Illinois Institute of Technology

Illinois Institute of Technology's Yagmur Torun (middle) stands with Bob MacGill of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (left), Barry Norris of Fermilab, Alan Bross of Fermilab, Michael Dickerson of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Derun Li of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (right) at the MUCOOL test area at Fermilab.

NAME:
Illinois Institute of Technology

HOME TOWN:
Chicago

MASCOT:
Scarlet hawk

SCHOOL COLORS:
Scarlet and gray

PARTICLE PHYSICS COLLABORATIONS:
Daya Bay, Double Chooz, E299, E545, E570, E594, E632, E791, HyperCP, MICE, MINOS, MIPP, MuCool and pbar

EXPERIMENTS AT FERMILAB:
HyperCP, MINOS, MIPP and MuCool experiments

SCIENTISTS AND STUDENTS AT FERMILAB:
Two postdocs, nine scientists, two graduate students and one undergraduate

COLLABORATING AT FERMILAB SINCE:
1972

MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO FERMILAB EXPERIMENTS:
HyperCP data acquisition system; E791, HyperCP and MINOS software management and MuCool Test Area instrumentation. IIT also built and maintained the holographic replay system for E-632, the 15-foot bubble chamber with holography, which searched for tau neutrino appearance from interactions in the bubble chamber that produced tau particles.

PARTICLE PHYSICS RESEARCH FOCUS:
Neutrinos, heavy quarks, CP violation and rare decays

WHAT SETS PARTICLE PHYSICS AT IIT APART?
Our proximity to Fermilab allows IIT students and scientists to easily participate in activities and projects centered at either the laboratory or our home campus. Our faculty can maintain a high-duty-factor on-site laboratory presence while meeting our university obligations. Our students can be based at the laboratory while maintaining close contact with their adviser and home institution.

FUNDING AGENCY:
Department of Energy, National Science Foundation

FAVORITE NATIONAL LABORATORY:
Fermilab

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NOvA first blast

Construction crews began blasting into the rock at the future site of the NOvA detector facility in northern Minnesota on Monday.

The civil construction project is funded in part by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

For the rest of the summer, crews will use explosives to clear a 50-foot deep cavern 65 feet wide and 370 feet long in the rock.

The facility will house a multi-ton particle detector that will investigate the role of subatomic particles called neutrinos in the origin of the universe.

Weekend power, AC outages, cafeteria closure; Monday morning power outage

On Saturday, July 25, shutdown workers will turn off the power feeder that controls the air conditioning to Wilson Hall. This will cause a drastic reduction in the building's air conditioning service on both Saturday and Sunday. To reduce the building's heat load, please plan to shut down all electronics at the close of business on Friday, July 24.

Although Wilson Hall will not be closed, it will be uncomfortably warm. For this reason, the cafeteria will not open on Saturday.

Power to the Accelerator Division's computer room will be out from 5:30 p.m. on Friday and remain out until after 7:30 a.m. Monday morning. This means no AD computers will operate.

Power and air conditioning will be restored late Sunday evening in time for business Monday morning.

A separate power outage will take place from 7-7:30 a.m. Monday morning. All beamline areas, Wilson Hall and AD areas except for the Main Injector will be without power during this time. From 8-9 a.m., another outage at the Kautz Road substation will affect only the Main Injector.

Antimatter from bananas

U.S.-based scientists and students working on research and experiments with the Large Hadron Collider contribute to a blog supported by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy that offers articles about particle physics and insight into the life as a physicist. This week, Flip Tanedo, a graduate student at Cornell University, posted an interesting entry on bananas and antimatter.

Positrons from bananas

July 21, 2009

I was recently preparing a "Physics of Angels & Demons" talk for a group of high school physics teachers who were visiting Cornell for a "Contemporary Physics for Teachers" workshop. While researching natural sources of antimatter, I discovered a curious article about a naturally occurring potassium isotope that, some fraction of the time, decays via positron emission. The conclusion was that:

"The average banana (rich in potassium) produces a positron roughly once every 75 minutes."

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