Soccer and the LHC

Lothar Bauerdick, head of the CMS Center, wrote this week's column.

Lothar Bauerdick

"Why are they still running like that?" my friend Claudio asked. It was Sunday night, and we were watching the World Cup soccer match between Germany and Australia. It was their first game of the tournament, and the German team was already 2-0 in the lead. So why did they still work so hard and run like crazy to shoot more goals?

It made me think of the LHC. Since the 7-TeV startup in March, the LHC accelerator team has delivered lots of proton-proton collisions, especially on weekends when there are fewer accelerator studies that interrupt beam delivery. As a result, we have seen the CMS luminosity curve skyrocket exponentially. As we were scoring an ever-increasing amount of data, we cheered for the LHC team, hoping they'd run some more beam before focusing on more machine studies. We hoped to get at least one inverse picobarn of integrated luminosity before this summer's International Conference on High Energy Physics in Paris. Like the German team, which ended up winning 4-0 in a beautiful game, we hoped to achieve a high score in time for ICHEP to show our colleagues the best possible physics results.

But then the LHC had a few weekends with technical difficulties and less than great luminosity. Now the LHC team's plan is to concentrate first on developing full intensity with just one pair of proton bunches, and then later to go back to a larger number of bunches in the machine. The focus is to establish safe and routine operation, taking one step at a time. For the moment, this means rather little luminosity for the experiments while machine studies take precedence over physics running.

Concentrating on the long-term goals is not a bad thing at all, in physics and in soccer. Reaching those goals may require anticipating what's ahead in the next rounds and giving the team the best chance for long-term success. In the long run the CMS team will score a lot more luminosity. And the German soccer team hopefully will score more wins.

DASTOW 2010 takes place Thursday

Children try their hands at firefighting during the 2009 DASTOW.

Don't forget that Thursday is Fermilab's bring your daughters and sons to work day. Enjoy a day of science shows, nature talks and metal crunching by the Fire Department.

A full schedule of events and rules can be found here.

The purpose of the day is to expose your children to science and to the work you do.

As you show your child or children around the laboratory, please keep a few things in mind. Employees must stay with their children at all times. When near offices, remember that other employees will be working nearby, so please keep noise and conversations to a minimum. Also, because parking is limited, a bus will be provided for Fire Department and bison farm activities. You must take the bus to attend these events.

There also have been problems in the past with individuals allowing children to wander around by themselves, particularly at the bison farm. Roads & Grounds personnel have agreed to keep the bison in the feeding pen off of Batavia Road so that you can get an up-close view. If children run around the barn or in the corral area, Roads and Grounds staff will not allow up-close viewing again and next year's DASTOW would have viewing from the Industrial Building complex parking lot.

Please come and enjoy the day with your child. Just remember to be respectful to laboratory property and coworkers.

Sterile neutrino back from the dead

From New Scientist, June 22, 2010

A ghostly particle given up for dead is showing signs of life.

Not only could this "sterile" neutrino be the stuff of dark matter, thought to make up the bulk of our universe, it might also help to explain how an excess of matter over antimatter arose in our universe.

Neutrinos are subatomic particles that rarely interact with ordinary matter. They are known to come in three flavours - electron, muon and tau - with each able to spontaneously transform into another.

In the 1990s, results from the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico suggested there might be a fourth flavour: a "sterile" neutrino that is even less inclined to interact with ordinary matter than the others.

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