Fermilab Today Thursday, May 28, 2009
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Have a safe day!

Thursday, May 28
2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Susan Gardner, University of Kentucky
Title: Dark Matter and the Transient Sky
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Extreme Beam - Physics at the Intensity Frontier Lecture Series - One West
Speaker: Janet Conrad, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Title: Neutrinos: To the Terascale and Beyond!
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR AND PHYSICS TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY

Friday, May 29
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Bruce Schumm, University of California, Santa Cruz
Title: B Factory Measurements of the b -> s(d) g Radiative Penguin Transition Rates

8 p.m.
Fermilab Lecture Series - Auditorium
Speaker: Dr. Samuel Stupp, Northwestern University
Title: Nanotechnology: The Crafting of Self-Assembling Materials for Medicine and Energy
Tickets: $5

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

Weather
Weather

Cloudy
68°/51°

Extended Forecast
Weather at Fermilab

Current Security Status

Secon Level 3

Wilson Hall Cafe

Thursday, May 28
- Santa Fe black bean
- Steak tacos
- Chicken Wellington
- Chimichangas
- Baked ham & Swiss on a ciabatta roll
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Crispy fried chicken ranch salad

Wilson Hall Cafe menu

Chez Leon

Thursday, May 28
- Closed

Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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Info

Fermilab Today
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www.fnal.gov/today/

Send comments and suggestions to:
today@fnal.gov

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University Profile

Baylor University

Baylor University graduate students Karen Bland, Martin Frank and Ben Wu work on an experiment.

NAME: Baylor University

HOME TOWN: Waco, Texas

MASCOT: Bear

SCHOOL COLORS: Green and gold

PARTICLE PHYSICS COLLABORATIONS: CDF

EXPERIMENTS AT FERMILAB: CDF

SCIENTISTS AND STUDENTS AT FERMILAB: Two faculty, one postdoc and four graduate students

COLLABORATING AT FERMILAB SINCE: 2005

MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS: Installing, commissioning, and maintaining the Run 2B Level 1 Tracking Trigger (XFT)

PARTICLE PHYSICS RESEARCH FOCUS: Higgs boson, QCD, searches for new phenomena

WHAT SETS PARTICLE PHYSICS AT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY APART? Baylor's experimental HEP group is relatively young, yet quickly growing. The group was formed in 2003 when Dr. Jay Dittmann, a Fermilab Lederman Fellow, was hired at Baylor.

FUNDING AGENCY: Department of Energy

FAVORITE NATIONAL LABORATORY: Fermilab

Feature

Results, future plans at Users' Meeting

Tom Katsouleas, professor and dean, at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering, will give a public lecture on Wednesday, June 3, titled "Surfing on Plasma Waves: Can We Hang 10 All the Way to the Energy Frontier?"

This year’s annual Users’ Meeting will feature recent experiment results, the laboratory’s future plans and physics updates from Washington D.C. and around the world. The meeting, which will take place Wednesday, June 3, and Thursday, June 4, will provide Fermilab employees and users a chance to learn more about global physics projects and plans for experiments at Fermilab.

All Fermilab employees are invited to attend.

This year’s highlights include lectures by:  Department of Energy’s Mike Procario, National Science Foundation’s Jim Reidy, HEPAP’s Mel Shochet, CERN’s Sergio Bertolucci, KEK’s Koichiro Nishikawa, and Fermilab’s  Director Pier Oddone. A poster session and banquet will take place on Wednesday, June 3.

A public lecture will take place at at 8 p.m. Wednesday, June 3, in Ramsey Auditorium given by Tom Katsouleas, dean of engineering at Duke University. He will discuss next-generation particle acceleration using plasma waves in energy-frontier machines and the technology’s industrial applications.

Registration for the meeting is free. Tickets for the public lecture are $5 and are available on a first-come, first-served basis. The Festa will follow the lecture in Kuhn Barn and feature a TESLA coil demonstration.

An Outreach Workshop will take place in conjunction with the Users’ Meeting on June 4 and 5. It will feature panel discussions, a special outreach colloquium by Michael Turner and the traveling show "Wonders of Physics".

Learn more

Special Announcement

Extreme Beam lecture today at 4 p.m. in One West

The sixth lecture of the Extreme Beam series will take place at 4 p.m. today in One West. Janet Conrad, from MIT's department of physics, will give a talk titled "Neutrinos: To the Terascale and Beyond!"

