Fermilab Today Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2008
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Wednesday, Sept. 3
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - One West
Speaker: L. Roberts, Boston University
Title: Muon (g-2): A Probe of the Standard Model and Beyond

Thursday, Sept. 4
THERE WILL BE NO PHYSICS AND DETECTOR SEMINAR THIS WEEK
1 p.m.
Research Techniques Seminar - West Wing, WH-10NW
Speaker: R. Mirzoyan, Max-Planck-Institute for Physics
Title: The Cross-Talk Problem in SiPMs and Their Use as Light Sensors in Multichannel Imaging Cameras
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

Showers
73°/58°

Extended Forecast
Weather at Fermilab

Current Security Status

Secon Level 3

Wilson Hall Cafe

Wednesday, Sept. 3
- Portabello 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, Sept. 3
Lunch
- Ham & gruyere crepes
- Confetti salad
- Mixed berry cobbler

Thursday, Sept. 4
Dinner
- Pasta carbonara
- Chilean sea bass w/spicy red pepper sauce
- Sautéed spinach with garlic & lemon
- Fresh fruit tart

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

From symmetry breaking

Film chronicles race between Fermilab and CERN

Promotional poster from "Atom Smashers", a film focusing on Fermilab and CERN in the race for the Higgs.

A character-driven documentary highlights the cross-Atlantic competition pitting U.S.-based Fermilab against Europe-based CERN in the race to discover the supposed mass-endowing Higgs boson particle.

This research showdown will premier at the world's largest science celebration, Science Chicago.

The 75-minute film Atom Smashers will air Sept. 19 and 21 at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry with a panel session following the initial screening. Eight Fermilab scientists play key roles while other employees appear occasionally in shots.

Following its Chicago debut, the film will head to several international cities and hit the air ways with a 53-minute version on PBS's Independent Lens Nov. 25.

Co-director Monica Ross, an adjunct professor at Columbia College in Chicago, said the film doesn't follow the traditional NOVA-like format of scientist interviews. Instead, the crew followed the lives of scientists working and trying to relax amidst the pressures of dealing with budget cuts, aging machinery, and the threat of watching the prize from a more than decade long search be ripped out of their grasp by the new experiment on the block: the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

-- Tona Kunz

Read the rest of the article in symmetry breaking.

Definition of the Day

Solenoid vs. Spectrometer

Rotation of the solenoid magnet of the CMS experiment before the insertion into its cryostat. Image courtesy of CERN.

Editor's note: Fermilab Today will tackle LHC vocabulary words prior to the machine's start up next week as part of our new Definition of the Day section. The CMS experiment was misidentified in Tuesday's Director's Corner. Fermilab Today received reader responses inquiring about the difference between a solenoid and a spectrometer, which are both pieces of the CMS detector. Both are defined below.

Solenoid
Solenoid refers specifically to a magnet made of coils of wire that produce a uniform magnetic field when an electric current flows through it. Solenoids can create controlled magnetic fields.

The largest solenoid ever constructed is found in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN. The magnet is superconducting, meaning that it is cooled to a level where the atoms inside the wires are almost frozen into place, allowing electrons to flow without resistance and create a powerful magnetic field. In the CMS experiment, the solenoid is nearly 43 feet long with a diameter of 23 feet and a magnetic field of 100,000 times stronger than that of the Earth.

Scientists at CMS need the very strong magnet to accurately measure very high momentum particles, such as muons. The more momentum a particle has, the less it bends in a magnetic field. Powerful magnetic fields, such as the one created by CMS's solenoid, force the particles to bend.

Spectrometer
A spectrometer is a tracking system that detects and measures the momentum of particles from how their tracks bend in a magnetic field. Both the CMS and ATLAS experiments have spectrometers to measure muons, particles with a very high momentum.

In the News

Courts weigh doomsday claims

From MSNBC Cosmic log, Sept. 2, 2008

Critics who say the world's largest atom-smasher could destroy the world have brought their claims to courtrooms in Europe and the United States - and although the claims are getting further consideration, neither court will hold up next week's official startup of the Large Hadron Collider.

