Atrium hosts a festival of lights to celebrate diversity

The Diversity Council has installed lights and other decorations in the atrium lobby, which organizers hope will tie together Fermilab events for Universal Human Rights month.

The display reflects the many cultures and people at the laboratory who celebrate events this time of year with a festival of lights, said Sandra Charles, who chairs Fermilab's planning group for multicultural events. The lights represent snow, peace, humility, winter, charity and hope, she said.

"The bottom line is that Fermilab is a wonderful place to work and that it's an inclusive, diverse workplace," Charles said of the light display.

The display will come down on Jan. 8, which is also the final day to donate canned and packaged goods to the Northern Illinois Food Bank. Food donation collection boxes are located on the first and ground floors of Wilson Hall near the entrances.

--Image and text by Chris Knight

URA accepting submissions for annual Thesis Award

Fermilab and the Universities Research Association invite submissions for the thirteenth annual URA Thesis Award competition. The award recognizes the most outstanding thesis related to work conducted at Fermilab or in collaboration with Fermilab scientists. The thesis submitted must be completed in the 2009 calendar year to qualify.

Nominations must be submitted to sbrice@fnal.gov by March 1, and should include at least two letters supporting the merits of the thesis being nominated. At least one letter should be from a member of the thesis committee of the Ph.D. granting institution.

The Thesis Awards committee will select the winners. The committee members will judge each thesis on clarity of presentation, originality and physics content. To qualify, the thesis must have been submitted as partial fulfillment of the Ph.D. requirements in the 2009 calendar year, be written in English and it must have been submitted in electronic form to the Fermilab Publications Office in accordance with Fermilab policy.

For further details consult the URA Thesis Award Web site.

First snow

AD's Greg Vogel submitted this photo of hay bales near the Fermilab village after the first significant snowfall of the year.

World's largest particle collider back in action

From NPR, Dec. 14, 2009:

The world's largest particle collider is back in business. The Large Hadron Collider broke down last fall. It has taken a year to repair, but this month it began smashing again at record energies. Scientists at CERN, Europe's particle physics lab, are eagerly preparing for a new era in the field.

It's the middle of the night in a room that looks like mission control. There are huge flat screen monitors lining the walls and about a dozen people are watching those monitors carefully. But instead of looking up, this mission control is looking down. About 300 feet below is a detector the size of a five-story building.

The detector is called the Compact Muon Solenoid. It's one of four "experiments" at the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. The LHC is the world's highest-energy particle collider. It accelerates protons around a sixteen-mile underground racetrack, and then smashes them together. The detector's job is to record the subatomic debris from the collisions so that researchers can piece together what happens when the protons smash into one another. At the moment, the LHC is running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and that means Niki Saolidou, who is running the night shift, won't be going to bed tonight.

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