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Fermilab Today!

On July 20, 2003, Fermilab's Office of Public Affairs launched Fermilab Today. With daily delivery, Fermilab Today has become an integral part of life at the laboratory.

Since its inception, Fermilab Today has highlighted research results, communicated both good and bad news, emphasized important activities and deadlines and shared the lives of those who read it.

Neutrino work at Fermilab gets EPS award

Niki Saoulidou (front) and Simona Murgia help assemble the MINOS near detector in 2004 at the New Muon Laboratory.

Niki Saoulidou is drawn to mysteries, the chance to sort through clues and piece together an answer.

Neutrinos, which have been involved in many mysteries and "anomalies" during the past 80 years, were ideal particles for her to study.

"Neutrinos have shown, so far, perhaps the only hints of physics beyond the Standard Model," she said. "No one expected how they behave a few years ago, and the hope is that they will continue to surprise us in the years to come."

Saoulidou, 34, born and raised in Athens, Greece, has immersed herself in neutrino research from detector construction to analysis. She has participated in Fermilab neutrino experiments since her graduate school days at the University of Athens. She received her Ph.D. from that university in 2003.

That breadth and depth of her experience coupled with a passion for her work, which materializes in animated gestures and twinkling eyes when she talks about research, likely captured the attention of the European Physical Society. They picked her as one of two winners of the high-energy particle physics 2009 Young Physicists Prize. She will receive the award for outstanding neutrino research today at the EPS conference in Krakow.

The small size of neutrino collaborations often allows young physicists to work on varied aspects of research, rather than specialize early in their careers.

Saoulidou got to work on hardware, software and data analysis for the DONUT (E872) and MINOS (E875) experiments. As a member of NOvA (E929) and a future wide-band beam neutrino experiment from Fermilab to the proposed Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory she also worked on software, simulation and optimization studies.

"I think Niki was one of the most productive members of the MINOS collaboration, both in putting the hardware together in the Near Detector and in the analysis," said Stan Wojcicki, MINOS spokesman.

-- Tona Kunz

Coyote on the hunt

Fred Nobrega, TD, submitted these images of a coyote pouncing on its food: a field mouse. Nobrega took the series of images on June 4 near Batavia & Eola roads.

The search for dark matter: Ethereal yet weighty

From The Economist, July 16, 2009

Two new ways to detect the elusive stuff of the universe

Most of reality appears to be missing. Physicists reckon that the missing matter must be there, but that it is dark. Finding the stuff is damned tricky because dark matter, by definition, cannot be seen. So some of those physicists have been busy trying to devise ways of glimpsing it indirectly-and two groups of them now think their methods are ready to test.

One reason to believe dark matter exists is that galaxies rotate at such speeds that they would fly apart without it, or so the argument goes. The fact that galaxies persist suggests they are held together by the gravitational pull of something invisible-in other words, dark matter. This stops stars being shed from their edges.

Claims to have spotted dark matter have so far rested mostly on evidence gathered by looking at collisions between clusters of galaxies. Some of these appear to have separated dark matter from its visible counterpart. Three months ago, however, a team of physicists reported subatomic evidence. They think they have seen an abundance of high-energy positrons, the antimatter versions of electrons, coming from space, and they speculate that this, too, is a sign of dark matter.

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