The main event took place today in Honolulu, where a federal judge is mulling over the federal government's request to throw out a civil lawsuit filed by retired nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and Spanish science writer Luis Sancho.

Meanwhile, legal action is pending as well at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. Last week, the court agreed to review doomsday claims from a group of professors and students, primarily from Germany and Austria. However, the court rejected a call for the immediate halt of operations at the LHC.

Read more

From the CMS Center

Ready for collisions

Lothar Bauerdick, head of the Fermilab CMS Center, wrote this week's column.

Lothar Bauerdick

As we move closer to recording the first collisions, working on the CMS experiment gets more and more exciting. The CMS detector is now closed, and the magnetic field was switched on for tests over the weekend. Things are coming together very nicely: the detector has almost everything installed we planned to have for the initial data taking, including both of the detector end caps of the electromagnetic calorimeter.

The CMS collaboration has been taking data with cosmic rays most weeks for some time. All detector components now send signals to the detector readout. The collaboration has recorded the first curved particle tracks with the magnetic field on and is ready for the first collisions.

The data taking chain is complex and is improving rapidly. Data gets promptly reconstructed at the CERN Tier-0 and is being pushed out to Tier-1 and Tier-2 centers around the world for analysis, including Fermilab's Tier-1 center. On a weekly basis results about detector performance based on cosmic-ray and calibration data are reported.

If you pass by the Remote Operations Center near the Fermilab cafeteria you frequently will see CMS people taking shifts to monitor the collection of cosmic ray data. These shift responsibilities go back and forth between CERN and Fermilab-an arrangement that takes advantage of working in different time zones. The CMS shift schedule fully counts on the Fermilab ROC, and U.S. CMS collaborators are taking shifts in the ROC as their collaborators do at the control room in Cessy, France, or in the CMS Centre at Meyrin, Switzerland.

You can see the cosmic rays that we are already recording by looking at the event displays in the ROC or the big screens installed in LHC Physics Center on the 11th floor of Wilson Hall. Beams will be circulating in the machine very soon.

Register for the Pajama party on Sept. 10 and celebrate the start of the LHC!

Safety Update

ES&H weekly report, Sept. 3

This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ES&H section, lists no incidents. We have now worked 13 days since the last reportable incident. Find the full report here.

Safety report archive

Accelerator Update

Aug. 29 - Sept. 1
- Fours stores provided 65 hours and 45 minutes of luminosity
- Pbar's pulse magnet replaced
- LRF3's LCW leak repaired
- H- Source's output adjusted
- MIRF5 causes problems for NuMI

Read the Current Accelerator Update
Read the Early Bird Report
View the Tevatron Luminosity Charts

Special Announcement

Register by Sept. 5 for LHC start-up pajama party

At 1:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 10, Fermilab will host a pajama party at the LHC Remote Operations Center to watch the first beam circulate in the Large Hadron Collider. Breakfast will be served following the LHC start-up. Pajamas are optional. You must register by Friday, Sept. 5 to attend.

Announcements

Have a safe day!

Second meeting on the feasibility of a Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab today
The second technical meeting on the feasibility of mounting a next-generation muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab will take place at 1:30 p.m. today, in One West. The meeting should last for two hours. The meeting will focus on several critical accelerator complex issues central to the core plan for the experiment and the experiment's compatibility with Mu2e. Organizers hope to establish a credible work and cost analysis. All interested parties may attend. Contact Milorad Popovic for more information.

URA Visiting Scholars Program applications due Sept. 10
The application deadline for the next round of scholarships for the Universities Research Association's Visiting Scholars Program is Sept. 10. The program will support visits by researchers from URA member institutions to work at Fermilab for periods of up to one year. More information.

September Wilson Hall Window washing
Window washing of Wilson Hall's exterior windows began Tuesday and will continue through Friday. Wilson Hall interior window washing will begin on Monday and continue through Thursday. The schedule is below. Please clear all items from in front of windows prior to your floor's interior washing date. Monday: Floors 12-15
Tuesday: Floors 8-11
Wednesday: Floors 4-7
Thursday: Ground, Mezannine and floors 1-3.

Additional Activities

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