Power outage shows strength of Tevatron team

An anchor-shaped bracket connects the electric lines to the Pi-shaped power poles north of Wilson Hall. A metal pin on one of the anchor-shaped brackets became loose, causing a static line that serves as a lightning rod to fall and hit the insulator and power lines. The ensuing arc of electricity triggered a shut down of the master power station. (Click to see larger image)

When most of Fermilab went dark Wednesday, non-essential support staff went home, but many engineers, technicians and physicists picked up flashlights and buckled down for work.

Instead of their normal jobs--running the cutting-edge machinery in an international race to discovery--the men and women were switching to the role of a high-tech pit crew: inspecting and returning to life the highest-energy particle accelerator currently operating.

At 2:30 p.m. Wednesday, a power arc at a power line on site had brought Fermilab's accelerator complex and its key component the Tevatron--a 4-mile particle raceway--to a standstill. Two nearly 6,000-ton particle detectors reading data from an average of 2.5 million proton-antiproton collisions a second ground to a halt as the engine powering bunches of particles racing toward them silenced.

The outage wasn't a monumental problem. Outages of up to a few seconds occur several times a year. Outages of up to 10 minutes occur occasionally. They cause little concern because the temperature of the superconducting magnets in the Tevatron particle collider rises slowly.

But an outage of an hour, which occurs only once every one or two years, creates some challenges. Such outages push the system past a temperature threshold that usually requires a day or two of downtime. It's a speed bump, but it's also a chance to test how well the divisions of the laboratory work together.

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--Tona Kunz

President-Elect Obama urged to promptly name White House science advisor

From AIP FYI, Nov. 7, 2008

"It is essential to quickly appoint a science advisor who is a nationally respected leader with the appropriate scientific, management and policy skills necessary for this critically important role." - Letter to Senator, now President-Elect, Obama

Almost 180 organizations, including the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, and the American Astronomical Society signed letters to Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain urging them to quickly appoint a White House Science Advisor by Inauguration Day. The October letters also ask that this position be called the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and that it be made a cabinet-level position.

A similar recommendation was made in a report issued last summer by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The first of three overarching recommendations in this report, "OSTP 2.0," stated:

"The President should appoint a nationally respected leader to be Assistant for Science and Technology. This individual should serve at the cabinet level. The appointment should be made early in the new Administration, along with the appointments of heads of cabinet-level agencies."

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