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For information about H1N1, visit Fermilab's flu information site.
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Thursday, July 1
- Breakfast: Apple sticks
- Minnesota wild rice w/chicken
- Tuna melt on nine grain
- Italian meatloaf
- Chicken casserole
- Buffalo crispy chicken wrap
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Mandarin chicken
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu
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Thursday, July 1
Dinner
- Closed
Wednesday, July 7
Lunch
- Cornmeal crusted catfish
- Green beans w/hot pepper vinegar
- Creamy coleslaw w/bacon
- Sweet potato pie
Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
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MINERvA receives CD-4
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| Members of the MINERvA collaboration stand in front of their completed detector in March 2010. |
The MINERvA project reached a milestone this week. The Department of Energy awarded the project CD-4, the last step in its five-step project approval process, on June 28.
"The MINERvA project team and our partners at Fermilab and the Department of Energy all worked very hard to complete construction of the MINERvA detector ahead of time and under budget," said MINERvA co-spokesperson Kevin McFarland of University of Rochester. "We're very grateful for the taxpayer trust and support that made this possible. I'm incredibly proud of everyone who rewarded that trust by delivering this new scientific instrument."
Collaborators on the MINERvA project completed construction of the detector on March 15. The detector, which consists of 108 4-ton, hexagonal steel and scintillator modules with more than 32,000 channels, will collect data that MINERvA collaborators will use to measure low-energy neutrino interactions at an unprecedented level of detail.
"As exciting as this milestone is, the real reward is seeing the beautiful neutrino events that this detector is now recording," said MINERvA co-spokesperson Deborah Harris, who will soon relinquish her role as project manager. "I'm grateful to have worked with such an excellent project team and I will miss those who are moving on to build new detectors."
-- Rhianna Wisniewski
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Start of tunnel construction for the European XFEL
The traditional tunnel and borer christening celebration today marked the start of construction of the tunnel system for the X-ray laser European XFEL. More than 500 guests attended the ceremony on the building site in Schenefeld (Pinneberg district, Schleswig-Holstein), the future research campus of the X-ray laser facility. Tomorrow, the first of the two tunnel boring machines - TULA ("TUnnel for LAser"), 6.17 metres in diameter, 71 metres long, weighing 550 tonnes and costing 18 million Euros - will start in the direction of DESY-Bahrenfeld (Hamburg), where it will arrive in summer 2011. Godmother for the tunnels excavated by TULA and by the same token "earthly patron saint" for the tunnel builders is Dr. Herlind Gundelach, State Minister for Science and Research of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.
The new X-ray laser research facility is 3.4 kilometres long and located in the German federal states of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein. Its tunnel system comprises a 2.1-kilometre-long section for the electron accelerator and a "fan" of five tunnel sections in which the X-ray flashes used for research will be generated. These tunnels end in an underground experiment hall. In total, 5777 meters of tunnel will be constructed in the next two years using two boring machines, the larger of which now starts excavating the tunnel sections underneath the city of Hamburg.
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In rememberance
Warren Cannon, a former Fermilab senior personnel administrator who died in March, now has a street named after him. One block of a street in Aurora was named Warren F. Cannon Street in honor of Cannon, who was a prominent community leader in the city. To learn more, read a news story about this honor.
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Observations from overhead
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| AD's Greg Vogel submitted this image of an osprey watching him from overhead on Tuesday, June 29. |
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If scientists want to educate the public, they should start by listening
From The Washington Post,
June 27, 2010
Whenever controversies arise that pit scientists against segments of the U.S. public -- the evolution debate, say, or the fight over vaccination -- a predictable dance seems to unfold. One the one hand, the nonscientists appear almost entirely impervious to scientific data that undermine their opinions and prone to arguing back with technical claims that are of dubious merit. In response, the scientists shake their heads and lament that if only the public weren't so ignorant, these kinds of misunderstandings wouldn't occur.
But what if the fault actually lies with both sides?
We've been aware for a long time that Americans don't know much about science. Surveys that measure the public's views on evolution, climate change, the big bang and even the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun yield a huge gap between what science tells us and what the public believes.
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Wizards, demigods and CP violation
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| The allowed range for the CP-violation parameter ( βS) and the decay rate difference (ΔΓ) from the CDF analysis of the matter-antimatter symmetry using Bs → J/ψ φ decays together with the Standard Model-favored point. The fact that the Standard Model favored point is within the one-sigma region (blue oval) means that the measured value is consistent at that level with the Standard Model. |
Editor's note: This is Craig Group's final column as editor of the CDF Result of the Week. Fermilab Today staff thank Group for his hard work. Future CDF Results of the Week will be edited by Andy Beretvas.
In popular literature, demigods like Percy Jackson or wizards like Harry Potter distinguish themselves from regular mortals, or muggles, by using their special powers.
In particle physics, some measurements have more power than others to distinguish themselves as clear tests of the Standard Model.
One such measurement is the search for charge-parity violation in Bs-mesons (pronounced "b-sub-s"), which are bound states of a strange and a beauty quark. CP violation is linked to the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. The fact that all the antimatter in the universe has disappeared and the surrounding world is made only of matter particles can partially be explained through CP violation. For example, CP violation can lead to differences between the decay rates of particles and their anti-particles.
Physicists expect CP violation to occur in Bs-mesons. In some observable phenomena physicists expect the predicted effect to be very small with a small uncertainty. This means, if a large CP violation is measured in these Bs-mesons, it must be due to a contribution from physics beyond the Standard Model. This makes the Bs system an excellent candidate to search for ever-elusive signs of new physics.
CDF physicists recently presented an update of the measurement of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in Bs-mesons by analyzing Bs and anti-Bs particles decaying into a pair of lighter mesons (the J/ ψ and φ). Previous measurements by CDF and DZero from 2008 caused some excitement as they indicated that CP violation in the Bs system only marginally agrees with the Standard Model prediction. For the new measurement, CDF physicists used almost four times more data and applied significant improvements to the analysis. They find that the region of the CP-violation parameter allowed by the new measurement is now much closer to the value favored by the Standard Model. It is interesting that a recent measurement by DZero, also related to CP violation in the Bs system, shows a larger discrepancy with the Standard Model. It seems that it will require another round of updates, or Harry Potter waving his magic wand, to sort out what is going on with CP violation in the Bs system and its contributions to the lack of antimatter in our universe.
- edited by Craig Group
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| Primary contributions to the analysis were made by these analyzers. Top from left: Gavril Giurgiu, Johns Hopkins; Louise Oakes and Farrukh Azfar, Oxford University; Jan Morlock, Thomas Kuhr, Michal Kreps and Andreas Schmidt, University of Karlsruhe. Bottom from left: Manfred Paulini and Elisa Pueschel, Carnegie Mellon; Karen Gibson, Case Western; and Joseph Boudreau, University of Pittsburgh. Not pictured: Michael Feindt, University of Karlsruhe.
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