DOE counterintelligence personnel here Thursday

Members from the Department of Energy's Chicago Office of Counterintelligence will visit Fermilab on Thursday, Aug. 12. They will set up a booth in the atrium of Wilson Hall to answer any employee questions.

This activity is part of the laboratory's Facility Counterintelligence Program. The program is required of all Department of Energy national laboratories.

The goals of Fermilab's program are:

1. To protect Fermilab personnel, research, technologies and information and cyber systems from unauthorized exploitation by intelligence collectors and intelligence activities.
2. To participate, as appropriate, in the national DOE effort to protect DOE personnel, projects, information/cyber systems and classified materials from unauthorized collection or exploitation by foreign intelligence practitioners.

Since Fermilab is a single-purpose research laboratory whose mission does not include classified research, the program excludes many comprehensive procedures required at other DOE laboratories.

Employees should receive the laboratory's annual counterintelligence briefing via interoffice mail later today.

Taking the natural log

FESS's Sue Quarto submitted this photo of turtles on a log.

Dark-matter search plunges physicists to new depths

From the University of Chicago News Office, Aug. 11, 2010

This month physicist Juan Collar and his associates are taking their attempt to unmask the secret identity of dark matter into a Canadian mine more than a mile underground.

The team is deploying a 4-kilogram bubble chamber at SNOLab, which is part of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Ontario, Canada. A second 60-kilogram chamber will follow later this year. Scientists anticipate that dark matter particles will leave bubbles in their tracks when passing through the liquid in one of these chambers.

The team is deploying a 4-kilogram bubble chamber at SNOLab, which is part of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Ontario, Canada. A second 60-kilogram chamber will follow later this year. Scientists anticipate that dark matter particles will leave bubbles in their tracks when passing through the liquid in one of these chambers.

Likely suspects for what constitutes dark matter include Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS) and axions. Theorists originally proposed the existence of both these groups of subatomic particles to address issues unrelated to dark matter. "These seem to be perfect to explain all of these observations that give us this evidence for dark matter, and that makes them very appealing," Collar said.

Read more

Gerson Goldhaber dies at 86; particle physicist discovered 'dark energy'

From Los Angeles Times, Aug. 7, 2010

The UC Berkeley scientist played a key role in identifying the antiproton, psi and charm particles, and later helped show that the universe is expanding.

Gerson Goldhaber, a UC Berkeley physicist who played a key role in identifying some of the fundamental particles of nature, then switched careers and helped show that the universe is expanding rather than contracting, died of natural causes at his home in Berkeley on July 19. He was 86.

Goldhaber "was a great physicist and a wonderful human being," said George Trilling, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley who worked with him. "The number of observations that he was responsible for was remarkable."

He "had an unerring sense of where great discoveries were to be made, from the antiproton to the psi and charm particles, and finally to dark energy," longtime colleague Robert Cahn of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said in a statement. He had "a special talent for turning abstractions into something for which he could have an intuitive sense," said Cahn, who co-wrote with Goldhaber "The Experimental Foundations of Particle Physics."

Read more