Former Fermilab intern Rodríguez gives back

César Rodríguez

Last month at a summer lecture, speaker César Rodríguez-Rosario, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, cheerfully informed students of the following:

"If a person is quantum drunk, the curve of his walk does not look the same as for a person who's classically drunk."

Using such trenchant explanations, Rodríguez surveyed the world of quantum physics for the young standing room-only audience of summer interns with an easy clarity. He was returning a favor: he was a Fermilab intern himself in 2000 when the summer lectures sparked his interest in physics.

"I was enchanted by the summer seminars then," he said.

While a computer engineering major at the University of Puerto Rico, Rodriguez faced a choice between a NASA internship and Fermilab's Summer Internships in Science and Technology (SIST). It wasn't easy explaining to his parents how he could choose high-energy physics over the higher-profile field of space science.

Under the mentorship of physicist Chandrashekhara Bhat, Rodríguez worked on modeling beams for the Main Injector.

Rodríguez held a SIST internship in 2000.

"I recall him saying, within the first week of his internship, that he might not pursue a career in physics," Bhat said. So he gave Rodríguez a two-week-long beam dynamics crash course. "He absorbed quite a bit and learned very fast."

Working in the company of other like-minded students helped.

"As interns, we would talk about physics until three in the morning," Rodríguez recalled.

After his Fermilab stint, he attended graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied theoretical quantum mechanics. The first year was brutal. As an engineering major, he hadn't taken the undergraduate quantum physics courses that his peers had.

But he's done well for himself since, earning an Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, two American Physical Society scholarships and his current Harvard fellowship, where he researches quantum effects in biological systems.

Even now, 10 years later, Rodríguez's internship work is still being used on 8 GeV antiprotons in the Main Injector.

"I think choosing SIST was the best decision I've made," Rodríguez said. "I was exposed to really good physics."

-- Leah Hesla

Club and League Fair today in Wilson Hall atrium

Fermilab has more than 25 employee clubs and athletic leagues. Come and see what these organizations have to offer from 11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 11, in the Wilson Hall atrium. Entertainment begins at noon with demonstrations from the Folk Club dancers, Fermilab Singers and the International Dancers. Stop by the Recreation Department table and enter your name in the drawing for giveaways. Prizes will be given away every 15 minutes.

New employees - July 26

Front row from left: Jirawat M. Amorn-Vichet, Alessandro Cattabiani, Caterina Vernieri, Francesco Dragoni, Marco Mariti, Marco Bentivegna, Pierfrancesco Butti and Marco Colo. Second row from left: Francesco Nuti, Alexander Sukhanov, Michael Jeeninga, Xuebing Bu, Vida Goldstein, Gabriele Bertoli, Alessia Marruzzo, Matteo Cremonesi and Pierluigi Vicini. Third row from left: Daniele Bortolotti, Andrea Pisoni, Danilo Caporale, Maria Teresa Grippo, Stefania Vitillo, Elena Gramellini, Eleonora Secchi, Federica Lionetto, Sara Nizzero and Camilla Galloni.

Astronomy without a telescope - strange stars

From Universe Today, Aug. 7, 2010

Atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons. If you cram them together and heat them up you get plasma where the electrons are only loosely associated with individual nuclei and you get a dynamic, light-emitting mix of positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons. If you cram that matter together even further, you drive electrons to merge with protons and you are left with a collection of neutrons - like in a neutron star. So, what if you keep cramming that collection of neutrons together into an even higher density? Well, eventually you get a black hole - but before that (at least hypothetically) you get a strange star.

The theory has it that compressing neutrons can eventually overcome the strong interaction, breaking down a neutron into its constituent quarks, giving a roughly equal mix of up, down and strange quarks - allowing these particles to be crammed even closer together in a smaller volume. By convention, this is called strange matter. It has been suggested that very massive neutron stars may have strange matter in their compressed cores.

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