Fermilab Today Tuesday, November 20, 2007
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Tuesday, Nov. 20
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY
4 p.m.
Special Fermilab Colloquium - One West (NOTE DATE)
Speaker: Y. Wang, Institute of High Energy Physics, Beijing
Title: From BEPC to Daya Bay - An Introduction to Particle Physics in China

Wednesday, Nov. 21
THERE WILL BE NO FERMILAB ILC R&D MEETING THIS WEEK
2:30 p.m.
Special Particle Astrophysics Seminar - Curia II (NOTE DATE)
Speaker: J. Roberts, University of Warsaw
Title: Use and Abuse of Fine-Tuning: Dark Matter at the LHC
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO FERMILAB COLLOQUIUM TODAY

Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.

Weather

WeatherChance of showers 58°/44°

Extended Forecast
Weather at Fermilab

Current Security Status

Secon Level 3

Wilson Hall Cafe
Tuesday, Nov. 21
- Creamy turkey vegetable
- Chicken gyros
- *Salisbury steaks w/mushroom au jus
- Chicken cacciatore
- Italian panini w/provolone
- Assorted slice pizza
- Super burrito

*Carb Restricted Alternative

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, Nov. 21
Lunch
- Cheese fondue
- Apple & pecan salad on field greens
- Baked pears w/bittersweet chocolate sauce

Thursday, Nov. 22
Dinner
- Closed

Chez Leon Menu
Call x4598 to make your reservation.

Archives

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Info

Fermilab Today
is online at:
www.fnal.gov/today/

Send comments and suggestions to:
today@fnal.gov

Feature

Handle holiday stress with Recreation Office offerings

ILC Communicator for the Americas Elizabeth Clements practices yoga at her desk during lunch. Clements participates in the Recreation Office sponsored hatha yoga class on Tuesdays.

As Christmas music fills the air and holiday shopping, cooking and family gatherings fill every moment of spare time, the stress and pressure of the holiday season sets in. But now, imagine a quiet, gentle ocean. Concentrate on your breath. Reach skyward and then fold forward. Doesn't that feel better?

Exercise is one of the best ways to relieve holiday stress and, according to Recreation Office Manager Jean Guyer, there are plenty of ways for employees and users tocenter their bodies and minds. The Recreation Office offers back-to-back classes, including yoga, strength training and Kyuki-Do, through the holiday season and beyond.

Christopher Baxter teaches Fermilab's Hatha Yoga classes on Tuesdays from noon to 1 p.m. in Ramsey Auditorium. "The class allows employees to take an hour out of their work day and benefit from yoga," he said. "Some participants say it feels like taking a nap or having a whole body massage. It allows you to relax before going back to work."

People can also sign up for six-week sessions of muscle toning classes, which meet Tuesday and Thursday evenings or Kyuki-Do, a Korean style of martial arts, which meets on Monday and Wednesday.

Those interested in other forms of exercise should stay on the look out for more offerings this season. "In the past, we have also offered self-defense classes and a dance program, including country line dancing and ballroom dancing classes," said Guyer.

For a less structured work out, employees and users can join the recreation facility. "There's no reason that people shouldn't find a way to have fun, exercise and relieve stress at this time of year," said Guyer.

More information and registration for all classes and the Recreation Facility is available in the Recreation Office on the 15th floor of Wilson Hall.

-- Haley Bridger

Holiday humor

Turkey tales

Image courtesy of grinning planet.

Have you ever (accidentally) made a rainbow-colored turkey? Had a furry friend start the meal without you?

Talk turkey with us! Send us your tales of Thanksgiving meals gone awry (the funnier the better). We'll publish some of our favorites in Wednesday's issue of Fermilab Today.

In the News

The Unexplained: The God of small things - How the universe holds together

From San Francisco Sentinel, Nov. 16, 2007

40 years ago, an unknown physicist in Edinburgh, Scotland, came up with a theory of how the universe holds together - sparking a multibillion dollar race to find the key particle. Is the most sought after prize in modern physics about to be won at last?

Amid 800 acres of landscaped grounds a mile from Princeton, New Jersey, stands the Institute for Advanced Study, one of the world's most prestigious centers of scientific thought. Within this intellectual microcosm, many of the most accomplished physicists in history, from Oppenheimer to Einstein, have wrestled with the deepest puzzles of the universe. To be invited to talk at Einstein's former lab remains among the highest honors a scientist can receive. And it was with this terrifying thought in mind that in March 1966 Peter Higgs, a 36-year-old physicist from Edinburgh University, loaded up his car and headed up the freeway.

Tucked into Higgs's luggage was the reason he had been invited. The notes for his highly contentious lecture overturned some of the most deeply-held beliefs of the resident experts. They proposed something remarkable, that an invisible field, which stretches throughout the entire universe, holds the key to one of the greatest mysteries of modern science - the nature of matter and mass.

