Monday, July 24
PARTICLE ASTROPHYSICS SEMINARS WILL RESUME IN THE FALL
3:30 p.m. Director's Coffee Break - 2nd floor crossover
4:00 p.m. All Experimenters' Meeting - Curia II
Tuesday, July 25
12:00 p.m. Summer Lecture Series - Auditorium
Speaker: H. Ray, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Title: Neutrinos
3:30 p.m. DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY
SEMINAR TODAY
Click here for a full calendar with links to additional information.
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Monday, July 24
-Minestroni
-Chicken & Mushroom Cheese Steak
-Baked Chicken Enchiladas
-Pot Roast
-Garden Turkey
-Assorted Slice Pizza
-Szechuan Green Bean w/Chicken
The Wilson Hall Cafe accepts Visa, Master Card, Discover and American Express. Wilson Hall Cafe Menu |
Wednesday, July 26
Lunch
-Danish Open Sandwiches
-Cucumber Salad w/Dill
-Apple Walnut Cake w/Crème Chantilly
Thursday, July 27
Dinner
-Grilled Calamari w/Garlic and Peppers
-Lamb Rib Chops
-Capponata
-Cannellini Bean Puree
-Gran Marnier Soufflé
Chez Leon Menu
Call x4598 to make your reservation. |
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Will a muon collider push leptons past the Terascale?
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Fermilab Director Pier Oddone has charged a new task force with exploring the possibility of a muon collider. |
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For more than a decade, physicists have searched for a way to achieve lepton collisions above 1TeV. In light of recent technical and conceptual developments, Fermilab Director Pier Oddone has charged a new task force with exploring the possibility of a muon collider, which theoretically has the potential to bring lepton collisions into the terascale and beyond.
"Lepton collisions above 1 TeV are likely to be a big part of the future of particle physics and this is one possibility for doing that," said Steve Holmes, Associate Director for Accelerators. Discussion of a muon collider at the Snowmass '96 conference found the concept to be technically daunting, but new advances in cooling methods and magnet design have sparked renewed interest.
"The greatest challenge we face is how to 'cool' or focus the beam to maximize the luminosity," said Steve Geer, co-leader of the new task force with Vladimir Shiltsev. Two types of magnets must be developed: a helical solenoid, which can perform six-dimensional cooling, cooling both the particle's position and momentum in three dimensional space; and a final focusing magnet, which will need a field strength of about 50 Tesla, or some six times the strength of LHC magnets.
Plans for a preliminary cooling channel design concept, cooling channel R&D and component developing and testing are due by September 2006. Subsequent reports on research and testing will be due in September 2007, and the design concept will be revised in 2007 and again in 2008. R&D efforts planned for the ILC may also be useful: while the manner of providing collisions between
muons and anti-muons is different than between electrons and positrons, the
technology needed for accelerating on the beams could be the same. "We have good new ideas and good people are available. The time is right," said Shiltsev. "We will see just how realistic the future of this technology is."
--Ben Berger
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Gene Guyer Former Fermilab employee Gene Guyer (father of LSS employee Jean Guyer) recently passed away.
There will be a wake Monday, July 24, from
4 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the
Dieterle Memorial Home at
1120 S. Broadway Street in
Montgomery, IL. The
funeral will be held Tuesday, July 25, at
10:00 a.m. at
St Anne's Church in
Oswego.
Burial will follow the funeral at Riverside Cemetery in Montgomery.
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Science, July 21, 2006:
NSF Reopens Competition for Site to Build Underground Lab
The long, strange quest to build a U.S. underground lab has taken another unexpected turn. A year ago, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that only two locations remained in the running to house the proposed Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL)--which would conduct experiments in particle physics, geology, microbiology, and other fields (Science, 29 July 2005, p. 682). But last month, NSF reopened the site competition to all comers. The reversal was prompted by an appeal from a losing group, but that group has now decided not to reapply.
Read More (subscription required)
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Attentiveness |
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On occasion, people ignore even obvious signs that things are going wrong. |
As our lab director pointed out in his column last week, "most accidents at Fermilab are the result of poor work practices, lack of focus or complacency. " This observation is consistent with the results of numerous accident prevention studies. In general, attentiveness is a major factor in more than half of all accidents. But why is this so?
After repeating a task, people develop an expectation about how things work. They establish "mental shortcuts" to selectively block out unnecessary information. This provides the benefits of reducing stress and improving efficiency. However, the shortcuts can be imperfect and information needed to prevent accidents may be blocked as well. This can easily lead to difficulty if something unusual occurs. On occasion, people will even ignore obvious signs that things are going wrong, and they behave, incorrectly, as if all is normal.
Unfortunately, urging people to simply "pay more attention" seldom has a significant or lasting effect. There are three factors to consider in managing worker attentiveness:
- Worker selection - Like other characteristics, people vary in their ability to pick out and use the information that is presented to them.
- Diminished abilities - Vigilance can be adversely affected by fatigue, poor health, major life events or medication.
- Mental workload - Too much or too little can be bad: Too much work can tax abilities, while too little can create complacency.
Safety Tip of the Week Archive
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Why Work at Fermilab?
The Employment Department is conducting an employee survey to find out why you enjoy working at Fermilab. Some of your answers will be posted on the Employment website as another avenue to help attract candidates to the lab. Click here to start the survey. It should take you about 2-3 minutes to complete.
Upcoming Activities |
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