Scintillating: Sergey Densiov marks 70th birthday today

Sergey Denisov's many contributions at Fermilab since 1980 include the early production of more than 4,200 scintillation counters.

Today Fermilab celebrates the 70th birthday of Sergey Denisov, and honors his nearly 30 years of service with the lab. Denisov is the leader of the Russian groups at DZero, and His many colleagues respect his dedication to teaching and research.

"I always have admired his enthusiasm, his devotion to physics and his energy that he shares with others," said Igor Vasilyev of DZero and IHN-Protvino (Russia), a student of Denisov's from 1995 to 1998.

Denisov supervised the early production of more than 4,200 scintillation counters, which are now a significant component of the upgraded DZero experiment "He's one of the true leaders, one of the special small number of particle physics leaders around the world," said Fermilab Assistant Director Roy Rubinstein. "And, by the way, he doesn't look 70."

Denisov was a leader of the Russian group in the first ever East-West particle physics experiment between IHEP and CERN, conducted at IHEP in Protvino, Russia in 1968-1972. Aside many other experiments performed in Russia and United States, Denisov said he is most proud of his work with two projects: total cross sections measurements where the rise of total cross sections was observed for the first time and DZero experiment where the top quark was discovered. .

Denisov studied under the guidance of many famous Russian physicists, and he watched Russian science's changes as the Soviet Union disintegrated. "It was a very unique period in history," said his son Dmitri Denisov, Dzero's co-spokesman. Sergey Denisov is still dedicated to the work of his mentors. "Now he is keeping their work alive for a younger generation," Dmitri Denisov said. Twelve of Sergey Denisov's former students are currently working at Fermilab and at several U.S. universities.

"I enjoy working at Fermilab, where people are professional and friendly, and ready to help," Sergey Denisov said. "Plus it has the world's biggest accelerator." Denisov has published hundreds of articles during his career and is an elected member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He holds a chair at Moscow State University, where he teaches part-time. He has received birthday cards from around the world.

-- Kate Raiford

Hard to say goodbye: Jim Garvey retires after 37 years

Jim Garvey

Today, as the work day comes to a close, Jim Garvey, senior associate engineer in Fermilab's Technical Division, will leave the lab one last time. Although he's sure he'll be back to visit, he's hanging up his hat as a lab employee, retiring after 37 years. "I'll miss the people," Garvey said. "This has been a really difficult week, with everyone stopping by. You forget just how long you've known some people."

During his time at the lab, Garvey has made what Romesh Sood, associate head of the Technical Division, calls "numerous and exemplary" contributions, particularly in AC power distributions, DC power supplies, electrical safety and lock out-tag out. Garvey said he has enjoyed his time at Fermilab immensely, and fondly recalls the projects and milestones he's been fortunate enough to be a part of, including the Tevatron and getting the beam around the Main Ring at 200 MeV.

During his retirement, Garvey said he's looking forward to relaxing and having fun, which includes traveling with his wife and fishing.

-- Rhianna Wisniewski

From Nature.com
May 2, 2007:

Neutrinos seem to oscillate: they change back and forth between one type and another and, by extension, have a tiny mass. But one experiment that predicted a particularly large mass looks to have been mistaken.

When is a discovery not a discovery? When it can't be reproduced, of course. That scientific ground-rule has plagued the members of the LSND (Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector) collaboration since they first saw evidence1 for so-called neutrino oscillations. Had the LSND results been confirmed, they would have rewritten much of what we think we know about the ever-elusive neutrinos (Box 1). But results just announced2 from the MiniBooNE detector at Fermilab, near Chicago, could prove those earlier results' nemesis.

The story begins in 1996, with observations made by LSND of the decay products of a pion particle beam at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility (LAMPF) accelerator in New Mexico. The neutrinos came mainly from the decay of positively charged pions into positive muons and muon neutrinos, and the subsequent decay of these positive muons to positrons (positively charged electrons), muon antineutrinos and electron neutrinos (Fig. 1a). What the LSND collaboration found on examining the reaction products was an excess of electron antineutrinos1 - which are produced nowhere in the positive-pion decay chain. The conclusion was that muon antineutrinos were changing into electron antineutrinos while propagating. This is the process known as neutrino oscillation, and is itself by now relatively uncontroversial3. But the oscillations that LSND saw seemed to indicate much larger neutrino mass differences than other experiments had predicted. That was indeed controversial.

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