediterranean tortellini pasta salad $2.50

Eurest Dining Center Weekly Menu
Chez Leon
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Annual Christmas Bird Count Draws Large Crowd -- and Birds Too
Peregrine falcon
Peregrine Falcon
Bufflehead. European Starling. Brown Creeper. They're not rock bands, they're birds. And all of them have been sighted at Fermilab.

Every year since 1976 a group of amateur birdwatchers has spent a day in December counting the birds at Fermilab. This annual Christmas Bird Count is part of the Audubon Society's national bird census. Peter Kasper of the Accelerator Division helps organize Fermilab's count and says he has seen 270 species on Fermilab property. "There are bird lists in national parks that don't match that number. And we get rare ones too," Kasper said. This year a Peregrine Falcon was counted at Fermilab for the first time.

More than 80 people showed up to count birds this year on and off Fermilab property, some at 4:30 in the morning. Kasper notes sightings on his Palm Pilot, then uses custom software to upload data to his computer and analyze it statistically. All of the results are posted on Fermilab's Christmas bird count website. "The website has become very popular," Kasper said. "It has drawn birdwatchers to Fermilab from other birding areas."

Accelerator Update
January 5 - January 7
- Tevatron ran smoothly without any major problems
- Operations established 1 store during the last forty-eight hours. They delivered approximately forty three hours and thirty minutes of luminosity to the experiments.

View the current accelerator update
View the Tevatron Luminosity Charts

In the News
From the Daily Herald, January 7, 2004
Fermilab reaching out to the community
By Lisa Smith
Fermilab officials are looking for better ways to reach out to the community around the laboratory's Batavia campus.

They have hired a consultant and plan to invite local politicians, educators, business owners and other residents to be a part of roundtable discussions about proposed projects.
read more

From The Globe and Mail, January 3, 2004
Are there parallel worlds?
By Dan Falk
We live in three dimensions: You can go north-south, east-west or up-down. Simple enough. If you add one more dimension for time -- as Albert Einstein suggested -- that's four altogether.

That's plenty for most of us. And, until recently, it would have been enough for most physicists as well. But the past few years have brought a flurry of new ideas about the structure of the universe, and physicists are now contemplating multidimensional worlds that put our seemingly-three-dimensional surroundings to shame.
read more

Fermilab Result of the Week
Searching For Rare Charm Decays at CDF
CDF Result of the Week
The fraction of D0 mesons that decay to a pair of muons, much too small to measure in the Standard Model, could be enhanced dramatically by the exchange of non-Standard-Model particles. (Click on photo for larger version.)
CDF's displaced-track trigger, new for Run II, has yielded charm samples comparable in size to those of the B factories, prompting a number of physics analyses not envisioned in CDF's original Run II plan. An example is the
Bill Ashmanskas
Bill Ashmanskas
worked on the dis-
placed-track trigger
and the search for
D0->mumu at CDF.
He is now moving
from Argonne to
Cornell, and will spend
the intervening spring
semester in Fermilab's
accelerator division.
improved upper bound on the decay of a charm meson called D0 to two muons (D0 --> µ+µ-) presented in CDF's third Run II publication.

This decay is not forbidden in the Standard Model, but cancellations suppress the expected rate to less than one in a trillion D0 decays, much too small to be seen by any present experiment. Thus, any observation of the decay (D0 --> µ+µ-) is a sure sign of non-Standard-Model physics. Theorists have proposed numerous scenarios in which the decay rate can be enhanced, in some cases by a factor of a million:
Rob Harr
Rob Harr is an assoc-
iate professor at Wayne
State University, presently
on sabbatical and working
in CDF operations.
extra Higgs bosons, some classes of supersymmetry, and large extra dimensions are examples.

The D0 mesons produced at the Tevatron commonly decay to two pions (D0 --> pi pi) after traveling less than a millimeter. CDF's displaced-track trigger selects both rare (D0 --> µ+µ-) events and common (D0 --> pi pi) events equally well. The two decays are differentiated by the presence or absence of signals in the muon detector. Finding no (D0 --> µ+µ-) events in 65 pb-1 of data collected in 2002, CDF published a new upper bound on this process of 2.5x10-6, a 40% improvement on the previous limits of the BEATRICE and E771 experiments. CDF will improve further on this result with the additional data being accumulated.

Announcements
Missing Book
The following book: Developing the Horizons of the Mind: Relational and Contextual Reasoning and the Resolution of Cognitive Conflict by K. Helmut Reich was on the new books display in the Fermilab Library, but is now missing. If you have it, please bring it back to the library office, or put it in inter-office mail (Library MS 109), as someone has requested it.

Join the Fermilab Singers in 2004!
The first rehearsal of the new year will be held in Ramsey Auditorium on Wednesday, January 14 at noon. We will begin to prepare for our summer concert. If you enjoy to sing and have fun, plan to come and join us! If you have any questions feel free to contact Anne Heavey.

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