Ned Goldwasser to give special colloquium today

Ned Goldwasser, Fermilab's founding deputy director, will give a special colloquium at 4 p.m. today in One West. All are invited.

Goldwasser, who turned 90 this year, will talk about Robert Wilson and the birth of Fermilab. A special Director's Coffee Break starting at 3 p.m. will take place in celebration of Goldwasser's birthday.

Fermilab launches muon collider Web site

A muon collider complex would comprise several machines and many different components. Scientists across the world are developing and testing them. View full graphic

Fermilab is a potential site for a muon collider. Learn more about this new type of particle accelerator, why we would want to make muons collide, how the collider would work and the research and development process currently underway: all available at Fermilab's new muon collider Web site.

Physics potential of muons

Muons are the heavy cousins of electrons. They have the same electric charge, but are about 200 times heavier. Physicists plan to use muons in three ways.

First, a muon collider would allow for a new generation of experiments at the energy frontier. The machine would steer a beam of muons into a beam of antimuons to make the particles collide. The annihilation of muons with antimuons would create the conditions that existed shortly after the Big Bang and allow scientists to investigate the behavior of matter in the most extreme conditions.

Second, a neutrino factory, a facility originally proposed by Fermilab's Steve Geer, would store a large number of muons in a storage ring and let them decay to produce intense, high-energy neutrino beams. It is the facility of choice for the study of neutrino oscillations and offers the best chance of discovering matter-antimatter symmetry violation in leptons. In addition, a neutrino factory has the potential to make the measurements required to develop a complete and consistent theory of the physics of flavor and perhaps to elucidate the mechanism by which all antimatter was removed from the early universe, leading to the dominance of matter over antimatter.

Last but not least, intense low-energy beams of muons would allow scientists to search with exquisite sensitivity for particle interactions in which leptons change flavor in such experiments as Mu2e, COMET and PRISM.

--Ken Long

COLBERT, Leonardo and a Neutralino Heading for Space Station

From Universe Today, Aug. 28, 2009

The third launch attempt was a charm for space shuttle Discovery and her crew. The STS-128 mission is now underway with a successful liftoff one minute before midnight, local time, from Kennedy Space Center. Discovery is carrying the Leonardo supply module to the International Space Station, and tucked away inside is the COLBERT treadmill, along with several refrigerator-sized racks of science equipment, a freezer to store research samples, a new sleeping compartment, an air purification system, and other supplies, plus another unusual object packed in Swedish astronaut Christer Fuglesang's belongings: a theoretical particle called a neutralino.

As you may have guessed, Fugelsang didn't bring a real neutralino, but a soft toy version (see the whole collection of particles at Particle Zoo.) Fugelsang is a former CERN physicist and he wanted to take something representing CERN up to space on his mission. He chose the neutralino because it links together astrophysics and particle physics. In particle physics, the neutralino is a hypothetical particle, one of many predicted by supersymmetric theories.

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Particle plushie designer digs Fermilab

Plushie particle zoo

There are Beanie Babies, plush, tiny stuffed animals with heart-shaped tags. And then there are subatomic particle plushies, the stuffed versions of the constituents of Beanie Babies - soft, cuddly representations of the hadrons and leptons that make up all matter in the universe.

Really, what budding young scientist wouldn't want to take one to bed instead of a Teddy bear?

That's what Julie Peasley was betting on, sort of, when she designed the Particle Zoo line of plushies after seeing hand-made stuffed animals at craft shows.

"I love physics and I love crafts, so I thought why not combine them," she says. "I was sure someone had done it already, but they hadn't."

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