Neutrino results, progress from annual Users' Meeting

Joseph Walding of the College of William & Mary delivers a lecture on new results from the SciBooNE and MiniBooNE experiments.

Fermilab continues to make progress on multiple fronts at the Intensity Frontier, according to speakers at the laboratory's annual Users' Meeting last week.

Scientists working on the MINOS, MiniBooNE and MINERvA neutrino experiments will present new results in the near future, speakers said.

On June 14, members of the MINOS and MiniBooNE collaborations will announce new findings at two consecutive Fermilab wine and cheese seminars beginning at 2 p.m., and at the Neutrino 2010 conference in Athens, Greece. The speakers credited the Accelerator Division with doubling the statistics for their electron antineutrino search. The Accelerator Division was recently recognized for its achievements providing NuMI with record numbers of protons on target.

MINOS will be the first experiment with accelerator-produced neutrinos to examine closely the oscillation parameters of muon antineutrinos, said speaker Justin Evans, a postdoc at University College London who won the Tollestrup Award for his research.

"We will use the analysis of data from the new running to check our previous low-statistics result," Evans said.

Physicist Cesar Castromonte from the Brazilian Center for Physics Research surprised members of the audience at the Users' Meeting when he said the MINERvA collaboration members expected to present their first physics results in the next few months. The MINERvA detector observed its first events just more than a year ago.

"We're working really hard to get the results out as soon as possible," Castromonte said.

Collaborators on the SciBooNE and MiniBooNE experiments are working on their first joint analysis, which they hope to present in the near future, said speaker Joseph Walding of the College of William & Mary.

The newcomer to Fermilab's group of neutrino experiments, the NOvA experiment, is currently under construction in Ash River, Minn. At the site of the NOvA detector facility, workers have finished blasting and have begun to pour the concrete floor for the detector building, said speaker Sarah Budd of Argonne National Laboratory. The collaboration is scheduled to complete a full-height engineering prototype of the NOvA far detector by November, she said.

-- Kathryn Grim

Find the NOvA neutrino experiment online

Those interested in learning more about the NOvA neutrino experiment, currently under construction in Ash River, Minn., can visit the collaboration's new website.

The website explains questions members of the NOvA collaboration have set out to answer and the manner in which they plan to find those answers. It also provides a collection of photos, graphics and videos related to the experiment and links to information from public presentations.

Scientists present first "bread-and-butter" results from LHC collisions

From symmetry breaking, June 8, 2010

It's been just over two months since the first high-energy proton collisions took place in the Large Hadron Collider, and scientists from the LHC experiments have been working feverishly to analyze the data now pouring from their detectors. The results of these first analyses using real LHC data are being presented this week at the "Physics at LHC" conference. The conference, taking place at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany, is the first in this summer's series of international particle physics conferences.

LHC scientists have not yet found the Higgs boson, nor any hints of supersymmetric particles; these discoveries require much more collision data than has yet been collected. But nevertheless there is excitement among the 270 conference participants, who have been waiting years-in some cases decades-for the first proton-proton collisions at the LHC. With these data, particle physicists are doing what they call "bread-and-butter" physics: rediscovering the Standard Model.

The Standard Model of particle physics is the best theory that physicists currently have to describe the building blocks of the universe. With the exception of the discovery of the Higgs boson, the model has been very precisely measured at other particle accelerators and can thus be used as a touchstone to see if the LHC detectors work properly. Physicists also repeat Standard Model measurements to verify that their simulated data correspond to real data. The simulated data, also known as Monte Carlo data, will play a critical role in future discoveries.

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