Fermilab TodayThursday, March 10, 2005  
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Thursday, March 10
11:00 a.m. Research Techniques Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: D. Reyna, Argonne National Laboratory
Title: Double-CHOOZ: A New Experiment to Measure Theta_13
2:30 p.m. Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: H-C. Cheng, Harvard University
Title: Little Hierarchy Problem and Little Higgs Theories
3:30 p.m. DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY

Friday, March 11
3:30 p.m. DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4:00 p.m. Joint Experimental Theoretical Physics Seminar - 1 West
Speaker: J. Olsen, Princeton University
Title: The Other Angles: Measurements of a and g at BaBar

Weather
Weather Light Snow 35º/26º

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Secon Level 3

Cafeteria
Thursday, March 10
Minnesota Wild Rice with Chicken
Tuna Melt on Nine Grain $4.75
Breaded Veal with Mushroom Cream Sauce $3.75
Sweet & Sour Pork over Rice $3.75
BLT Ranch Wrap $4.75
Double Stuffed Pizza $3.25
Chicken Pecan Salad $4.75

The Wilson Hall Cafe now accepts Visa, Master Card, Discover and American Express at Cash Register #1.

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu
Chez Leon is now open. Call x4512 to make your reservation.

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Party Photos Show the Fun
Lab-wide party
More than 1,000 people attended the lab-wide party last Friday. (Click on image for larger version.)
The turnout was great, the music was lively, and people had fun. On Friday afternoon, March 4, more than 1,000 people celebrated a lab-wide party in the balloon-decorated atrium of Wilson Hall, following the dedication of the NuMI/MINOS project in Ramsey Auditorium.

Deborah Guzman, Visual Media Services, and Jackie Coleman, Directorate, found lots of smiling faces as they captured the event with their cameras. Fermilab Today invites its readers to browse through a photo album of the best photos.

The party, sponsored by URA, was organized by committee chaired by Jeff Appel, with a membership of Margie Bruce, Liz Buckely-Geer, Linda Christiansen, Jackie Coleman, Ethel Hall, Catherine James, Barb Kristen, Traci Langford, Elizabeth May, Elaine McCluskey, Mike Perricone, Monica Sasse and Marilyn Smith. From the improved setup to the larger amount of food, the party organization committee followed the suggestions made by employees after the last lab-wide party. Fermilab Today thanks everybody for the fun event.
- Kurt Riesselmann

Computing Division Achieves New Safety Record
CD Safety Record
Vicky White (left) and Jed Brown get ready to cut the cake at Tuesday's scheduling meeting. (Click on image for larger version.)
In Tuesday's scheduling meeting, ES&H presented Computing Division Head Vicky White with a cake in recognition of the division's recent safety record. As of March 8, Fermilab's Computing Division has worked 1,509,153 hours without a DART case. This accomplishment surpassed the Particle Physics Division's record of 1,500,459 hours.

"This is really an excellent achievement and shows that people are keeping their heads focused on working safely, sensibly assessing and dealing with hazards, and following procedures," White said in a congratulatory e-mail to the Computing Division. "Thank you to everyone for working safely and for the lively participation in formulating our safety plan."

Director Mike Witherell presented the Computing Division with a plaque for the best sustained safety record at the ES&H Executive Committee meeting on February 22. "I'd like to give credit to all the people who made safety a priority, and to have you pass this on to all the people in your division," Witherell said. Fermilab's Business Services Section also received an award for the most improved safety record.
- Elizabeth Clements

Accelerator Update
March 7- March 9
- During this 48 hour period Operations established one store that combined with an existing store provided the experiments with approximately 27 hours and 13 minutes of luminosity
- Pbar and NuMI commission new stacking TLG module
- KRF6 problems held off beam
- Booster Watchdog power supply held off beam
- H- Source suffers from intensity drop
- Store 4027 quenched
- Debuncher Kicker problem halted stacking
- TeV trim magnet fails

Read the Current Accelerator Update
Read the Early Bird Report
View the Tevatron Luminosity Charts

In the News
Sara Stein was married to architect Martin Stein, the president of Urban Associates in New York City. Urban Associates was one of three architectural firms that worked with founding director Robert Wilson to design Fermilab's site as we know it today. Stein recently told Associate Director Jed Brown that he is most of proud of his work at Camp Drum in Upstate New York, Cape Canaveral and Fermilab.

