"Atom Smashers" screening at 4 p.m. today in Ramsey Auditorium

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

Fermilab employees and users can get an early look at a PBS documentary on Fermilab's race to find the Higgs boson and other physics beyond the Standard Model at 4 p.m. today. The Chicago-based directors of "Atom Smashers" will air their 73-minute documentary in Ramsey Auditorium. The directors also will answer questions from the audience, such as why they chose to spend 3 ½ years chronicling life at Fermilab and why they think the general public will find the quest for discovery engrossing.

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Fabiola Gianotti to take helm of ATLAS collaboration

Fabiola Gianotti

When Fabiola Gianotti first traveled to CERN as a young post-doc in the early 1990s, she was overwhelmed by the laboratory's international culture.

Starting March 1, 2009, she'll help lead that international community as the ATLAS collaboration's new spokesperson.

"Clearly this is a role for which she has been training," said Fermilab theorist and colleague Chris Quigg. "From my perspective, the important characteristics in this position are a good physics sense and an effective manner with people. Fabiola has both. ATLAS has chosen well."

Gianotti, who has served as ATLAS physics coordinator from 1999 to 2003 and has worked with the collaboration since its inception, will take over from Peter Jenni, who will step down after 15 years.

"It is a big honor and big responsibility. Peter has given the most crucial contributions to develop and shape the collaboration," Gianotti said.

Jenni plans to get back to more hands-on physics, including helping to run the detector.

Gianotti was selected out of three candidates because of her competence and leadership qualities. "She listens to people and is an excellent physicist," Jenni said.

Gianotti's physics career stems from a love for philosophy and life's great questions.

"At some point, I figured that I needed to decide what to do with my life, and I thought that physics was a more practical way to address these questions," Gianotti said.

Gianotti received her Ph.D. in experimental physics from the University of Milano. Her thesis was on data analysis for the UA2 experiment.

Gianotti began working on liquid-argon calorimetry at the LHC in 1990 and continued that work for ATLAS when the collaboration began in 1992. Gianotti also worked on LEP2's supersymmetry search between 1996 and 2000.

She is excited for her new role, which coincides with an exciting era of physics.

"This is the first step in a very long and exciting path," she said.

-- Rhianna Wisniewski

Pajama Party patches available

Iron-on patches for the LHC first beam Pajama Party

Fermilab's Pajama Party patches are back by popular demand. If you'd like a patch, please stop by the Office of Communication to pick one up or e-mail Barb Kronkow at kronkow@fnal.gov.

Big Bang or Big Bounce?: New theory on the universe's birth

From Scientific American, October 2008

Our universe may have started not with a big bang but with a big bounce-an implosion that triggered an explosion, all driven by exotic quantum-gravitational effects

Atoms are now such a commonplace idea that it is hard to remember how radical they used to seem. When scientists first hypothesized atoms centuries ago, they despaired of ever observing anything so small, and many questioned whether the concept of atoms could even be called scientific. Gradually, however, evidence for atoms accumulated and reached a tipping point with Albert Einstein's 1905 analysis of Brownian motion, the random jittering of dust grains in a fluid. Even then, it took another 20 years for physicists to develop a theory explaining atoms-namely, quantum mechanics-and another 30 for physicist Erwin Müller to make the first microscope images of them. Today entire industries are based on the characteristic properties of atomic matter.

Physicists' understanding of the composition of space and time is following a similar path, but several steps behind. Just as the behavior of materials indicates that they consist of atoms, the behavior of space and time suggests that they, too, have some fine-scale structure-either a mosaic of spacetime "atoms" or some other filigree work. Material atoms are the smallest indivisible units of chemical compounds; similarly, the putative space atoms are the smallest indivisible units of distance. They are generally thought to be about 10-35 meter in size, far too tiny to be seen by today's most powerful instruments, which probe distances as short as 10-18 meter. Consequently, many scientists question whether the concept of atomic spacetime can even be called scientific. Undeterred, other researchers are coming up with possible ways to detect such atoms indirectly.

The most promising involve observations of the cosmos. If we imagine rewinding the expansion of the universe back in time, the galaxies we see all seem to converge on a single infinitesimal point: the big bang singularity. At this point, our current theory of gravity-Einstein's general theory of relativity-predicts that the universe had an infinite density and temperature. This moment is sometimes sold as the beginning of the universe, the birth of matter, space and time. Such an interpretation, however, goes too far, because the infinite values indicate that general relativity itself breaks down. To explain what really happened at the big bang, physicists must transcend relativity. We must develop a theory of quantum gravity, which would capture the fine structure of spacetime to which relativity is blind.

The details of that structure came into play under the dense conditions of the primordial universe, and traces of it may survive in the present-day arrangement of matter and radiation. In short, if spacetime atoms exist, it will not take centuries to find the evidence, as it did for material atoms. With some luck, we may know within the coming decade.

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