IMAP password reminder

If you have not already done so, please change your password for your IMAP e-mail account before the end of the day today.

If you have not reset your password since Aug. 18, you must reset it - even if your password is already at least 10 characters long. Starting tomorrow, the Computing Division will begin a week-long process of disabling accounts with unchanged passwords. If you do not reset your password, you will need to contact the Service Desk to re-enable your account.

The password must be at least 10 characters in length to fulfill DOE password complexity requirements.

A secure password will include a combination of letters, symbols and numbers. For instructions on how to change your IMAP password on the IMAP server and on other clients such as Outlook and Entourage, see this site.

Service Desk representatives will offer assistance at the Password Doctor booth in the Wilson Hall atrium during lunch hours today. They are also available during business hours at the Service Desk and at x2345. Please bring your Fermilab identification to the booth or Service Desk.

Fermilab aids earthquake engineering network

A screenshot of a computer simulation of the 1906 earthquake that shook the San Francisco Bay Area. The red areas indicate the most intense shaking. Image courtesy of NEES and USGS.

By partnering with a network of earthquake engineering research sites, Fermilab could ultimately help to reduce the losses caused by earthquakes and tsunamis.

The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation, or NEES, is a consortium of 14 research equipment sites committed to sharing both information and equipment. They share the common goal of modeling and simulating earthquakes, tsunamis, and their effects on human-made structures.

On Oct. 1, the new NEES Community and Communications Center, or NEEScomm, will open its doors at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., thanks to a $105 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

"The large physics experiments have a lot of experience in terms of technical collaborations between the universities' researchers and engineers," said Ruth Pordes, associate head of Fermilab's Computing Division. "We can bring that experience to the table."

Pordes will contribute a few weeks of work each year to NEES by serving on NEES' project advisory committee and chairing the project's community collaboration subcommittee. In those capacities, she works to build synergy with related projects in cyberinfrastructure, site operations and educational outreach.

Collaborations, such as Open Science Grid, which has members at many NEES institutions, help to bridge the divide that can exist between groups at a given institution. Pordes, who also holds a leadership role in OSG, wants to make those collaborations stronger.

"I want to foster a direct connection between earthquake engineers in the engineering faculty and the other groups doing distributed data and computing at their universities," Pordes said.

NEES isn't the only one that benefits from this partnership. "The physics community and Fermilab benefit from the chance to demonstrate our physics technology in a broader setting," Pordes said. "This is a practical technical way to do so."

-- Miriam Boon

TD celebrates 1 million hours worked without injuries

From left: TD employees Earl Shaffer and Steve Gould staff a raffle table at the TD picnic last week. The division's employees celebrated 1 million man hours without a DART injury.

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. Ikaros Bigi from the Department of Physics at the University of Notre Dame will give a lecture titled "Come Botticelli Nella Sistina -- On The Beauty of Charm." A reception will follow.

The lecture series, which features talks at Fermilab throughout 2009, gives 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.

Endgame for the Tevatron

From Discover Magazine, Sept. 21, 2009

With little fanfare, last week the Tevatron at Fermilab, and the two experiments CDF and D0, emerged from an 11-week shutdown for what will likely be the final run of the collider, which is over 20 years old. In the past year, the machine has regularly set new records for luminosity (essentially the number of collisions per second) and delivered over 2 fb^-1 (inverse femtobarns) of proton-antiproton collisions at a center of mass energy of 1.96 TeV to the experiments, still the highest in the world. The startup has gone very smoothly, and the Tevatron delivered a solid load of data to the experiments last week.

This funny unit, inverse femtobarns, allows us to calculate how many collision events of a certain type to expect. Take top quark pair production, for example. For protons colliding with antiprotons at Tevatron energies, we can calculate (or measure) what we call the production cross section. This cross-section is in fact expressed as an area, a very small area, since protons and antiprotons are so small. One "barn" is 10^-28 m², and the cross section for top pair production is about 7 x 10^-12 barns, or 7 picobarns. By multiplying the cross-section times the integrated luminosity we can get the number of top quark pairs events produced. To get the number we actually observe in the detector, we need to take into account the efficiency for reconstructing them.

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