Kerry Ewald retires after 33 years

Kerry Ewald

Kerry Ewald will bid good-bye today to Fermilab’s design and drafting group in the Technical Division, but he’s not leaving the world of particle physics.

After 33 years of working on components for Fermilab’s Tevatron and R&D for the next-generation linear collider cavities, he’ll take his skills to the world's most intense pulsed accelerator-based neutron source, the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Ewald says that he will miss Fermilab’s worldly environment as well as many of the people he has worked with here. “I’ve met a lot of people from a lot of places in the world,” he said. “You get to learn much from people in this type of environment.”

The 56-year-old designer started working at Fermilab in 1976 as a machine shop assistant, moving up the ranks as he learned more engineering skills.

He has worked on several projects, including magnet design for the LHC and ILC, but his favorite project was the end-plug upgrade for CDF. “ We worked out of lab 5 in the village, designing, building, and testing the east and west end plugs. It was a time for me when I did everything from design to fabrication to installation. It was a team of people who worked together.”

Ewald looks forward to the challenges of a new job.

“Plus I love the country there. I bought a log cabin on 37 acres in the mountains. I’ll get to drive Harley and drive my Miata through the mountains,” he said. “I'll finally have my own land to hunt deer on.”

Wish Ewald well at his retirement party today from 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. in trailer 157.

--Kristine Crane

Letter to Obama

From Seed, Jan. 26, 2009

Dear President Obama,

As a part of your economic stimulus package, we ask you to consider an immediate increase in funding for scientific research. We deeply appreciate your commitment to increasing the funding that American science so desperately needs. We know that you understand how important it is for the long-term health and vitality of the American economy to keep America at the forefront of scientific research. While some might argue that the current economic crisis should push such plans into the future, we believe, to the contrary, that the stimulus package provides a vital opportunity to begin rebuilding American science, because increased science funding is an ideal economic stimulus: it creates good jobs across the economy, there is large pent-up demand so that money can be spent immediately, and it represents an investment in the infrastructures of scientific research and higher education that are vital to our economy's future.

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One Quantum Leap

From MSNBC.COM, Jan. 22, 2009

Researchers have successfully teleported information from one trapped atom to another one sealed up in a container sitting 3.3 feet (1 meter) away. That's one small step for teleportation, and one quantum leap for code-makers and code-breakers.

But if you're waiting for the kind of teleporter that can beam Captain Kirk down from the Starship Enterprise ... well, don't hold your breath.

"The term 'teleportation' is a little weird," research team leader Christopher Monroe told me today. "When people see that word they think of Captain Kirk, and that's a big problem."

That's not to say that this kind of teleportation is ho-hum physics: Albert Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance" and thought it couldn't be done. But quantum teleportation, as in the transfer of information from one place to the other without passing through any physical medium, has been in the works for more than a decade.

Over the years, teleportation experiments have demonstrated that quantum states - for example, the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon - can be teleported using a variety of methods. But the researchers behind the latest experiment, reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science, claim that this is the first time information has been teleported between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures.

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