Register now for the annual Users' Meeting June 2 and 3

Mikko Antero Voutilainen presents on the inclusive jet cross section measurement at DZero at the 2009 Users' meeting. Presentations about results achieved and progress made by Fermilab experiments will also take place at the annual meeting.

Registration for this year's annual Users' Meeting is now open. The meeting, which takes place June 2 and 3, will provide an opportunity for users and Fermilab employees to learn about Fermilab's current experiments and efforts as well as the laboratory's future plans.

All Fermilab employees are invited to attend. This year's highlights will include presentations of the URA Thesis and Tollestrup award presentations and talks and talks by Steven Koonin, Department of Energy under secretary for science and Dennis Kovar, associate director for High Energy Physics in the DOE Office of Science.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu will give the public lecture in the evening of Tuesday, June 2.

Tevatron sets new initial luminosity records

The Tevatron broke Fermilab's initial luminosity record twice on Friday, April 16. That morning store number 7737 reached 378.1 µb^-1/s, breaking the previous record, 377.4 µb^-1/s, which was set on April 12. On Friday evening store number 7747 reached 402 µb^-1/s. The unit of measurement µb ^-1/s is roughly equivalent to 70,000 proton-antiproton collisions per second.

DASTOW 2010 set for Thursday, June 24

Save the date: The annual Daughters and Sons to Work Day at Fermilab will take place on Thursday, June 24. DASTOW '10 will offer many of the always-popular events along with some new additions. Read Fermilab Today in coming weeks for more details.

Death

Curtis Owen, a former employee, died March 18. Owen was a group leader in the Linac. He came to the laboratory as it was beginning in the late 1960s and was involved in the creation of the Linac. You can read Owen's obiturary here.

Pleasant pheasant

PPD's Barb Kristen submitted these photos of a male pheasant that stopped by Lab BEG.

Astrophysicists cast doubt on link between excess positrons and dark matter

From Physorg.com, April 16, 2010

Astrophysicists are looking everywhere - inside the Large Hadron Collider, in deep mines and far out into space - for evidence of dark matter, which makes up about 25 percent of the energy density of the universe.

Despite the recent tantalizing observation of excess high-energy positrons - thought to be due to dark matter - UC Irvine researchers say we're not quite there yet.

Models predict that when dark-matter particles collide, they'll annihilate some of the time into electrons and positrons, said Manoj Kaplinghat, physics & astronomy associate professor. Scientists working on a satellite experiment called PAMELA recently identified a large excess of positrons, causing a flurry of excitement about having detected dark matter.

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