NOvA moves toward Minnesota ground breaking

A site model and prototype building for the NOvA experiment. Collaborators hope to break ground in early 2009.

The longest-baseline neutrino project in the United States kicks into high gear this month following the release of $1 million in federal funds and a review of the NOvA project baseline.

The next-generation neutrino experiment hopes to receive soon Critical Decision-2 approval by the U.S. Department of Energy, which would set the scope, price and timeline of the cross-country project. The Energy Systems Acquisition Advisory Board met Aug. 15 to review the project. CD-2 approval likely would have occurred in October 2007, but a Congressional continuing resolution and then a December halt to the project's funding stalled work.

Collaborators were told they could spend no money until February 2009, but a July supplemental funding bill gave the group about $9.5 million and fast-tracked work. When in June it appeared the money might come to fruition, collaborators started gearing up with building design plans and getting ready to send out construction bid requests. They hope to bid all the work at once to cut costs.

The first million of the supplemental funding was paid to the University of Minnesota this month to finish designing the building in Ash River, Minn., at the end of the beam line. Design work could be done by early December to enable start of the bid process. Work could begin in spring on the site preparation, which includes constructing a 3.5 mile-access road and a 40-foot-deep hole dug in granite to house the detector.

"We have the money so we are gathering the people and starting with the plan. Here at Fermilab they were diverted to other tasks and they have to finish what they were doing. It's the same at Argonne and at the universities," said Project Manager John Cooper. "By September 1, we will be doing what we said we would do by February 2009. We will be about five months ahead, and I hope to continue that."

Full construction approval, CD-3b, is expected by September 2009, paving the way for the building construction.

"It's a large object to build up there," Cooper said.

The 15,000-ton NOvA detector is 53 feet wide, 53 feet high and about 220 feet long.

-- Tona Kunz

New to the world

Dan Lee, of Village Housing Services, took this photo of a newly hatched cicada behind 8 Shabbona in the Fermilab Village on Tuesday, Aug. 26.

GLAST Observatory renamed for Fermi, reveals entire gamma-ray sky

From SLAC, Aug. 26, 2008

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and NASA announced today that the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) has revealed its first all-sky map in gamma rays. The onboard Large Area Telescope's (LAT) all-sky image--which shows the glowing gas of the Milky Way, blinking pulsars and a flaring galaxy billions of light-years away--was created using only 95 hours of "first light" observations, compared with past missions which took years to produce a similar image. Scientists expect the telescope will discover many new pulsars in our own galaxy, reveal powerful processes near super-massive black holes at the cores of thousands of active galaxies and enable a search for signs of new physical laws.

The NASA mission was made possible by collaboration with many U.S. and international partners. As part of its support for particle physics research, DOE contributed funding to the LAT--the primary instrument on GLAST--and DOE's Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) managed the LAT construction. SLAC also played a key role in assembling the instrument and now plays the central role in LAT science operations, data processing and making scientific data available to collaborators for analysis.

Read more

Double first for Large Hadron Collider

Counter-clockwise beam test produces historic particle collisions

From Scientific American,
September 2008

Champagne corks popped at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this weekend after one of the facility's four giant particle detectors tasted its first authentic data. Crammed into a stuffy control room on the afternoon of Friday 22 August, physicists tracked the debris produced by protons that had struck a block of concrete during a test of the €3 billion (£2.1 billion) collider's beam-injection system.

Some 15 years in construction, the LHC is based at the European particle facility CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, and is due to fully switch on its proton beams on 10 September. But the LHC's particle detectors have been recording hits from cosmic rays for several months - and Friday's test now marks the first time particle tracks have been reconstructed from a man-made event generated by the collider. "It's amazing to have seen the first LHC tracks," Themis Bowcock of University of Liverpool, UK, who led the team, told Nature. "It's quite overwhelming actually."

Read more