Fermilab employees create outreach opportunities

Fermilab handouts are available at the front desk in the Wilson Hall atrium and in the Office of Communication.

A little off-work initiative created a wealth of good will and new friends for Fermilab. Alex Chen of AD and Dave Harding of TD set up a table with information about Fermilab at a Warrenville neighborhood's annual picnic last month.

Even with a lighter than usual attendance and competition from a nearby reptile booth, the effort paid off. Chen and Harding chatted with several local elected officials, and put a human face on the neighboring laboratory. In the Summerlakes Homeowners' Association newsletter, they earned a free thank-you advertisement for the Fermilab Science Adventure children's classes.

"In the end we probably talked with about two dozen people, not counting a couple of Fermilab employees," Harding said. "People were interested in our funding situation and the future. Everyone expressed appreciation for our presence."

Some of the visitors to the table knew little about Fermilab; others had children in the Science Adventures program. Several had bicycled or fished at the laboratory but wanted to know more about the work done there.

The laboratory encourages such outreach. The Education Office has a variety of hands-on science activities, displays and literature that may be appropriate for such events. Harding also tapped into the Education Office to find a partner to help him man the booth. Nancy Lanning put Harding in contact with Chen, who is in the Education Office list of potential volunteers.

Chen got involved as a way to set an example for his children about giving back to the community, as well as a way to help promote the laboratory. At first he was a little worried that sitting at a booth would be boring or that people would ask questions he couldn't answer. Neither happened.

"It was very good," he said. "I met lots of interesting people. Some people knew a lot about the laboratory and others knew nothing. It was good to be there with David who knows a lot. Now I will be more confident the next time."

To meet with the Education Office contact Susan Dahl at sdahl@fnal.gov, x3094. Informational handouts about the laboratory also may be picked up in the Office of Communication.

--Tona Kunz

What is it?

The design in this photo is actually the eyespot on the wing of a Luna moth. The moths, which are typically found at Fermilab both in May and July/August, have eyespots on their wings to confuse potential predators. Fermilab's own butterfly expert, Tom Peterson, sent in this photo, which was taken at the G2 service building on Aug. 14. Click on the image to see the entire moth.

STAR of the show

Without the need to connect remotely to Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) from all the way across the world to get analysis data, collaborating scientists in Prague can now do their analysis at lightning speed, thanks to their new local Tier2 site.

In an experiment called STAR, researchers aim to recreate the quark-gluon plasma (a soup-like state of the matter) that permeated the universe less than a second after the Big Bang. To do this, they analyze data from BNL's high-energy heavy nuclei collisions. Before installation of the Tier2 site at the Nuclear Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (NPI ASCR) in Prague, STAR collaborators had to connect to BNL remotely each time they needed to retrieve analysis data, and network latencies made this a tedious task.

For the Prague collaborators to analyze data more efficiently, the datasets from BNL needed to be brought onsite at NPI ASCR. With the new Tier2 site, NPI ASCR now has 20 terabytes of space to store these datasets, which can be rotated periodically depending on the researchers' demands and interests.

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--Amelia Williamson, iSGTW

Dark-matter simulation reveals lumpy haloes

From Physics World, Aug. 6, 2008

Cosmologists in the US and Switzerland have made the most detailed simulation yet of how gravitational interactions have led to the "haloes" of dark matter we see near the centres of galaxies today. The feat could help future experiments grasp the nature of the dark matter, an elusive substance thought to make up nearly a quarter of the universe.

The simulation, which took over a month to run on a supercomputer, charts the evolution of over a billion dark-matter particles since a few million years after the Big Bang. It reveals that the dark-matter haloes are less smooth than previously thought.

"This is the best resolved calculation of the Milky Way's halo ever carried out, with a mass resolution five to sixty times better than the previous largest computations," explains Piero Madau at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "Previously, the inner regions of the halo came out smooth but now we have enough detail to see dense clumps of dark matter."

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