Fermilab kicks off lab's Engineers Week 2010

Fermilab's engineers gather for a group photo in celebration of Engineers Week 2010.

To kick off Engineers Week at Fermilab on Wednesday, Feb. 10, Director Pier Oddone addressed all engineers at a talk in Ramsey Auditorium.

Oddone gave an overview of Fermilab's future projects and highlighted how crucial engineers are to the laboratory.

"All the big dreams we can cook up would not be realized if we didn't have your help," he said.

Fermilab's Engineers Week celebration will continue throughout the week of Feb. 15 with tours, discussions and other events. View the schedule of events

Preserving the data harvest

Canning, pickling, drying, freezing-physicists wish there were an easy way to preserve their hard-won data so future generations of scientists, armed with more powerful tools, can take advantage of it. They've launched an international search for solutions.

When the BaBar experiment at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory shut down in April 2008, it brought an end to almost nine years of taking data on the decays of subatomic particles called B mesons. But that was hardly the end of the story for the 500 scientists working on the experiment. In November they celebrated the publication of their 400th paper, and they expect the next few years will yield at least 100 more.

These BaBar results and discoveries stem from more than two million megabytes of data. As impressive as this number is, it's only a fraction of the data that will come out of the next generation of high-energy physics experiments. For instance, the ATLAS detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider will produce a whopping 320 megabytes of data every second, surpassing BaBar's total output within three months.

BaBar's treasure trove of data, which may contain answers to questions we don't even know how to ask yet, raises an increasingly important question in highenergy physics: When the party's over, what do you do with the data?

In the past, this was not so much of a concern. New experiments came along in a regular drumbeat, regularly superseding one another in terms of what could be done with the data they produced. Today, as experiments get bigger, more complex, and much more expensive, the drumbeat has slowed considerably, and physicists are starting to realize the value of wringing as much insight out of every experiment as they possibly can.

But without a conscious effort to preserve them, data slowly become the hieroglyphs of the future. Data preservation takes a lot of work, and with that, a lot of resources. Researchers have to think not only about where to store the data, but also how to preserve it in a way that it can still be used as technology and software change and experts familiar with the data move on or retire.

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URA submissions for annual Thesis Award due March 1

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. 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.

Fun in the snow

BSS employee Julius Borchert submitted this photo of a snowperson in front of 41 Nequa in the Village.

First results from Large Hadron Collider published

From BBC News, Feb. 9, 2010

The results from the highest-energy particle experiments carried out at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in December have begun to yield their secrets.

Scientists from the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid detector has now totted up all of the resulting particle interactions.

They wrote in the Journal of High Energy Physics that the run created more particles than theory predicted.

However, the glut of particles should not affect results as the experiment runs to even higher energies this year.

The LHC is designed to smash together particles and atoms circling its 27km-tunnel in a bid to find evidence of further particles that underpin the field of physics as it is currently formulated.

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