SciBooNE's aggressive move targets June commissioning

A truck carries the SciBar detector to its new home in the SciBooNE building on Wednesday. The three major components of the experiment were moved into place this week.

As the first element of the SciBooNE experiment safely landed in place Monday afternoon, SciBooNE cospokesperson Morgan Wascko and a group of collaborators broke into applause. Two days later, the final piece was lowered into the SciBooNE building, marking the end of a nail-biting week for those involved in the experiment, and the beginning of what project head Rick Tesarek hopes will be a quick and painless setup process. "This is incredibly exciting," he said.

Although much work remains, Tesarek expects that SciBooNE will be commissioning by middle of June. "That is an aggressive schedule, but everything we've done here is aggressive," said Tesarek. "We will be taking data before shutdown." The Fermilab accelerator complex will be shut down for maintenance in August.

Once up and running, the SciBooNE experiment will measure precise cross sections of neutrino interactions. Through data collected from each of the detector's three elements -- the SciBar detector, the electromagnetic calorimeter, and the Muon Range Detector -- scientists will be able to retrace the steps of each particle, essentially recreating the reaction itself.

The data is important in itself, allowing scientists to understand more about how neutrinos react with other particles, but it will also prime the way for other experiments, including the T2K experiment in Japan. "The prime reason for doing this experiment is that the neutrino energies here are expected to match the neutrino energies at the T2K experiment," Tesarek said. "We'll also be trying to fill in the gaps where some measurements don't exist."

The experiment's eventual success, Tesarek said, can be attributed to a large number of individuals, including students Joe Walding and Yasuhiro Nakajima and others who helped to build the SciBar detector, and the technicians who moved it. The experiment is scheduled to run for two years.

-- Rhianna Wisniewski

The SciBar detector is lowered 38 feet into the SciBooNE building on Wedneday.

Fermilab and partners create network for spouse placement

The Greater Chicago Higher Education Recruitment Consortium will help academic, scientific and cultural institutions place spouses and significant others of candidates they are recruiting.

Fermilab has long been a world-class leader in particle physics, but the lab's most recent venture puts it at the leading edge of human relations. The laboratory is one of the initiators and founders of the Greater Chicago Higher Education Recruitment Consortium, a new organization dedicated to addressing what Fermilab deputy director Young-Kee Kim calls "the two-body problem."

The new consortium will create a network of higher administrators from Chicago-area institutions who can work together to find spousal placement. The networking process is something that Kim and other administrators have been informally doing for years. "I'd call all my personal contacts, but it was not the most effective and efficient mechanism since they weren't always the best contacts, resulting in spending a lot of time for a number of people," Kim said.

The fledgling consortium encompasses the five founding members: Fermilab and Argonne Lab, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Northwestern University, which fund and operate the organization. Other consortiums with similar structures exist in regions including New England and California.

An April 18 launch meeting at the University of Illinois at Chicago brought together 60 representatives from higher academic and cultural institutions within 100 miles of Chicago. Institutions have until the May 30 to express their interest in becoming a member.

The April 18 meeting was also good exposure for Fermilab. "It was one way of advertising ourselves to our community - they didn't know much about us," Kim said.

The group has already hired an executive to run the consortium, and is working to set up a web site for an official launch in fall 2007. The next consortium meeting will be at Fermilab in June.

-- Rhianna Wisniewski

New Scientist podcast
April 20, 2007:

MiniBooNE interview podcast

An interview of Fermilab's Scott Dodelson, head of the Theoretical Astrophysics department, with New Scientist regarding the MiniBooNE neutrino results. (mp3 file)

Access here