Fermilab Today Wednesday, March 5, 2008
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New furlough information, including an up-to-date Q&A section, appears on the furlough Web pages daily.

Layoff Information

New information on Fermilab layoffs, including an up-to-date Q&A section, appears on the layoff Web pages daily.

Calendar

Wednesday, March 5
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - One West
Speaker: A. Leggett, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Title: Bell's Theorem, Entanglement, Quantum Teleportation and All That

Thursday, March 6
12 p.m.
Grid School Brown Bag Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: K. Chadwick, Fermilab
Title: FermiGrid 101 - FermiGrid Introduction and Overview
THERE WILL BE NO PHYSICS AND DETECTOR SEMINAR THIS WEEK
2:30-4:30 p.m.
Joint Theory-CMS Seminar - One West
Speaker: M. Narain, Brown University
Title: Mass Determination Using Events with Charged Leptons and Missing Transverse Momentum from the Tevatron to the LHC
3:30 p.m. (part of the Joint Theory seminar)
Speaker: J. Gunion, University of California, Davis
Title: Accurate Mass Determinations in Decay Chains with Missing Energy
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY

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

Weather

Weather

Partly sunny
36°/19°

Extended Forecast
Weather at Fermilab

Current Security Status

Secon Level 3

Wilson Hall Cafe
Wednesday, March 5
- Creamy mushroom chicken soup
- Cajun chicken ranch
- Chicken Wellington
- Parmesan baked pork chops
- Smoked turkey panini pesto mayo
- Assorted pizza slices
- Chicken alfredo fettucine

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, March 5
Lunch
- Pork satay w/peanut sauce
- Sautéed asian vegetable
- Baked lime custard

Thursday, March 6
Dinner
- Mushroom duxelle
- Sautéed flounder w/shrimp
- Lacey potato pancakes w/chives
- Steamed green beans
- Marzipan soufflé w/bittersweet chocolate sauce

Chez Leon Menu
Call x4598 to make your reservation.

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Info

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

Send comments and suggestions to:
today@fnal.gov

Feature

Geese Police aim to get Fermilab flock under control

The Geese Police will help "get the flock out" of Fermilab's high-use areas during March and April.

A new posse in town has its sights set on Fermilab's feathery fowl. Patrols of the laboratory will begin Friday and continue randomly through April in an effort to address safety issues related to the laboratory's resident goose population.

"It became obvious that it would be a safety issue again this year," said Fermilab ecologist Rod Walton, who thought it best to bring in experts.

The Geese Police, a goose-control company stationed in Naperville, will employ specially-trained border collies to chase geese away from building entrances and lawns.

"Border collies are bred to herd sheep. Their natural instinct is to run after things without hurting them," Walton said.

Roads and Grounds employees chased after geese last year with little success, said Roads and Grounds' Jim Kalina. Walton thinks the collies will have better luck because the geese view them as predators. When the dogs go after geese, they start by stalking the birds, creeping up to them while staring them down. These tactics scare the birds away without harming them.

The Geese Police will concentrate efforts in the first two months of geese mating season and on areas where geese have nested in the past, including CDF, Feynman and entrances to Wilson Hall, Kalina said. The service will cost $1,000 a month.

Employees should watch for dog handlers wearing fluorescent orange vests like those worn by Roads and Grounds employees. "The dogs aren't going to be running helter-skelter, but we should still be careful not to hit them," said Kalina.

Watch the Geese Police video on You Tube.

--Rhianna Wisniewski

In the News

U of C asks Congress to aid research

From Chicago Maroon,
Feb. 26, 2008

President Zimmer joined a coalition of university and research industry leaders on Capitol Hill earlier this month to lobby members of Congress and the Bush administration for more funding for scientific research. The officials mobilized in response to a budget cut earlier this year that slashed millions of dollars for science research in this year's final federal budget proposal.

Bob Rosenberg, associate vice president for public affairs and communications at the University, said that the lobbyists are concerned that "the direction of funding for research in this country is flat and trending downward."

The coalition said that they hoped to make a dramatic statement about the importance of funding scientific research through a strong show of numbers. Zimmer was joined by the presidents of Duke University, the University of Maryland, the University of Minnesota, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Alabama, and the University of New Mexico. Industry leaders such as Norman Augustine, retired CEO and chairman of Lockheed Martin Corp.; and Christopher Hansen, president and CEO of American Electronics Association, also participated.

Read more

In the News

Fighting to launch cosmic-ray detector

From The Lede, a New York Times blog,
Feb. 29, 2008

Dennis Overbye is a science correspondent for The Times. His most recent book is ''Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance.''

