Fermilab Today

Monday, Feb. 1, 2010

Monday, Feb. 1
2:30 p.m.
Particle Astrophysics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Jennifer Siegal-Gaskins, Ohio State University
Title: Using Anisotropies to Identify Dark Matter and Astrophysical Gamma-Ray Sources with Fermi
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
All Experimenters' Meeting - Curia II
Special Topics: Proton Source Repairs; HINS RFQ Accelerates Beam in MDB; CMS/LHC Report

Tuesday, Feb. 2
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd floor X-over
4 p.m.
Accelerator Physics and Technology Seminar - One West
Speaker: Dmitri Denisov, Fermilab Title: Tevatron Program - Status and Future Prospects

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

Upcoming conferences

Take Five
Tune IT Up

For information about H1N1, visit Fermilab's flu information site.

Cloudy
28°/23°

Extended Forecast
Weather at Fermilab

Secon Level 3

Monday, Feb. 1
- Breakfast: Croissant sandwich
- French Quarter gumbo soup
- French dip with horseradish cream
- Santa Fe pork stew
- Country baked chicken
- Popcorn shrimp wrap
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Sweet and sour chicken with egg roll

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Wednesday, Feb. 3
Lunch
- Broiled tilapia with Thai coconut curry sauce
- Tri-colored peppers
- Pineapple upside-down cake

Thursday, Feb. 4
Dinner
- Shrimp cocktail
- Glazed filet mignon with bourbon-roquefort sauce
- Two-potato cake
- Steamed green beans
- Poached pears with chocolate pear sauce

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

Fermilab Today
Result of the Week
Safety Tip of the Week
CMS Result of the Month
User University Profiles
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www.fnal.gov/today/

Send comments and suggestions to:
today@fnal.gov

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Celebration! MINERvA construction comes to an end

MINERvA collaborators and experiment supporters wear their celebratory T-shirts honoring the end of the experiment's construction at a party at Chez Leon on Thursday, Jan. 28.

MINERvA collaborators and Fermilab and Department of Energy staff celebrate the completion of the experiment's construction. From left: Debbie Harris, MINERvA co-spokesperson; Dean Hoffer, Directorate; Kevin MacFarland, MINERvA co-spokesperson; Ted Lavine, Department of Energy; and Jorge Morfin, former MINERvA co-spokesperson and collaborator.

Reset local account passwords

If you have a local account on your Windows computer, you or your system administrator might need to reset its password.

Starting today, system administrators will begin receiving alerts about local accounts with passwords that need updating. If your system administrator contacts you, please work with him or her to either change the password or disable the account, if it is no longer needed.

These passwords must be changed to ensure they comply with the laboratory's password policies. A strong password contains at least 10 characters, including letters, symbols and numbers.

Local accounts are set up to manage or use a computer without connecting to the Fermi domain over the network.

If you want to check whether you are using a local account, you can lock your computer screen by pressing the Control, Alt and Delete keys. If you are using an account on the Fermi domain - not a local account - you will see "FERMI\" before your username on the screen that appears when you unlock your computer by pressing Control, Alt and Delete again.

On Feb. 22, the Service Desk will begin disabling any local accounts that still need to be reset.

If you have any questions, please ask your system administrator or contact the Service Desk at x2345.

Water main repairs

FESS Operations workers and contractors braved the single-digit temperatures on Friday morning to respond to a leak in an industrial cooling water main in front of Wilson Hall. The line provides industrial cooling water to Wilson Hall, Ramsey Auditorium, Linac and the accelerator galleries. Workers isolated the leak and reconfigured the system so that no critical areas lost cooling water, although some may have experienced lower water pressure. Workers completed the repair during the weekend to restore normal flow configurations to the area.

Decision for the LHC: 1 inverse fb at 7 TeV or bust!

From Cosmic Variance, Jan. 29, 2010

Last week in Aspen we learned that this week would be when a major decision was reached by CERN at the annual Chamonix meeting as to how to operate the LHC at high energy. Following the magnet quench incident in September 2008, a year-long shutdown ensued for repairs to the magnets, and retrofitting of the rest of the machine for better quench protection circuitry and helium pressure release valves. Not all sectors were warmed up to room temperature for the retrofit last year, but all magnets were trained to go as high as beam energies of 5 TeV (design energy is 7 TeV per beam).

SNOLAB researchers 'thrilled' with $9 million funding

From Northern Life, Jan. 29, 2010

The provincial government has announced roughly $9 million in funding into dark matter research, hoping to find clues into the origin of the universe.

The research is taking place at SNOLAB, two kilometers underground at Vale Inco's Creighton Mine in Sudbury.

Dr. Mark Boulay and Dr. Mark Chen of Queen's University are the lead researchers. They are working to understand the origin of the universe and how it continues to evolve.

"We're thrilled with this new funding," Chen said. "It allows us to go forward with new experiments that address fundamental and important questions that will help our understanding of the evolution of the early universe."

Happy 40th anniversary, NEPA

Frost settled over the Fermilab prairie during a winter day. The National Environmental Policy Act ensures that environmental and conservation factors are included in planning.

At the end of 1969, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) - the first major environmental law in the United States — passed Congress with nearly unanimous bi-partisan support. NEPA was then signed into law on Jan. 1, 1970, ushering in the environmental-law decade of the 1970s.

NEPA set forth environmental protection and conservation as a U.S. policy, and ensures the public has an opportunity to participate in environmental decision making. It established a framework to ensure that environmental factors, along with economic and technical factors, receive appropriate consideration. That means the assessments for all experiments and projects include calculations of their impacts on air, sound, water, soil and traffic flow as well as looking at ways to minimize these impacts.

As a Department of Energy facility, Fermilab both complies with and benefits from this law. For example, NuMI and NOvA had to go through the process of developing an environmental assessment at Fermilab and the Minnesota sites to prove that they would not have a significant impact.

On Jan. 4, President Barack Obama recognized NEPA's 40th anniversary and signed a proclamation celebrating its accomplishments. Although much has changed since 1970, a need remains for the tools provided by NEPA.

"America's economic health and prosperity are inexorably linked to the productive and sustainable use of our environment," Obama said in his proclamation. "With smart, sustainable policies like those established under NEPA, we can meet our responsibility to future generations of Americans, so they may hope to enjoy the beauty and utility of a clean, healthy planet."

During the past 40 years, NEPA has served to successfully improve collaboration, consensus, accountability and transparency. So happy 40th anniversary, NEPA. And cheers to the benefits that a clean, healthy environment brings to all people.

-- Teri Dykhuis, ESHS NEPA compliance coordinator

Safety Tip of the Week Archive

Jan. 27-29
- The accelerator complex was shut down for maintenance - there was no beam
- Technicians found a MI vacuum leak
- The H^- Source recovered
- Linac resumed sending beam at 10:30 a.m. on Jan. 28, and the rest of the complex got beam by midnight
- The TeV suffered a sector DZero quench
- A Linac Klystron LCW leak halted beam

Read the Current Accelerator Update
Read the Early Bird Report
View the Tevatron Luminosity Charts

Users accessing Fermilab computers must complete
PII training

A special announcement in Fermilab Today stated that Fermilab employees must complete a training course about protecting personally identifiable information. The article should have stated that all employees and users who connect to the Fermi network must complete the PII training.