Classes, events and discounts for September

Fitness classes starting soon:

• Muscle Toning: 5:30 - 6:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays, Sept. 2 - Oct. 28 at the Recreation Facility Exercise Room. Cost: $77 per person.
• Yoga: noon - 1 p.m. Tuesdays, Sept. 7 - Oct. 26 in Ramsey Auditorium. Cost: $85 per person.
• Kyuki-Do: 5 p.m. - 6 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays, Sept. 20 - Oct. 27 in the Recreation Facility. Cost: $55 per person.

This month, the Benefits/Recreation Department will also sponsor the following wellness events:

• Lunch and Learn: Proton Beam Therapy for Cancer: 12 - 1 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 14, in Wilson Hall Curia II. Presenter: Ken Bourkland.
• Health and Wellness Fair: 11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 23, in the Wilson Hall Atrium.
• Qi Gong, Mindfulness & Tai Chi Easy: noon-12:45 p.m. on Fridays in Ramsey Auditorium. Free.

Employee Club:

• Toastmasters: noon - 1 p.m. Tuesdays, Sept. 2 and 16, in the Wilson Hall 7th Floor Racetrack conference room.

Employees and users can also contact the Recreation Department to take advantage of special discounts, including:

• AMC, Regal and Goodrich Theater tickets: AMC and Regal tickets $8. AMC and Regal two-week restriction tickets $7. Goodrich tickets $7.
• Rosati's Pizza of Batavia offers Fermilab employees a 20 percent discount on pizzas and 15 percent off other menu items.

First COD students participate in summer internship at Fermilab

From College of DuPage, August 2010

Azeam Anjum (Naperville) and Paul Butkovich (Oakbrook Terrace) are the first science students from College of DuPage to participate in summer internships at Fermilab.

Although Anjum and Butkovich are working on different projects, they are both enjoying their experiences at the national laboratory in Batavia.

"This is a real project, and I need to do it properly," Anjum said. "I'm dealing with expensive equipment and making sure what's being calculated is factual. It's fun and gratifying."

"I was nervous on my first day," Butkovich added. "You're surrounded by physicists and scientists who have large reputations. I didn't understand half of what they were talking about at first, but I picked it up on the fly and learned to speak their language."

Anjum is participating on several projects at Fermilab. One deals with a re-accelerator that involves inductive output tubes, or IOTs, which TV stations once used to broadcast analog signals. Fermi is taking these tubes and using them to power superconductor radio frequency cavities for a future accelerator.

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Closing in on the inflaton, mother of the universe

From New Scientist, Aug. 19, 2010

The inflaton particle is credited with generating the universe and fuelling its inflation. It has yet to be discovered, but it is fast running out of hiding places, thanks to the theoretical framework known as supersymmetry (SUSY).

Enormous and mainly extinct, supersymmetric particles are the dinosaurs of particle physics. Each of these "sparticles" is the partner of a known particle, and they have already solved several cosmological problems, including smoothing the way for a long-sought grand unified theory of physics.

Now two theories suggest that some sparticles might also be components of the elusive inflaton, which is thought to have driven space-time apart at the dawn of the universe.

If either theory turns out to be correct, it would constitute a first glimpse of the cosmic process of inflation. What's more, one of the new theories will soon be put to the test by collisions occurring at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.

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