Fermilab Today Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2008
Search
Calendar

Wednesday, Aug. 6
9 a.m. - noon
SIST program student final talks - One West
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - One West
Speaker: J. Phillips, Sandia National Laboratories
Title: Science and the Energy Security Challenge: The Example of Solid-State Lighting

Thursday, Aug. 7
1:30 p.m.
DOE All-Hands meeting - Ramsey Auditorium
Speaker: DOE Secretary Bodman

THERE WILL BE NO PHYSICS AND DETECTOR SEMINAR THIS WEEK
THERE WILL BE NO THEORETICAL PHYSICS SEMINAR THIS WEEK
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

Sunny
85°/60°

Extended Forecast
Weather at Fermilab

Current Security Status

Secon Level 3

Wilson Hall Cafe

Wednesday, Aug 6
- Portobello harvest grain
- Smart cuisine: Santa Fe chicken quesadilla
- Hoisin chicken
- *Smart cuisine: parmesan fish
- Cuban panini
- Assorted slice pizza
- Pesto shrimp linguini w/leeks & tomatoes

*Carb Restricted Alternative

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, Aug. 6
Lunch
- Spicy Italian sausage & 3 cheese calzone
- Caesar salad
- Fresh fruit plate

Thursday, Aug. 7
Dinner
- Melon & prosciutto
- Ancho chili pork tenderloin with caramelized onions
- Red rice
- Vegetable of the season
- Hazlenut cake with blueberries

Chez Leon Menu
Call x4598 to make your reservation.

Archives

Fermilab Today
Result of the Week
Safety Tip of the Week
ILC NewsLine

Info

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

Send comments and suggestions to:
today@fnal.gov

Feature

SciBooNE earns Fermilab DOE environmental award

Mark Bollinger, deputy manager of DOE's Fermi Site Office, presents Young-Kee Kim, Fermilab deputy director, with a DOE Pollution Prevention and Environmental Stewardship Accomplishment Award on July 22. Rick Tesarek, SciBooNE project head (far left), Morgan Wascko and Tsuyoshi Nakaya, SciBooNE co-spokespersons, look on.

When the SciBooNE collaboration was cobbling together its particle detectors from spare parts in early 2007, pollution prevention wasn't really on their minds.

"The award is fortuitous. Recycling parts of the detector was the only way to do what we needed to do," said SciBooNE co-spokesperson Morgan Wascko, Imperial College London.

Still, the collaboration's creative efforts landed it a DOE-wide Pollution Prevention Star (P2 Star) Award in April for its reuse of existing materials. On July 22, the laboratory also received a DOE Pollution Prevention and Environmental Stewardship Accomplishment Award for the collaboration's efforts. Mark Bollinger, deputy manager of DOE's Fermi Site Office, presented the latest award to Fermilab Deputy Director Young-Kee Kim and certificates of appreciation to co-spokespersons Wascko and Tsuyoshi Nakaya, Kyoto University, and project head Rick Tesarek, Fermilab, at a ceremony on the second-floor crossover.

"Necessity, drive for invention and personal commitment led the Fermilab SciBooNE team to reuse a significant number of experimental components, saving both money and resources - $3 million and 70 tons of material," Bollinger said. "By doing so, Fermilab advanced the DOE and federal goals for robust environmental stewardship at federal facilities."

Wascko said that much of the credit should go to the collaboration members, particularly the students.

"While we saved $3 million, the hidden cost was in the time that people took to vet old equipment and to get the experiment up and working to specifications," he said.

Nakaya also credited KEK and former director general Yoji Totsuka for crucial support. One of the experiment's detectors came from KEK and will return there.

Fermilab Deputy Director Young-Kee Kim marveled at the collaboration's speed and resourcefulness.

"They've done a great job reusing pieces of detectors and also a great job setting up quickly," she said. "I thank the SciBooNE collaboration for their hard work."

-- Rhianna Wisniewski

Members of the SciBooNE collaboration pose for photos hold the DOE P2 Star Award and Fermilab's DOE Pollution Prevention and Environmental Stewardship Accomplishment Award and corresponding certificates of appreciation.

Announcement

Secretary Bodman at DOE All-Hands Meeting Thursday

Satellite broadcast in Ramsey Auditorium Aug. 7 at 1:30 p.m.

At the Department of Energy's All-Hands meeting on Thursday, Aug. 7, Secretary Bodman will speak to the reality of our energy and national security challenges. He will highlight the unique ability of the DOE complex to respond to those challenges both today and moving forward. DOE and contractor employees are invited to attend. Fermilab will broadcast the meeting in the auditorium at 1:30 p.m.

Photo of the Day

Late afternoon meal

Fermilab Fire Department Battalion Chief Larry Meyer captured this image of a buck, which was eating corn along west Wilson Road, on Saturday afternoon.

In the News

Belle discovers three new mesons

From Interactions.org, Aug. 5, 2008

An international team of researchers at the High Energy Accelerator Research organization (KEK) in Tsukuba, Japan, the "Belle collaboration", has announced the discovery of three new exotic sub-atomic particles, labeled as Z_1, Z_2 and Y_b. The Z_1 and Z_2 states have unit electric charge, by which these particles are clearly distinguished from normal quark-antiquark mesons, and thus can be identified as particles consisting of four quarks. The Y_b structure may be the first clear example of an exotic hybrid particle, which contains the bottom quark and its anti-particle (an anti-bottom quark) as in a conventional meson but with an excited gluon as well.

