Fermilab Today Thursday, Feb. 19, 2009
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Thursday, Feb. 19
11 a.m.
Computing Techniques Seminar - FCC2A
Speaker: Douglas Thain, University of Notre Dame
Title: Programming Multicore Clouds Using High Level Abstractions
THERE WILL BE NO PHYSICS AND DETECTOR SEMINAR THIS WEEK
2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Darren Forde, University of California, Los Angeles/ SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Title: Automating One-Loop Amplitudes for the LHC
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Accelerator Physics and Technology Seminar - One West
Speaker: Sandor Feher, Fermilab
Title: Experience with the Commissioning of the LHC Superconducting Magnets

Friday, Feb. 20
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Daniel M. Kaplan, Illinois Institute of Technology Title: New Experiments with Antiprotons

Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.

Weather
Weather

Cloudy
23°/9°

Extended Forecast
Weather at Fermilab

Current Security Status

Secon Level 3

Wilson Hall Cafe

Thursday, Feb. 19
- Tomato Florentine
- *Pork BBQ sandwich
- Pasta primavera
- Smart cuisine: chicken marsala
- Smoked turkey melt
- Assorted sliced pizza
- SW chicken salad w/roasted corn salsa

*Carb restricted alternative

Wilson Hall Cafe menu

Chez Leon

Thursday, Feb. 19
Dinner
- Closed

Wednesday, Feb. 25
Lunch
- Lemon & Herb Tilapia
- Spinach Risotto
- Blueberry Pecan Crumb Cake

Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 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 symmetrybreaking

After 15 years, CMS crystals ready for prime time

A technician works on crystals for the CMS detector's electromagnetic calorimeter at CERN. Image courtesy of CERN.

A year may sound like a long time to shut down an experiment.

But it's all relative to researchers working on the Compact Muon Solenoid detector, which will study the results of particle collisions in the Large Hadron Collider.

Physicists guided proton beams in a complete loop around the LHC for the first time in September 2008. But an electrical problem brought operations to a halt, and the LHC is not scheduled to start up again until September 2009.

That's nothing compared to the time it took the CMS collaboration to obtain the lead tungstate scintillating crystals they needed to build the detector's electromagnetic calorimeter-15 years.

They began working on the crystals just after the fall of the Soviet Union and finally collected the complete set about a year ago.

The Soviet military began developing the crystals, possibly for use in lasers, said CMS Collaboration Board Chair Dan Green. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, they shared their research with CMS physicists.

"Only about a handful (of the crystals) existed," said CMS Spokesman Jim Virdee at a presentation at the AAAS conference in Chicago. "We needed about 75,000 of them."

-- Kathryn Grim

Read more

Photo of the Day

DOE Office of Science tour

Last week, Dr. Laura Biven (right), science and technology advisor of the DOE Office of Science, visited Fermilab, with Sandra Geib, public affairs specialist for the DOE Chicago Office. Kurt Riesselmann (left), Fermilab Office of Communication, gave the visitors a tour of the 15th floor before they met with Fermilab scientists and members of the DOE Fermi Site Office.

Special Announcement

URA Thesis competition accepting admissions

Fermilab and the Universities Research Association invite submissions for the 12th annual URA Thesis award competition.

The award recognizes the most outstanding thesis related to work conducted at Fermilab or in collaboration with Fermilab scientists. The thesis must be completed in the 2008 calendar year. Nominations must be submitted to Steve Brice (sbrice@fnal.gov) by March 1 and should include at least two letters supporting the merits of the thesis you are nominating. At least one letter should be from a member of the thesis committee of the Ph.D.-granting institution.

The Thesis Awards Committee will select the winning thesis. Each thesis will be judged on clarity of presentation, originality and physics content. To qualify, the thesis must have been submitted as partial fulfillment of the Ph.D. requirements in the 2008 calendar year, be written in English, and submitted in the electronic form to the Fermilab Publications Office in accordance with Fermilab policy.

For more details, consult the URA Thesis Award web site.

In the News

Particle physicists set to invade the dark side

From Ivan Semeniuk's Embedded Universe, (a science blog) Feb. 13, 2009

Tom Diehl stretches his arms out and says, with relish: "It's the biggest phenomenon in the universe and we don't have a clue what it is!"