From the New York Times, March 9, 2005
Sara Stein, Garden Advocate for the Use of Native Plants, Dies at 69
By Christopher Lehman-Haupt
Sara Stein, an influential advocate for gardening with native plants, died Feb. 25 at her home in Vinalhaven, Me. She was 69.

The cause was lung cancer, said her husband, Martin Stein.
read more

Fermilab Result of the Week
Flip-Flopping Matter and
Anti-Matter

DZero
DZero
A sample of 13,300 reconstructed decays of Bs -> Ds mu nu X (Ds phi pi) are available for flavor tagging using muon and secondary vertex information from the opposite side of the reconstructed Bs meson. The asymmetry between "mixed" (with a Bs meson formed at production, but an anti-Bs meson at decay, or vice versa) and "unmixed" candidates as a function of visible proper decay length is shown in the top plot. Since no significant oscillations are observed in the asymmetry, the Bs mixing frequency is determined to be greater than 5.0 ps-1 (bottom plot). (Click on image for larger version.)
A curious property of a neutral Bs meson (b-antiquark and s-quark), is that it can spontaneously become (or "oscillate into") its own anti-particle, i.e., become an anti-meson that contains a b-quark and a s-antiquark, and back again. Such oscillations are characterized by a frequency related to a parameter called DeltaMs.

The same phenomenon was observed for the neutral Bd meson (b-antiquark and a d-quark) in the mid 1980's, and almost everyone was surprised by the large probability of oscillation. In fact, this large value
DZero
Sergey Burdin
implied that the top quark would have to be very heavy, which was subsequently confirmed by its discovery in 1995 at Fermilab.

Our current understanding of the theory of matter leads us to believe that Bs mesons oscillate much faster than Bd mesons; consequently their oscillations are very difficult to detect; almost all Bs mesons turn into anti-mesons in a fraction of a trillionth of a second. Measuring the frequency of oscillation is of the utmost importance,
Dmitri
Dmitri Tsybychev
since a deviation from predictions could point to some unexpected new force or interaction lurking around the corner.

At present, Bs mesons can only be studied at Fermilab. DZero has made an attempt at measuring Bs oscillations, and for now we claim that DeltaMs is larger than 5.0 ps-1 (this is already ten times faster than Bd oscillations). Although this initial result is not as restrictive as some previous results, it is a proof of principle that this analysis can be performed by DZero. We have many improvements in the works. Stay tuned!

Hal Evans Tulika Bose
Hal Evans (left) and Tulika Bose (right), both of Columbia University, and Dmitri Tsybychev (above), of SUNY Stony Brook, and Sergey Burdin (above), of Fermilab, have contributed, with many other colleagues, to this analysis and other analyses involving B hadrons.
Wyatt Merritt Adam Lyon
Wyatt Merritt (left) and Adam Lyon and work on DZero’s data grid project SAM which allows access to experimental data to researchers around the world.

Result of the Week Archive

Announcements
New issue of symmetry
The March issue of symmetry is now online. To get notified when the next issue is available, please sign up for the email notification.

Fermilab Employee Art Show
The deadline to submit an intent application for the Fermilab Employee Art Show is March 10. Artwork must be submitted to the the gallery on April 4 and April 5. The Artist Reception for the show will be on April 20 from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Employees will pick up their artwork on June 1 and June 2. Contact Georgia Schwender for more information.

Volunteer Translators Needed for Education Materials
In celebration of the World Year of Physics the Fermilab Education Office is looking for volunteers to translate a few of our resources. After polling teachers internationally, we have selected some physical science and physics materials at the middle and high school levels. With assistance, we can share these activities in some of the major world languages. If you would like to volunteer, Susan Dahl at sdahl@fnal.gov or x3094 Please include what materials and what language you are able to translate.
more information

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