In a recent report to Congress (pdf), NASA offered two contradictory statements: a $1.5 billion physics experiment intended for the International Space Station was on track for a 2009 launch, but it had no intention of actually launching the device into space.

Once upon a time the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, as it is known, was to be the scientific centerpiece of the space station. By sifting cosmic rays from outer space, the 15,000 pound detector would look for evidence of antimatter or the mysterious dark matter that accounts for 25 percent of creation.

The brainchild of MIT physicist and Nobel laureate Sam Ting, the detector was built by a collaboration of scientists from 16 countries, including China and Taiwan, mostly with their own money. NASA agreed in 1995 to give it a ride to the space station and then reneged 10 years later after the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, saying the remaining flights between now and 2010 when the shuttles are to be retired were all spoken for. This dismayed many physicists who thought the space agency should keep its word and was being a bad international partner.

Read more

From the Accelerator Physics Center

Innovation rules!

Vladimir Shiltsev, director of the Accelerator Physics Center, wrote today's column.

Vladimir Shiltsev

Since the days of our founding director Robert Wilson, Fermilab has enjoyed a history of innovation to advance physics research. As we face turbulent times, our spirit of innovation is more important than ever before.

Let's take accelerator physics. Fermilab's pioneering work on magnets led to the world's first superconducting synchrotron, the Tevatron, and to the world's first permanent-magnet storage ring, the Recycler. Further innovations have greatly helped the Tevatron: We created the world's first high-energy electron cooling system, which almost doubled the collider luminosity, and built the first electron lenses that actively compensate for beam-beam effects - previously considered impossible.

For the proposed International Linear Collider, we demonstrated the round-to-flat beam transformation, an elegant way to achieve small emittance beams. Even our idea of bunched-beam stochastic cooling, which did not succeed at the Tevatron, became an extremely effective technique for cooling ions at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

Today, accelerator research programs around the world focus on facilities beyond the Large Hadron Collider. These facilities need to reach much higher beam energies and luminosities than our current machines. While many laboratories work toward the goal of achieving high-acceleration gradients, Fermilab's accelerator R&D program seeks new ways to high luminosity by exploring high-intensity beams and minimizing beam size (emittance). For Project X, we will address the most burning issues of the physics of high-intensity beams: solving the electron cloud problem, improving collimation and optimizing acceleration. In the area of emittance control, we are pursuing several fascinating ideas, including 6-D ionization cooling of muons in helical cooling channels, optical stochastic cooling, longitudinal-to-transverse emittance exchange, electron columns that compensate for the space charge beam blowup.

I believe that we can test most of these ideas and concepts right here at Fermilab, either at our test facilities at the Meson Test Area and the New Muon Laboratory or at our operating accelerators. The success of any of these ideas could again revolutionize accelerator-based high-energy physics, like the advent of superconducting magnets - because, ultimately, innovation rules!

Safety Update

ES&H weekly report, March 4

This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ES&H section, includes a non-reportable, first-aid case of a person tripping while climbing stairs without holding onto the handrail. Tripping and slipping incidents are among the most frequent incidents reported at Fermilab, especially during winter time. Please check these valuable tips posted by Wayne State University on how to stay safe during winter time and how to minimize injuries if you do fall. The full report is available here.

Safety report archive

Announcements

Have a safe day!

2008 CTEQ-MCnet School August 8-16
Applications are now accepted for the 2008 CTEQ-MCnet Summer School on QCD Phenomenology and Monte Carlo Event Generators from August 8-16 in Debrecen, Hungary. The CTEQ-MCnet School program will include lectures on QCD theory, phenomenology and analysis as well as a practical approach to event generator physics and techniques with hands-on sessions using the techniques in real analyses. The application deadline is April 30, 2008. Enrollment will be limited to 80 participants. Application procedures and additional information are available here.

Brown Bag Seminar on toxins
The Wellness Works committee presents a Brown Bag Seminar on mold, radon and capsaicin from noon to 1 p.m. Wednesday, March 12, in One West. Dr. Lawrence Stilwell Betts, a retired Navy captain will speak on the prevention and clean up of these dangerous toxins.

Computing Techniques Seminar
On March 12 at 3 p.m. in Curia II, Fermilab will offer C++: New and Improved!, a Computing Techniques Seminar that will present an overview of changes forthcoming in the next C++ standard. Walter Brown, who participates on Fermilab's behalf in the international C++ standardization effort, is the presenter. He is a member of the Computing Division's LSC department.

U of C Tuition Remission program deadline March 10
The deadline for applying for the tuition remission program at The University of Chicago for the Spring 2008 quarter is March 10. See the Web site for more information or contact Karen Karlix, x4365 with questions.

Additional Activities

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