Another record! Tevatron again surpasses expectations

The purple dots show that the Tevatron's performance in FY2009 has exceeded the federal goal, shown by the top line. The lower line shows the minimum acceptable luminosity range for FY2009. The weeks without lines coincide with scheduled maintenance shutdowns.

When Mary Convery moved to the Accelerator Division about 1 ½ years ago, people told her that with major upgrades finished there wasn't much to do but to keep the nearly three-decades-old Tevatron particle accelerator running smoothly.

"‘There are no more home runs to get,' I was told," said Convery, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory deputy run coordinator. "Yet, we keep continuing to make improvements."

In the past five years at the Tevatron, the luminosity - the number of collisions per second - has increased sixfold.  In the last six weeks alone, overall luminosity has improved 10 percent, generating more than a dozen luminosity records, sometimes multiple records in one week. Since October, the Tevatron has had nine of the top 10 stores in its history.

The Tevatron consistently tops past integrated luminosity records even without increasing the number of protons and antiprotons injected into the accelerator ring.

The higher the luminosity, the better the chance for discovery -- including sighting the Higgs boson, theorized to impart mass to other particles.

The Tevatron is on track to beat the FY 2009 estimated maximum weekly integrated luminosity by 20 to 25 percent. Earlier this month, the machine showed its stamina with a run of 15 uninterrupted stores. Achieving a run of more than six stores without interruption is considered good.

"So we are getting more bang for the buck," said Cons Gattuso, run coordinator.

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-- Tona Kunz

Obama pick as energy secretary says new energy sources, stopping climate change are essential

From Chicago Tribune,
Dec. 11, 2008

Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who is President-elect Barack Obama's choice for energy secretary, has been a vocal advocate for more research into alternative energy, arguing that a shift away from fossil fuels is essential to combat global warming.

Chu, a Chinese-American who currently is director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, has in recent years campaigned to bring together a cross-section of scientific disciplines to find ways to counter climate change.

If action is not taken now to stop global warming, it may be too late, he argues.

Since 2004, Chu has been director of the Berkeley lab, the oldest of the Energy Department's national laboratories, with its 4,000 employees and a budget of $650 million. The laboratory does only unclassified work and under Chu has been a center of research into biofuels and solar energy technologies. He is a former head of the physics department at Stanford University.

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Regulation change for 403 (b) plans

The Internal Revenue Service has finalized regulations covering the 403(b) plans. All employees will receive a memo explaining in detail the changes to the eligibility requirements for obtaining hardship withdrawal distributions. You can access the memo on the Benefits Web site.

High Energy Physics Team Sets New Data-Transfer World Records

From Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research news room,
Dec. 8, 2008

Building on seven years of record-breaking developments, an international team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)-with partners from Michigan, Florida, Tennessee, Fermilab, Brookhaven, CERN, Brazil, Pakistan, Korea, and Estonia-set new records for sustained data transfer among storage systems during the SuperComputing 2008 (SC08) conference recently held in Austin, Texas.

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