SciBooNE recognized for reusing science

When SciBooNE collaborators put the neutrino experiment together, they thought more about tightening their belts than setting industry standards. Still, the experiment, cobbled together from used parts and recycled detectors, recently received recognition as a DOE Office of Science Noteworthy Practice and a pollution prevention model.

DOE environmental scientist Sally Arnold congratulated the experiment collaborators for their creativity in building the experiment.

"Among stiff Office of Science competition in the pollution prevention arena, Fermilab continues to shine," Arnold said.

"This award means a lot to us," said project head Rick Tesarek. "It is a big honor for the experiment and for Fermilab."

The SciBooNE experiment measures cross-sections of neutrino interactions. It consists of multiple detector systems, each made almost entirely of reused parts, including a detector previously used in an experiment in Japan. Tesarek estimates that without the efforts of collaboration members, who borrowed and scrounged for parts and materials, the experiment would have cost $4.5 million. Instead, it cost $1.2 million.

"What they did was pretty new," said Eric Mieland, Fermilab's recycling coordinator. "They went to great lengths to make it work differently."

Although Fermilab has previously received awards for best practices in recycling and pollution prevention, none, Mieland said, were for efforts like this.

"They figured out how to do this experiment without spending the money," said Mieland. "We've never seen recycling like this before. It is a great example."

-- Rhianna Wisniewski

The future of physics

Scientific American

From Scientific American , February 2008

Editor's note: The February issue of Scientific American features a special report on the future of physics. The report focuses on science at the LHC, and includes an article from Fermilab theorist Chris Quigg about the coming revolution of particle physics.

From the special report introduction:

They call it the tera­scale. It is the realm of physics that comes into view when two elementary particles smash together with a combined energy of around a trillion electron volts, or one tera-electron-volt. The machine that will take us to the terascale-the ring-shaped Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN-is now nearing completion.

To ascend through the energy scales from electron volts to the tera­scale is to travel from the familiar world through a series of distinct landscapes: from the domains of chemistry and solid-state electronics (electron volts) to nuclear reactions (millions of electron volts) to the territory that particle physicists have been investigating for the past half a century (billions of electron volts)..

What lies in wait for us at the tera­scale? No one knows.

But radically new phenomena of one kind or another are just about guaranteed to occur. Scientists hope to detect long-sought particles that could help complete our understanding of the nature of matter. More bizarre discoveries, such as signs of additional dimensions, may unfold as well.

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