Labwide database to capture lessons learned

The Lessons Learned Program is part of the Integrated Quality Assurance effort

Learning from past events and projects is a good thing, both at home and at work. The sharing of lessons learned can increase safety, improve quality and reduce cost of products and processes.

Many divisions and sections at Fermilab already keep records of lessons learned. But what is the best way of collecting and sharing them at a laboratory with about 2,000 employees? How can one make sure that all employees learn about the information that is relevant to them?

The Fermilab Office of Quality and Best Practices now is capturing the existing lessons learned information in a labwide Lessons Learned Program that covers many topics, including ES&H. The office has developed guidelines on what information should be collected and the Computing Division has set up a lab-wide, searchable database. In addition, the office has begun to train coordinators who will help capture the wealth of information that can help coworkers to make better decisions.

"We are just at the beginning of this process," explained Ed Vokoun, who helped set up the program on behalf of the Office of Quality and Best Practices. "People should contact the Lessons Learned Coordinators if they have questions or suggestions for lessons learned to convey. We are now beginning to populate the Lessons Learned database."

The initial list of Lesson Learned Coordinators includes Rafael Coll, ES&H; Jed Heyes, Quality Assurance; as well as Senior Safety Officers and Quality Assurance Representatives in each division, section and center. Bill Flaherty, Security; Ron Cudzewicz, Cybersecurity; and Dean Hoffer, Project Management; will join as additional coordinators.

If you have questions, please contact one of the coordinators or e-mail Vokoun at evokoun@fnal.gov. This fall, Fermilab Today will announce when the database is accessible for search by people on the Fermilab site.

-- Kurt Riesselmann

Shutdown-related power outage Tuesday morning

An outage to the master substation will take place from 7-7:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 3. The nearly sitewide outage will affect all buildings except for the Village buildings and the Main Injector. Please power down all personal electronics and computers before leaving work today. To learn more about Fermilab's four-week shutdown, view the article in the July 16 issue of Fermilab Today.

Spinning black holes could expose exotic particles

From New Scientist, July 29, 2010

Black holes do not have a reputation for giving up their secrets, but they could prove instrumental in uncovering exotic particles that are difficult to detect on Earth.

If conditions are right, a particle scattering from a spinning black hole will trigger the formation of a new particle. This also causes the black hole to lose a little angular momentum, an effect known as "superradiance".

Asimina Arvanitaki of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues say this loss of angular momentum could be exploited in the hunt for hypothetical particles called axions, which could constitute the invisible cold dark matter that appears to hold galaxies together.

According to the team's calculations, a single axion emitted by a spinning black hole could trigger the emission of more axions to form a cloud orbiting the black hole. The creation of each axion would draw rotational energy away from the hole. The cloud eventually gets so dense that some of it will collapse and fall into the hole while the rest is flung outwards and may escape the black hole's gravitational field altogether.

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