New leaders named for dark energy experiment

John Peoples, director emeritus and former Dark Energy Survey project director, handed over the reins to DES collaborators Josh Frieman and Rick Kron.

An experiment that scientists hope will help them understand what is causing the acceleration of the universe is under new management. On March 15, Josh Frieman succeeded Fermilab Director Emeritus John Peoples as project director of the Dark Energy Survey. Rich Kron will serve as deputy director.

"It was long enough," said Peoples of his seven years leading the experiment. Peoples, a founding member of the DES collaboration, now has retired from three director roles at Fermilab. "I want to do more hands-on science again and I want a slightly simpler life," he said.

Plus, Peoples said, this is a natural time to step down. The experiment is currently under construction and collaborators plan to complete installation and commissioning by late 2011.

"Josh has been organizing, planning and getting the collaboration ready," Peoples said. "At this stage, we're looking for a scientist to lead, not a politician. There are 130 prepared minds out there working under Josh and getting ready for science."

The data from the experiment will provide scientists with four methods that they can use to determine the nature of the dark energy thought responsible for the acceleration of the universe. The survey experiment, which will use a very large digital camera mounted to a telescope in Chile, is the first of a new generation of projects that can help to address that question. The Dark Energy Camera and its infrastructure are currently under construction at Fermilab. Other experiment components are being built elsewhere.

To help usher the collaboration into the next era, Frieman asked Kron, fellow DES collaborator and former Sloan Digital Sky Survey project director and spokesperson, to serve as his deputy director.

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Reminder: lights out for Earth Hour this Saturday

Fermilab will shut off all nonessential lights in Wilson Hall between 8:30-9:30 p.m. Saturday, March 27, as part of Earth Hour.

For one hour on Saturday, March 27, the building will boost its energy conservation efforts by joining businesses, organizations and homes around the world in darkness. Earth Hour, a global 60 minutes without electricity, delivers a powerful message about the need for action to pull the plug on global warming.

All nonessential lights in Wilson Hall will shut off at 8:30 p.m. Lights necessary for safety, such as those in stairwells and those needed to run experiments will remain on. Those who need to work on Saturday night should try to do so before or after 8:30-9:30 p.m. If you must work during that time, please remember to switch lights off when done. As an extra measure of compliance, all nonessential lights switched on after 8:30 p.m. will shut off again at midnight.

Wilson Hall building manager John Kent hopes that employees will do their part by turning off personal computers, task lights or any other personal electronics before leaving for the weekend.

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Physics: The Large Human Collider

From Nature News, March 24, 2010

Social scientists have embedded themselves at CERN to study the world's biggest research collaboration. Zeeya Merali reports on a 10,000-person physics project.

"I am here to watch you." So began anthropologist Arpita Roy when introducing herself in 2007 to a roomful of particle physicists. At the time, those scientists were racing to finish work on the world's biggest machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's high-energy physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

The LHC carries the hopes of generations of physicists, who have designed it to reach energies never before achieved in a collider and - possibly - to produce a zoo of particles new to science. But the LHC is also a huge human experiment, bringing together an unprecedented number of scientists. So in recent years, sociologists, anthropologists, historians and philosophers have been visiting CERN to see just how these densely packed physicists collide, ricochet and sometimes explode.

"The LHC allows a unique sociological study of how an experiment develops in real time: how scientists form opinions, make technical decisions and circulate knowledge in such a big project," says Arianna Borrelli, a particle physicist and philosopher of physics at the University of Wuppertal in Germany.

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