Fermilab Today

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Thursday, August 20
2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Myeonghun Park, University of Florida
Title: The Latest and the Greatest Tricks for Studying Missing Energy Events (PART III)
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY
4 p.m.
Extreme Beam - Physics at the Intensity Frontier Lecture Series - One West
Speaker: Augusto Ceccucci, CERN
Title: Rare Kaon Decays: Extreme Physics with Extreme Beams

Friday, August 21
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO JOINT EXPERIMENTAL-THEORETICAL PHYSICS SEMINAR TODAY

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

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Take Five
Tune IT Up

Thunderstorms likely
79°/62°

Extended Forecast
Weather at Fermilab

Secon Level 3

Thursday, August 20
- Santa Fe black bean
- Steak tacos
- Chicken Wellington
- Chimichangas
- Baked ham & Swiss on a ciabatta roll
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Crispy fried chicken ranch salad

*Carb restricted alternative

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Thursday, August 20
Dinner
- Fresh mozzarella & tomato salad
- Garlic shrimp w/ red peppers & wild mushrooms
- Lemongrass rice
- Sautéed spinach w/ garlic & lemon
- Brandy flan

Wednesday, August 26
Lunch
- Catfish w/coarse mustard
- Roasted corn and red peppers
- Spicy tomato rice
- Chocolate pecan pie

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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Michigan State University

Michigan State University Experimental High Energy Physics Group: Front row from left: Brenda Wenzlick, Tom Rockwell, Kirsten Tollefson, Maris Abolins, Chip Brock and Bernard Pope. Second row from left: Reinhard Schwienhorst, Mike Nila, Philippe Laurens, Wade Fisher, Dan Edmunds and Jim Linnemann. Not pictured: Joey Huston, Carl Bromberg, Jim Kraus, Reiner Hauser, Yuri Ermoline, Pat Ryan, Sarah Heim, Alessandro di Mattia, Weigang Geng, Ron Richards, James Koll, Joel Piper, Jenny Holzbauer, Brian Martin and Patrick True.

NAME:
Michigan State University

HOME TOWN:
East Lansing, MI

MASCOT:
Sparty (Three time national champion mascot, voted "Buffest Mascot" by Muscle and Fitness Magazine.)

SCHOOL COLORS:
Green (Pantone 341, to be exact) and white

PARTICLE PHYSICS COLLABORATIONS:
DZero, CDF, NOvA, ArgoNeut, ATLAS, Milagro/HAWC, E743, E629, E706, E594, E703, CTEQ and R110

EXPERIMENTS AT FERMILAB:
DZero, CDF, NOvA, ArgoNeuT, E743, E629, E706, E594, E703, E663, E585, E383, E743, E629, E382, E366, E319, E311, E281 and E12.

SCIENTISTS AND STUDENTS AT FERMILAB:
Eight faculty, seven students, one postdoc and three engineers and computing professionals

COLLABORATING AT FERMILAB SINCE:
Fermilab opened.

MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO FERMILAB EXPERIMENTS:
For more than 30 years, the MSU Group has specialized in Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 trigger electronics and software; calorimetry; large-scale scintillator/phototube production; and software design for Fermilab's neutrino, DZero and CDF projects. In addition, all faculty members have been leaders, spokespersons and conveners in technical and physics groups for all of their Fermilab experiments.

PARTICLE PHYSICS RESEARCH FOCUS:
W-mass determination, top quark pair physics, single-top physics, QCD jet physics, searches for new phenomena, Higgs Boson searches, photon/di-photon production, W+jets physics, underlying-event studies, neutrino oscillations, multiple phenomenology collaborations and statistical analyses.

WHAT SETS PARTICLE PHYSICS AT MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY APART?
Excellent technical staff and support, outstanding collaboration between HEP experimenters and theorists (CTEQ home), a congenial and cooperative atmosphere within the HEP group and three decades of terrific support from the department and the university.