In the past few years, a number of peculiar new particles, including the so-called X(3872), Y(4260), X(3940), Y(3940), have been found by the Belle and also by the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). These new particles lie in the mass region from 4 to 4.5 times the proton mass, and decay into "J/psi" or "Psi-prime" particles and pi-mesons. Here the J/psi and Psi-prime particles are examples of so-called "charmonium" mesons, bound states of a charm quark and its anti-particle (an anti-charm quark). Last year, the Belle team reported the first exotic particle containing a charm and anti-charm quark with non-zero electric charge, called the Z(4430).

Read more

Director's Corner

Editor's note: Pier Oddone's Director's Corner normally appears on Tuesday. Travel mishaps caused by Monday's severe weather delayed Oddone and his column from their scheduled arrival.

Made it!

Pier Oddone
Pier Oddone

It is 4:30 in the morning and the taxi driving me to the director's house is going through the forest to finally reach my house, home sweet home after what seemed a trip without end. Alas, a fallen tree was blocking the way. The taxi driver and I could not budge it so the last hundred yards were on foot dragging my luggage, no longer surprised at anything.

Read more about Pier's travel adventure here.


First kiss

ICHEP2008

The curve that represents the 95 percent confidence level exclusion limit for the Higgs has finally kissed the Standard Model curve for the expected rate of Higgs production at the mass of 170 GeV. Definitely something to write home about! This combined result of CDF and DZero was the talk of ICHEP2008. The result excludes a Standard Model Higgs of 170 GeV and marks the start of an expanding region both below and above 170 GeV where the Higgs will be excluded as we collect more statistics and refine our analysis. Even more exciting, if the Higgs is anywhere nearby, we should then see evidence for it with the full data sample in the next two years.

The crop of results from Fermilab at ICHEP2008 was remarkable. This is a golden period in the productivity of the laboratory, the result of many years of dedication by Fermilab and the many academic institution that use our facilities. Across the board on the three frontiers of particle physics, results based on Fermilab facilities or obtained with Fermilab as a partner were important highlights at the conference. At the intensity frontier, MiniBooNE presented a more extensive analysis in which the unexplained low-energy excess persists and calls for further elucidation; MINOS continued to improve the measurements of oscillations and promises important results on electron appearance later in the year; and SciBooNE, the newest kid on the block, presented results on neutrino interactions that will be important for future oscillation experiments. At the particle astrophysics frontier CDMS II and Pierre Auger again lead the world in their respective domains. And at the energy frontier the Tevatron dominates with a huge crop of new results on Higgs searches, electroweak physics, quantum chromodynamics, precision measurements of the top quark and W boson, heavy quark physics and searches for phenomena beyond the standard model.

A portent of things to come was the remarkably large number of papers on LHC physics, even before the LHC has seen its first collision -- great virtual physics and a moment of suspense for our field just before the LHC opens up a huge new energy territory.

You can get more details from the ICHEP Web page and follow my misadventures getting back from Philadelphia here.

Safety Update

ES&H weekly report, Aug. 5

This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ES&H section, lists four minor first-aid cases, none of which are recordable. Fermilab employees and contractors have worked 100 days without a recordable injury. The last page of the safety report summarizes the number of DART and TRC cases for employees and subcontractors since 1997 and shows the great progress we have made in reducing the number of injuries incurred by our employees and contractors. Find the full report here.

Safety report archive

Announcements

Have a safe day!

Supervisors performance review help
Managers and supervisors who need help with the performance review can attend a review briefing from 8:30 - 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, Aug. 7. The briefing will help answer questions about the performance review process, including the form and compensation. Learn more and enroll

SIST program final talks
The Summer Internships in Science and Technology (SIST) program ends this week and 13 interns will give their final talks between 9 a.m. and noon on Wednesday in One West. Please try to attend and show your support!

Interactive Vehicle Safety Seminar Friday
An interactive vehicle safety event will take place from 11:30 a.m.- 1 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 8, as part of the Interactive Vehicle Safety Seminar in the Wilson Hall west overflow parking lot. Read more.

U.S. visa application changes
Applicants might experience longer-than-usual waits at U.S. Consulates during their visa application process. The Visa Office has reported that applicants have experienced waits for visas in excess of five weeks. While five weeks is unusual, it is a trend toward longer visa processing caused, in part, by security clearances.
Applicants for U.S. visas should make sure that they provide all the paperwork required for their visas. Check the U.S. Consulate's Web site prior to applying to find out what paperwork is required. Do not rely on past experience - processes change. Anyone whose visa application has been pending for four weeks should notify the Visa Office. Similarly, anyone contemplating applying for a U.S. visa abroad should contact the Visa Office prior to making travel plans. You also should advise the Travel Office of your visa application plans during the travel authorization process.

Benefit Customer Service Survey
The Benefits Office invites you to participate in a customer service survey. We will use the feedback to evaluate current service level and compare the results to customer service standards. We appreciate your assistance in gathering this data. The survey is available in the Benefits Office, WH 15th floor or on the Benefits Office Web site.

Additional Activities

Fermi National Accelerator - Office of Science / U.S. Department of Energy | Managed by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC.
 
Security, Privacy, Legal  |  Use of Cookies