Read More

In the News

Shadow World

From Science News Online,
week of Nov. 17, 2007

How many dimensions space has could all be a matter of perspective

In a school of thought that teaches the existence of extra dimensions, Juan Maldacena may at first sound a little out of place. String theory is physicists' still-tentative strategy for reconciling Einstein's theory of gravitation with quantum physics. Its premise is that the subatomic particles that roam our three-dimensional world are really infinitesimally thin strings vibrating in nine dimensions. According to Maldacena, however, the key to understanding string theory is not to add more dimensions but to cut their number down.

In his vision, the mathematical machinery of strings completely translates into a more ordinary quantum theory of particles, but one whose particles would live in a universe without gravity. Gravity would be replaced by forces similar to the nuclear forces that prevailed in the universe's first instants. And this would be a universe with fewer dimensions than the realm inhabited by strings.

Read More

Director's Corner

28 and Counting

Hesheng Chen, Director of the Institute for High Energy Physics, and Fermilab Director Pier Oddone shake hands after signing a MOU.

During the last two days we have been privileged to host the 28th meeting of the U.S./China Joint Committee on High Energy Physics. The protocol for this committee falls under the comprehensive U.S. - China Agreement on Cooperation in Science and Technology signed by President Jimmy Carter and Premier Deng Xiaoping in 1979. Pief Panofsky, T.D. Lee and Bob Wilson played important roles in opening scientific cooperation between the U.S. and China -- one of the earliest cooperative ventures between our two nations following the Cultural Revolution. I started participating in the Joint Committee 21 years ago when I was Physics Division Director at LBNL. I have seen over the years not only the tremendous economic growth that has transformed China, but also the remarkable development of the country's accelerator-based science.

Today the tau-charm factory is being commissioned in Beijing at the Institute for High Energy Physics, the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility is under construction with a magnificent new building in the Pudong area of Shanghai and construction of the China Spallation Neutron Source is about to start in Guangdong in Southern China. These three facilities are state-of-the art, world-class facilities. Cooperation between the U.S. and China began in the area of particle physics but is now more pervasive as laboratories both in the U.S. and in China build accelerator-based facilities for other sciences. There is also a very important non-accelerator experiment, the Daya Bay experiment, initiated by LBNL and IHEP and today the world's most ambitious reactor-based neutrino experiment.

During the meeting, Hesheng Chen, Director of IHEP, and I, signed a memorandum of understanding between IHEP and Fermilab on the development of SCRF technology. This follows a recent MOU that Fermilab signed with Peking University. Our collaboration in R&D will hopefully lead to joint US - China projects to build new accelerators based on SCRF technology.

Members of the U.S./China Joint Committee on High Energy Physics meet as part of the committee's 28th meeting, held at Fermilab this week.

Accelerator Update
Nov. 16-19
- Four stores provided 49 hours and 56 minutes of luminosity
- Recycler beam valve repaired
- Recycler experts revert to old damper system
- NuMI resumes taking beam
- Kicker problem halts NuMI beam

Read the Current Accelerator Update
Read the Early Bird Report
View the Tevatron Luminosity Charts

Announcements

AFS outage Saturday morning
On Saturday, Nov. 24, from 6 to 10 a.m., the AFS service will be out for an emergency upgrade. It has been determined that the current release of code, OpenAFS v1.4.4 can have issues with clients that are behind a NAT. These issues can indirectly cause a resource problem on the fileservers. This outage will affect central web services and FNALU.

"Water to the Ropes" showing
at noon Wednesday

In honor of the 40th anniversary of Fermilab, there will be a showing of "Water on the Ropes: The evolution of an accelerator" at noon on Wednesday in One West.The film is 30 minutes long. It was made to commemorate the 20-year anniversary of Fermilab on Dec 2, 1988. Brief interviews with Robert Wilson and Leon Lederman are shown as well as early construction footage. This program was produced by Visual Media Services.

Benefit enrollment
Wednesday, Nov. 28 is the final day to review and change your benefits for the 2008 plan year. You will find enrollment materials on the Benefits Office Web site. Representatives from Blue Cross and CIGNA will be available on Wednesday, Nov. 14, from 8 a.m. to noon and Tuesday, Nov. 20, from 1 to 5 p.m. They will be located in the Aquarium Conference Room on the 15th floor of Wilson Hall.

Seasonal holiday student requests
Managers who would like to bring back their summer students for holiday seasonal employment can access information and a request form here. Only students who were summer 2007 employees are eligible. Students who were on-call must return as on-call workers.

Education Office holiday sale Dec. 4-6
The Education Office will host its annual holiday sale Dec. 4-6, from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., outside One West in Wilson Hall.

Scottish Country Dancing Tuesday
Scottish Country Dancing will meet today, Nov. 20, at Kuhn Barn on the Fermilab site. Instruction begins at 7:30 p.m. and newcomers are always welcome. Most dances are fully taught and walked through. You do not need to come with a partner. For more information call (630) 840-8194 or (630) 584-0825 or e-mail folkdance@fnal.gov.

Additional Activities

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