Engineers key to laboratory's continuing success

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

Fermilab's celebration of National Engineers Week showcased the cutting-edge know-how and tireless dedication of the laboratory's more than 200 engineers.

"All the big dreams we can cook up would not be realized if we didn't have your help," Fermilab Director Pier Oddone said in a kick-off talk. Oddone outlined some of the laboratory's future international projects and said they will require engineers to work more closely with other laboratories and universities and integrate components fabricated elsewhere.

That doesn't mean Fermilab engineers will have less to do. An array of complex and ground-breaking projects and experiments will keep Fermilab a leader in the field of particle physics and require top-notch engineering skills.

A series of R&D talks throughout the week detailed the pivotal role in design and production that Fermilab's engineers will continue to play for the advancement of a muon collider, Project X, the International Linear Collider, liquid argon detectors, rare decay experiments, a Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment and accelerator upgrades.

During E-Week engineers gave talks to the non-engineers of the Fermilab community as well and offered tours to seldom-visited areas of the laboratory.

"We were very fortunate to have 16 volunteers from the Fermilab Engineering community that formed an ad-hoc committee to organize the week's activities, and many more that helped in various ways throughout the week," said Vic Kuchler, chair of the organizing committee and chairman of the Engineering Policy Committee.

Watch slides from the talks here.

-- Tona Kunz

Fermilab Open House provides family fun for all

Children learn how to make telescopes to take home during the Fermilab Open House on Sunday, Feb. 21.

A volunteer hand-cranked walnuts through accelerator rings and onto a collision path to simulate how protons and antiprotons collide in the Tevatron at Fermilab's Family Open House on Sunday, Feb. 21. Hungry onlookers got to eat the "particle" sprays emitted by the broken walnuts.

Visitors to Fermilab's Open House on Sunday, Feb. 21, got a tour of the superconducting magnet factory.

Take the ICFA detector and instrumentation survey

The Instrumentation Panel of the International Committee for Future Accelerators, ICFA, would like members of the physics community - from undergraduates to retirees - to take 10-15 minutes to complete a survey about the opportunities they have had to acquire practical experience and in-depth understanding of detectors and instrumentation.

The panel is considering organizing a school to teach young researchers information and skills they might not have the chance to learn while participating in large experimental collaborations. They will use the results of the survey as a guide for how to proceed with plans for the new school. Please complete the survey by March 8.

Did design flaws doom the LHC?

From Nature News, Feb. 23, 2010
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Catastrophic failure that caused accelerator shutdown was not a freak accident, says project physicist.

Running more than a year behind schedule and at half its intended energy, the world's most powerful particle accelerator is slated to begin its first full scientific run this week. Along with relief, the occasion is bringing some soul-searching. One senior scientist who helped to build the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, is claiming that the cause of the delay - a major accident in 2008 - could have been avoided.

"Any technical fault is a human fault," says Lucio Rossi, a physicist who oversaw the production of the accelerator's superconducting magnets. In a paper published on 22 February (L. Rossi Supercond. Sci. Technol. 23, 034001; 2010), he concludes that the catastrophic failure of a splice between two magnets was not a freak accident but the result of poor design and lack of quality assurance and diagnostics. The project, he says, will be coping with the consequences for many months to come.

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