Traffic safety Q&A

As reported in the March 2 issue of Fermilab Today, Fermilab now prohibits the use of cell phones, including hands-free devices, while driving on site. In addition, repeated traffic violations will result in week-long suspensions without pay; non-lab personnel can be banned from site. In response, Fermilab management has received several questions regarding traffic safety, the use of electronic devices while driving and the new Traffic Safety Awareness course that all employees and users must take.

In collaboration with the Traffic Safety Subcommittee, Fermilab management has created a new Web site that lists the answers to the questions received and also provides links to useful resources related to traffic safety on and off site.

Here is a question and answer featured on the new site:

Q. Why has Fermilab adopted a stricter rule than the state of Illinois for cell phone use while driving on the Fermilab site?

A. For most Fermilab employees, the greatest safety hazard is a traffic accident on site. Fermilab is committed to reducing this risk. According to studies cited by the National Safety Council, the use of cell phones, even hands-free devices, is the most significant distraction that affects driving performance.

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MINERvA installs final planes

Technicians from the MINERvA collaboration added the last detector plane to the neutrino experiment on Monday.

Atom and Eve: Fermilab's First International Women's Day

To kick off Fermilab's first International Women's Day, Deputy Director Young-Kee Kim greets CERN luminaries as Director Pier Oddone and a roomful of Fermilab employees look on.

Monday, March 8, dawned gloomy and forbidding at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Thick curtains of gray fog obscured Wilson Hall's upper floors, giving the high rise the look of a modern-day retreat for a Tolkien villain. But the bleak atmosphere out of doors didn't extend beyond the building's sturdy walls. At least not inside the ROC, Fermilab's remote operations center for the Large Hadron Collider's CMS experiment, where some two-and-a-half dozen people gathered to kick off the laboratory's first ever celebration of International Women's Day.

Perhaps it was all the free coffee, or the palpable sense that, after weeks of intense planning, this thing was actually (finally!) happening, but the mood was downright convivial—more befitting a Friday evening cocktail hour than an overcast Monday morning.

At around 8:30 a.m., the crowd fanned out around one of the command center's enormous computer screens, and the day's festivities officially began. Via video conference, scientists from CERN sent a warm, trans-Atlantic greeting to their female colleagues, and, after some brief speeches on the importance of diversity, handed the floor over to Fermilab.

Deputy-director Young-Kee Kim highlighted women's contributions to particle physics research over the laboratory's lifetime. She also looked to the future. "I hope this day is not only a celebration, but an inspiration to young women considering a career in science," she said.

Echoing Kim's remarks, Director Pier Odonne wrapped up the video conference and called upon the particle physics community to try to bring more women to the field.

Read more and view a slideshow of images from CERN and Fermilab's International Women's Day celebrations.

-- Andrea Mustain

Physics lab in underground mine in northern Minnesota studying neutrinos

From Associated Content,
March 15, 2010

An unexpected discovery in an underground mine in Minnesota

If you signed up for a tour of the oldest underground iron ore mine in Minnesota what would you expect to see? Tunnels? Caverns? Bats? Mining carts?

Yes, you would find all of these but what you might be surprised to find there, a half mile below the surface, is an internationally staffed high energy physics lab. Yet this is what our family discovered when visiting the Soudan Mining underground mine site in Northern Minnesota.

The mine, which originated before the turn of the century and was operational until the mid 1960s, provides guided educational tours of the mine tunnels and caverns but twice a day tours are also provided down to the lowest level of the mine which contains an immense physics laboratory contained within a large cavern of the mine.

The first question that came to our mind was, why was this laboratory constructed a half mile beneath the surface? It certainly wasn't for convenience. Every piece of construction material and equipment had to be transported down to the cavern in an elevator and assembled below. It wasn't for security purposes either.

The tour includes a full explanation of the experiments that are being conducted there. The reason for the location is that these experiments need to be done under the earth , because of the need to filter out cosmic rays. Though there are three different experiments that the lab participates in, the one we were fascinated with was the MINOS experiment. MINOS stands for Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search. The experiment's purpose is to measure the mass of particles called neutrinos, which are smaller than the nuclei of atoms. So why did they need a huge cavern to study particles smaller than an atom's nuclei? That is evident immediately as you enter the lab. What you see hanging in the center of this immense underground cavern is a huge slab of metal that weighs 5.4 kilotons (that's A LOT, by the way). This large central item of the lab is called a 'detector' and was explained to us to be a sort of very dense 'catcher's mitt' made of magnetized metal and plastic reflectors. This dense object is built for the purpose of 'catching' some of these tiny neutrinos that are actually being shot through the earth from another location.

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