That pretty much sums up our situation with respect to dark energy, that mysterious thingamajig* that is thought to be causing the universe to expand at an ever-faster rate (as opposed to an ever-slower rate, like cosmologists once expected). When dark energy was first reported in 1998, it was soon recognized as the biggest discovery in a generation. But, as Diehl suggests, no one really knows very much about it.

This is not news. What is new is that some astronomical hardware tailor-made to study dark energy is now jumping off the drawing board and into reality. And it's happening at Fermilab, a place that is better known for looking at the smallest phenomena in the universe instead of the biggest.

Diehl himself is a living example of this shift. He’s a high energy physicist associated with “DZero”, one of the two main experiments at Fermilab that discovered the top quark in the early ‘90’s.  He’s always liked astronomy (ever since he helped run a planetarium at his undergraduate college in Maine) but he didn’t expect astronomy to reach out and grab him at Fermilab.  Now, with the leading edge of collider physics shifting to the Large Hadron Collier in Europe, researchers at Fermilab are searching for new ways to stay in business, and dark energy certainly fits the bill.

Read more

Fermilab Result of the Week

Standing on tiptoes

An event in which a photon and a Z boson was created is shown with a single (red) energy deposition in the electromagnetic calorimeter and (yellow) missing energy, which indicates neutrinos from the Z boson decay.

Recent particle physics research studies the rare and difficult to find. With the low hanging fruit picked clean, the time has come to stand on our tiptoes.

DZero physicists have done just that and announced the results of a search for a very rare process. They searched for events in which a Z boson and a photon are produced without anything else observed. While events like this have been observed before, these scientists searched for a special case, specifically when the Z boson decayed into two neutrinos. In earlier studies, the Z boson decayed into electrons or muons. Because neutrinos can traverse many billions of miles of solid lead without interacting, they pass through the detector entirely undetected. Thus, the scientists were looking for collisions in which a single photon was observed and nothing else.

Events like these are clean and very rare. They are easily mimicked by a detector malfunction or a stray cosmic ray. It is only because of the amazing amount of beam delivered by the Tevatron that scientists had any chance to view enough of these events to be certain of what they were observing. The certainty is 99.99997 percent.

While simply seeing something never before observed at a hadron collider is a triumph, DZero physicists went further and used this information to look for even rarer types of physics: an unusually heavy "virtual" photon or Z boson decaying into a Z boson and a photon. The Standard Model predicts that this process, called trilinear gauge boson couplings, is not possible. If some new physical phenomena allowed for this kind of couplings, DZero physicists would have seen more events than expected. Since they observed the number of events predicted by the Standard Model, these scientists were able to set some of the most stringent limits on this unexpected process occurring. Sometimes, standing on tiptoes is all you need to do to reach the prize.

-- Don Lincoln

These physicists played a leading role in this analysis.

DZero Trigger Board: A good trigger is crucial to any particle physics experiment. It decides what data is recorded and what is discarded. This board studies and sets the parameters that govern the current DZero suite of triggers.
Accelerator Update

Feb. 16-18
- Three stores provided ~42.75 hours of luminosity
- MI suffered vacuum burst
- One transfer of antiprotons lost due to timing problem
- On Thursday Pbar will install new target

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

Announcements

Latest Announcements

URA visiting Scholars applications due March 20

Have a safe day!

Monthly leave sheets due

Online Oxford English Dictionary now available site wide

Daycamp information and registration

Muscle Toning Classes

Outlook 2007 New Features classes scheduled Feb. 26

Special Seminar: Programming Multicore Clouds - Feb. 19

NALWO - Mardi Gras Potluck Dinner - Feb. 20

Discount Tickets: World's Toughest Rodeo Presents Toughest Cowboy - Feb. 21

NALWO - Brown Bag Lunch Program - "Australia: Travels in the Land Down Under" - Feb. 24

English Country Dancing, March 1

Introduction to LabVIEW class offered March 5

On-Site Housing - Summer 2009

NALWO - Adler Planetarium Trip - March 21

Child Care program offered - March 24

Kyuki Do Classes - March 30

Conflict Management & Negotiation Skills class offered Apr.1

2009 Standard Mileage Reimbursement Rate

 
Additional Activities


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