The lecture series, which will feature talks at Fermilab throughout 2009, will give in-depth information about the science and accelerator and detector technologies that will create a world-leading physics program at the Intensity Frontier.

Visit the Extreme Beam Web site for more information.

In the News

Success in coping with infinity could strengthen case for multiple universes

From Science News, June 6, 2009

Before ER, House and even Marcus Welby, a TV-doctor show called Ben Casey opened each week with a hand drawing symbols, as the voice of Sam Jaffe identified them one by one: "Man, Woman, Birth, Death . Infinity."

Those five symbols supposedly encapsulated what medicine was all about. But they could equally well have summarized the story of the universe. Cosmologists, the scholars of cosmic existence, generally concur that the universe is probably infinite. And they are consumed with understanding the universe's birth, the prospects for its death and whether the presence within it of men and women has anything to do with it all.

Read more

Fermilab Result of the Week

Trying to expand the "zoo"

In this analysis, a squark decays in a complicated chain of events, resulting in a quark, a tau neutrino, the lightest neutralino and a tau lepton. Both the neutrino and the neutralino escape, unobserved by the detector. If supersymmetry turns out to be true, the lightest neutralino is a leading dark matter candidate.

The vast numbers of subatomic particles that physicists discovered over the past century are sometimes called the particle zoo. Physicists organized these particles into classes of particles with similar properties. One set of categories includes quarks, which are bound inside protons, and leptons, which include the electron. Another broad way that particles are split is into two categories, called fermions and bosons. Without getting too technical, the difference between these two classes of particles is their subatomic spin. The most familiar fermion is the electron, while the familiar boson is the photon. This particular fermion/boson difference plays a huge role in the different behavior of light and ordinary matter.

One of the most popular theories for physical phenomena beyond what we currently know incorporates a principle called supersymmetry. Supersymmetry is a theoretical idea that states that for every fermion we have observed, there is another, yet-undiscovered, boson (and vice versa.) This theory effectively doubles the number of expected particles.

Theory suggests that the most copiously-produced supersymmetric particles at the Tevatron would be the so-called squarks and gluinos. These particles are the supersymmetric analogues of the quarks and gluons found inside the protons and antiprotons that make up the beams. The theory then predicts that these supersymmetric particles will dominantly decay back into quarks and gluons.

While such a decay chain is the most common chain predicted, it is possible for squarks to also decay into leptons. In this analysis, DZero physicists searched for squarks decaying not into the familiar electrons, but the electron's heavier cousin, the tau lepton. Identifying tau leptons in a detector is much more difficult than the debris associated with quarks and gluons. The events of interest are very complicated, containing the signature of at least two quarks, one tau lepton and missing energy.

This analysis is the first to search for squarks using tau leptons at the Fermilab Tevatron and plays an important role in the ongoing search for supersymmetry. If it is found, the zoo will get much bigger.

-- Don Lincoln

These analyzers played a crucial role in this analysis.

Modern particle physics experiments depend on simulating particle collisions and the detector's response to them. This simulation uses what we call "Monte Carlo" techniques. Gerald Grenier and Ann Heinson lead DZero's Monte Carlo event-generator effort.
Accelerator Update

May 25-27
- Three stores provided ~36.5 hours of luminosity
- TeV quench at DZero

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

Announcements

Latest Announcements

International folk dancing - last at Barn today, cancelled June 4, resumes at auditorium June 11

Scottish Country Dancing moves to Ramsey Auditorium June 2

English Country Dancing, June 21

Free yoga open house

Users' Office closed May 29

Asian/Pacific quiz contest winners week 3

Costco Warehouse Club memberships

New URA e-mail address

Computing account requests reach peak season

Concerned about H1N1? Ask a question

Argentine Tango classes through June 24

Summer co-ed volleyball league June 1

Registration for Users' Meeting is open

Conflict Management and Negotiation Skills class - June 3 and 10

Discount tickets to "1964"...Beatles tribute - June 6

Accelerated C++ Short Course: registration open - June 8

Python Training June 17-19

Susan Werner - Singer/Songwriter Performs on Arts Series

Microsoft Office 2007 help at the Library

Process piping (ASME B31.3) class offered in October

Nanotechnology lecture: Crafting of Self-Assembling Materials for Medicine & Energy - Fermilab Arts Series

Science Adventures for children

Discounted rates at Grand Geneva Resort, Lake Geneva, WI

SciTech summer camps

Intermediate/Advanced Python Programming July 22-24

 
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