Pine Street entrance closing: Use Wilson Street entrance

Both the inbound and outbound lanes of Fermilab's Pine Street entrance will be closed during paving operations next week, from Monday, April 23 to Thursday, April 26. The Pine Street entrance will be closed at 6 a.m. and will reopen by 6 p.m. The Wilson Street entrance will be open between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. All operations are dependent on the weather. Roads and Grounds crews do not expect that the Pine Street entrance closing will affect bicyclists entering the lab. However, bicyclists who want to ride through on Pine street will have to turn off at the Lederman Science Education Center and then cross over on the trail to the Wilson Hall west parking lot. Fermilab Today will provide updates.

SciBooNE moving: Some roads closed Monday, April 23

Traffic will be delayed along Wilson Street between the site entrance and SiDet from about 8:30 a.m. to 9 a.m. Monday morning for the arrival of a 360-ton crane. Roads between Road B and Giese Road will be closed between 12:30 and 1 p.m. Monday afternoon while the detector is moved. View a map of the road closures here.

Crane will give SciBooNE detector a lift to its new home

A fish-eye view of the new SciBoone building from the ground up.

It's a simple but challenging equation -- how to move more than 100 tons of fragile detectors across the lab and into a building the size of a freight elevator shaft without any damage.

The answer involves a 360-ton crane, slow moving trucks, road closures and a careful crew. On Monday morning the long and tedious, but thrilling, process of moving all the elements of the SciBooNE experiment into place will begin.

"This is a momentous occasion because it is the first time that all of the detectors come together," said department head Rick Tesarek, who added that it also a time of high anxiety for the collaborators, since their months of hard work could very easily be jeopardized during the few hour move.

At 7 a.m., early-rising lab employees can watch the live feed of the Muon Range Detector (MRD) being pushed out of its building. The 58-ton detector will then be picked up by the 360-ton crane, placed on a trailer and carefully moved to the new SciBooNE building, located just north of the Main Injector ring and south southeast of MiniBooNE. The move will cause road closings near Wilson Hall: the roads between Road B and Giese Road will be closed between 12:30 p.m. and 1 p.m. At 2 p.m., the crane will lower the detector into the building, and employees can watch here.

Although Monday's events will only involve the Muon Range Detector, all three pieces will be in place by the end of the week, including SciBar, previously used in neutrino experiments at KeK. Once up and running, SciBooNE will measure precise cross sections of neutrino interactions.

-- Rhianna Wisniewski

From nature.com
April 19, 2007:

Setbacks at CERN offer Tevatron a chance to snatch the prize.

Soon after the news emerged on 29 March that a magnet test in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) atom-smasher had failed, two physics bloggers decided to have a bit of fun with the idea. On 1 April they posted blogs announcing news such as 'Three years of delay for LHC start-up'. Visitors found the reports all too easy to swallow, decrying it as a cruel blow. Only then did one blogger add an April Fool's spoiler, with an apology: "Sorry to those of you who got hurt by not understanding that in the first place."

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From nature.com
April 19, 2007:

Fermilab detector quashes sterile particle.

A nine-year effort to resolve a mystery about the behaviour of neutrinos - particles that interact only weakly with matter - has thrown up an unexpected signal. The findings, announced on 11 April, leave open the possibility that new physics hides within the observations, but winnows the options for what that might be.

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