All-hands meetings Friday (Note new time)

Fermilab Director Pier Oddone will hold all-hands meetings on Friday, May 23, in Ramsey Auditorium. Oddone will meet with employees from the Accelerator Division, Technical Division, Accelerator Physics Center, Facilities Engineering Section, Finance Section and Directorate at 11:30 a.m.; and with employees from the Particle Physics Division, Computing Division, CMS Center, Work Force Development Section, Business Services Section, ES&H Section, and Center for Particle Astrophysics at 1 p.m. The sessions will be videotaped and posted to the Fermilab Web site after the meetings.

Faraday Cup Award given for wire sensor technology

From left to right: Julien Bergoz, award sponsor, Suren Arutunian, award recipient, and Fernando Sannibale, BIW08 chairman.

Historically, beam instrumentation stays in the shadows if an accelerator functions well. But with the new generation of machines using charged particle beams at power intensities never seen before, the spotlight is shifting toward those who work behind the scenes to control beams.

"At the LHC, this is the first time where a beam could rip a machine apart in one pulse. And many future accelerators will be like this," said AD's Ralph Pasquinelli, a member of the program committee for the international Beam Instrumentation Workshop.

The workshop provides a forum to compare and discuss instrumentation techniques for measuring charged particle beams in accelerators. At the bi-annual workshop, the Faraday Cup Award is given to the innovator of newest and best idea in beam instrumentation technology that goes beyond theory with proven functionality in an accelerator.

This year, the award went to Suren Arutunian, of the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia, for designing vibrating wire sensors (VWS) to measure a beam halo. Essentially, the wire's extreme sensitivity to temperature variations causes its vibration frequency to change with varying amounts of intercepted beam. This ability to measure beam halos could have widespread potential in accelerators of the future.

"His particular entry was a novel approach, and the hardware is not too complicated so it's cost effective," Pasquinelli said.

VWS technology works with a wide variety of accelerator diagnostic applications for electron, proton, ion and photon beam monitoring. First experiments for its use with hard X-ray beams in vacuum and air have been promising. Projects in Armenia and APS at Argonne use the technology, which has long-term stability, high precision and resolution.

View previous Faraday Cup Award winners here.

Learn about VWS here and here.

-- Tona Kunz

Gardeners wanted

The Fermilab Natural Areas group will sponsor a volunteer planting event Thursday, May 22, from 3:30 until 6 p.m. Join Roads and Grounds staff along the south shore of Swan Lake. The live plants will help to create a more natural shoreline that will resist erosion and provide texture and color. Volunteers should wear boots and prepare to plant in wet and sloppy conditions. For more information call Roads and Grounds at x3303.

Bike commuters spread the word

WBBM news radio interviewed Fermilab Bicycle Commuters Dave Peterson, Jim Budlong and Dave McGinnis about how the 100-member group started as an outgrowth of a DOE fuel conservation effort, how they save $1,000 to $1,500 a year in gasoline and vehicle maintenance and what it's like to find a safe route to work in the congested suburbs. Listen to the full 15-minute interview.

Bottling the big bang

From the Engineer Online, May 19, 2008

The air of anticipation around CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research near Geneva, is palpable. In a matter of weeks, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will start operating, hurling subatomic particles around its 27km circumference at almost the speed of light. Two months later, the two contra-rotating beams will be squeezed, focused and aimed at each other to collide with colossal force, creating conditions that existed millionths of a second after the Big Bang.

The physics goals of the LHC are mind-boggling. Discovering the Higgs boson, the particle that explains the origins of mass; explaining why the universe is made of matter not anti-matter; freeing the constituent parts of the particles that make up the nuclei of atoms; possibly making minute black holes which, in passing, would indicate that alternate dimensions exist. But in order to answer these questions, equally mind-blowing engineering has been brought into play, 100m below the ground in the tunnels and caverns that make up the LHC complex.

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