Happy Holidays from Fermilab

Click on the image above to view the full-size holiday greeting card. Scroll down past the image for instructions on how to send the card to your friends.

Earlier this year, Fermilab's ArgoNeuT experiment recorded signature particle tracks from neutrinos in its detector. These tracks were the first ever seen in a liquid-argon detector in the United States.

To learn more about the ArgoNeuT detector or the particle track milestone, read the July 1 issue of Fermilab Today.

LARP reaches magnet technology milestone

A focusing magnet, with quadrant slices visible, was built by LARP using advanced superconducting material. The magnet just passed a test at Fermilab showing it can withstand greater heat and energy levels that will be needed for the next phase design of the LHC.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has just started producing collisions, but scientists and engineers have already made significant progress in preparing for future upgrades beyond the collider's nominal design performance, including a 10-fold increase in collision rates by the end of the next decade and, eventually, higher-energy beams.

In a test on Dec. 4, a focusing magnet built by members of the U.S. Department of Energy's multi-laboratory LHC Accelerator Research Program (LARP), using an advanced superconducting material, achieved the goal of creating a magnetic field strong enough to focus intense proton beams in the upgraded LHC interaction regions.

"This success has been made possible by the enthusiasm and dedication of many scientists, engineers, and technicians at the collaborating laboratories," said Eric Prebys of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, who heads LARP, "and by the guidance and continuous support of the U.S. Department of Energy and the encouragement and contributions of CERN and the entire accelerator magnet community."

LARP is a collaboration of Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermilab, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory founded by DOE in 2003 to address the challenge of planned upgrades that will significantly increase the LHC's luminosity.

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-- Paul Preuss

Food, magic and funny physicists at potluck party

Fermilab's Inaugural potluck party begins tonight at 5 p.m.

Enjoy food from around the world, singing by Fermilab's Daycare children and comedy skits from some of Fermilab's funniest physicists.

From 5 to 6:15 p.m., Fermilab employees, retired employees, users, contractors, funding agency employees and their families and friends will gather in the Wilson Hall atrium to enjoy a wide variety of cultural cuisine.

At 5:30 p.m., children from the Fermilab Daycare will sing Christmas songs in the Fermilab atrium.

From 6:30-8:30 p.m., the evening's entertainment will take place in Ramsey Auditorium. Rocky Kolb will emcee the event, which will include skits, songs and more. View the program and find out more at the party Web site.

This week at the LHC

The LHC had a successful weekend, with the experiments recording a total of 50,000 collisions at 2.36 TeV, the LHC's maximum energy for 2009. Collectively, the six LHC experiments saw over one million collision events at 900 GeV, which also provided enough data to characterize the accelerator. Last night, the LHC circulated the highest intensity beams yet, with 16 particle bunches per beam. Each bunch contained approximately 20 billion particles.

The weekend's collision events are an exciting confirmation of the machine's abilities, but there is still a long way to go. This year's LHC run ends this week. The LHC will restart in the first quarter of 2010, following maintenance and hardware preparation for the next milestone, collisions at an energy of 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam).

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