All Hands meeting 11:15 a.m. Wednesday in Auditorium

Fermilab Director Pier Oddone will hold an All-Hands Meeting on Wednesday, July 2. Thanks to savings from voluntary separations and additional funding in the supplemental funding bill passed by Congress last week, Oddone expects to announce the end of involuntary layoffs. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, Congresswoman Judy Biggert and Congressman Bill Foster will speak. The meeting will begin promptly at 11:30 a.m. Please plan to be in your seats by 11:15 a.m. There will be overflow seating in One West.

CMS 101 tutorials prepare students for analysis

Attendees at the recent CMS 101 tutorials

As a fourth-year graduate student, Mike Anderson has paid his dues. He has written software for CMS collaborators to use for data analysis. He lived at CERN for two months. He has completed his coursework. Soon Anderson hopes to start his analysis. The CMS 101 tutorials on June 18-20 at Fermilab brought him one step closer.

Roughly 35 U.S. CMS members attended the workshop, and more than 15 connected remotely via videoconference. The LHC Physics Center at Fermilab offers the tutorials every six months to help U.S. CMS collaborators get up to speed on the experiment's data analysis software. Largely intended for students, the workshops begin with a general overview of the CMS experiment and then progress to software and computing instructions.

Anderson, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, feels that the tutorials help establish a common computing language for the collaboration. He plans to use the knowledge gained from the workshop on his analysis. "They dump information on you as though it's a bucket of water," he said. "Hopefully some of it sticks."

The CMS 101 tutorials allow students to take advantage of the large number of experts in the LPC. "There is a high density of people who have this knowledge here," said Fermilab's Liz Sexton-Kennedy, who along with her group organized the workshop.

In response to requests to expand the tutorials, the recent CMS 101 workshop included more hands-on exercises. "The hands-on sessions force participants to try something new," said Sexton-Kennedy. "On their laptops they try commands to see if they work. The exercises take you through what you need to do to conduct an analysis."

Those who couldn't attend CMS101 may view the talks online. Videos of the tutorials will be made available soon.

-- Elizabeth Clements

Computing Division logs
3 million safe hours

Computing Division employees celebrate
3 million hours worked without a DART case. They celebrated June 23 on the lawn of the Feynman Computing Center.

'Frozen' stars could shed light on dark matter

From New Scientist,
June 26, 2008

The universe's first stars were the rock stars of the stellar world: they lived fast and died young, burning out in only a few hundred thousand years.

But new research suggests some of them might still be around as a result of interactions with dark matter, which halted their growth and curbed their blazing excess.

"These stars can be frozen for timescales longer than the age of the universe," said Gianfranco Bertone of the Paris Institute of Astrophysics in France.

Such frozen stars might still linger at the centre of the Milky Way, scientists say, and could provide important insights into the elusive nature of dark matter.

Many of the stellar firstborns, called population III stars, are thought to have formed inside dense dark matter clouds.

Read more