FUNDING AGENCY:
National Science Foundation

FAVORITE NATIONAL LABORATORY:
Fermilab

View all University profiles

Laboratory releases Physics Advisory Committee report

The Fermilab Physics Advisory Committee met in Aspen, Colorado, June 23-26, for its annual summer session to review aspects of the Fermilab science program. The charge to the committee and its comments and recommendations are now available via links from the PAC Web page.

As usual, this summer's meeting focused more on the overall physics program and strategy than is possible at shorter meetings at other times of the year.

The PAC is a major source of advice to the director about the future direction of Fermilab's experiments and programs. Ever since Fermilab's early days, the PAC's recommendations and comments have offered insight into opportunities and issues important to members of the laboratory community.

The PAC is composed of senior scientists from universities and high-energy physics laboratories in the U.S. and abroad. Fermilab benefits greatly from the knowledge and experience of its PAC members. They represent a wide range of expertise in various subfields, and bring different perspectives to discussions of the Fermilab research program, especially in the context of worldwide efforts.

The next PAC meeting will take place Nov. 12-14, 2009.

New employees - Aug. 3

From left: Oleg Brandt, PPD; Karen Prosapio, WDRS; and Don Gustafson, CD.

Recovery Act scores trifecta by stimulating science

From EyeOnTechnology,
Aug. 19, 2009

To most people, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is about creating jobs. So, why should it include more than $327 million in new funding announced early this month go toward scientific research, instrumentation, and laboratory infrastructure projects?

The answer is that job creation, while the primary concern, is not the only consideration the Obama Administration has when deciding where to put our tax dollars. If possible, they like to see projects that provide long-lasting benefits that keep on giving long after the jobs are created.

In addition to immediate job creation, dollars spent on scientific research stimulate advances in the technology our society depends on, and generate business for high technology companies. That's a trifecta that few infrastructure projects - and no make-work projects - can equal.

We've come a long way...

Top and antitop quarks are generally created in pairs. Events in which the quarks decay so that there are two leptons (electrons and/or muons) after all decays are especially useful in this kind of measurement. The above shows an actual event display that includes an informative diagram.

The spring of 1995 was an incredibly exciting time for Fermilab. The top quark discovery had just been announced. DZero's discovery paper reported a handful of collisions that "looked" like they could have been the creation of top quarks. (The numbers of events reported by CDF in their own discovery paper were comparable.) Those scant 17 events had a huge impact on our understanding of the Standard Model.

Returning to the present, we can review our current understanding of top quarks. By exploiting the extra beam delivered by the Tevatron -- which is currently more than a hundred times the amount of beam delivered to the detectors in 1995 -- we can use our much larger data set and truly study them.

A top quark is the most massive fundamental particle known. This property makes it a very attractive object to study. For one thing, its heavy mass makes it decay before it can be incorporated into more complex particles, such as mesons and baryons. So, studying top quarks provides a way to directly probe the details of quark production.

One of quarks' interesting properties is their subatomic spin. You can think of quarks as little spinning tops. Spin is conserved, which means that if you know the spin of one particle and the specific particle-producing process involved, you should know exactly the spin of another one produced at the same time. In the context of top quarks, because they are produced in pairs (i.e. every quark comes with an antiquark,) if you know the spin of one, you can precisely predict the spin of the other.

DZero scientists recently measured the spins of pairs of top quarks and compared them to theory. This method directly tests heavy quark production in the Standard Model, and is much more precise than a similar analysis done in Run I. The analysis agreed with calculations and highlights the top quark's transition from discovery to careful measurement. Had a disagreement been observed, the predicted mechanisms of top quark production would have received additional scrutiny.

The top quark has sure come a long way.

-- Don Lincoln

Muons are present in collisions in which the electroweak force has played a role, including the decay of top quarks. The muon ID group is constantly working to ensure that scientists can efficiently identify muons in the data.

These physicists played a crucial role in this analysis.

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

Another lecture of the Extreme Beam series will take place at 4 p.m. today in One West. Augusto Ceccucci, spokesperson for NA62 at CERN, will give a talk titled "Rare Kaon Decays: Extreme Physics with Extreme Beams." A reception will follow.

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.