 | Friday, October 6, 2006 |
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Friday, October 6
Monday, October 9
Saturday, October 7 Click here for a full calendar with links to additional information. |
Sunny 65º/40º
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Secon Level 3 |
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Friday, October 6 -New England Clam Chowder -Black & Blue Cheese Burger -Mardi Gras Jambalaya -Swedish Meatballs -Bistro Chicken & Provolone Panini -Assorted Slice Pizza -Carved Top Round of Beef Upcoming Menu |
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Wednesday, October 11
Chez Leon Menu |
| Fermilab Today is online at: http://www.fnal.gov/today/ Send comments and suggestions to today@fnal.gov Hurricane Relief Page Fermilab Today archive Fermilab Today PDF Version Fermilab Result of the Week archive Fermilab Safety Tip of the Week archive Linear Collider News archive Fermilab Today classifieds Subscribe/Unsubscribe to |
| On the job with Parkhurst: Sculpting metal for CMS | ||
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Working in the Fermilab machine shop, machinist Harry Parkhurst sets an aluminum slab on a platform inside a milling machine. Sparks fly as he lowers a drill to touch the slab, and the platform and slab begin to gyrate like a hoola-hoop around the drill. "It angles the hole in two different directions," Parkhurst explained.
It's Parkhurst's job to translate plans into reality. "The [engineer's] drawing only describes the product, it doesn't tell you how to get there," he said. Parkhurst interprets the drawings, and programs a computer to execute the steps needed to make each angle and dimension perfect. When complete, his latest project, a set of tubes, will carry coolant through the CMS detector. First, however, Parkhurst had to figure out how the slab should gyrate under the drill to make holes that twist in one direction, and then another. To build the cooling system, Parkhurst will bore two of these holes into about one hundred slabs, each hole connecting with the ends of a U-shaped trough down the slab's center. He'll sandwich the troughs together in pairs to form a hollow space, and mill aluminum away until only half a millimeter of metal surrounds each channel (see photo below). The hollow spaces will connect where Parkhurst drilled curved holes, creating a continuous tube. "It comes out feather-light," he said. "Coolant goes in one tube, around and down to the other." "This type of work highlights the interaction between the machinist, the engineer and the user," said Parkhurst's boss, Charles Matthews. "It's just a lot of geometry," Parkhurst added. "Geometry and dimensions."
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| Fluorocarbon will flow through these U-shaped channels to keep CMS electronics operating at -10 degrees Celsius. "Without cooling, the temperature of the electronics mounted directly on the silicon pixels could be high enough to prevent normal operation," said physicist Bruno Gobbi, who helped work on sketches for the design. |
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The Economist, September 28: The light fantastic: A way of building particle accelerators on a table top HIGH-ENERGY particle physicists like to smash things together, break them open and see what is inside. It is a good way of working out what the world is really made of, but it has its limits. The faster you hurl things, the more you find out. But the apparatus needed to hurl things fast enough to interest today's physicists is huge and horrifyingly expensive. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), now being built near Geneva in a tunnel 27km (17 miles) in circumference, is expected to have cost SFr10 billion ($8 billion) by the time it opens next year.
In their heart of hearts, many particle physicists fear that the LHC will be the last big accelerator built. Their subject, intellectually important though it undoubtedly is, has little practical application. It may therefore become too expensive for taxpayers to sustain. However, a paper just published in Nature Physics by Wim Leemans of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and Simon Hooker of Oxford University may offer the subject a way out. For Dr Leemans and Dr Hooker describe a device that might cut costs drastically.
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| Students contribute to ILC damping ring studies | ||
In order to optimize the performance of the damping rings and at the same time minimize the cost, test facilities, such as the Accelerator Test Facility at KEK, are necessary to study important physics and technology issues. At Cornell University, a proposal is underway to convert the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR), which is scheduled to stop operating for high energy physics in March 2008, into a new damping ring test facility, called CesrTF, for the ILC. This past summer, Cornell physicist Mark Palmer enlisted the skills of three undergraduate students to lend a hand with CesrTF R&D.
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Child care at work Does your child have a day off when you plan to work? If so, you may want to take advantage of The Children's Center's pilot child care program for children ages 5 through 12. The service will be available from 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Colombus Day (October 9) and Veteran's Day (November 10). You can register early by calling x3762. The cost is $35.00 per day.
Health benefits open enrollment ends today, only certain conditions will allow you to make changes during the year
Calling all scouts
Professional Development
Argonne open house
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