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Friday, Nov. 12
- Breakfast: Croissant sandwich
- Old-fashioned ham & bean soup
- Philly-style chicken
- Chicken pot pie
- *Baked fish over rice
- Roasted veggie and provolone panini
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Carved baked ham
*Carb restricted alternative
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu
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Wednesday, Nov. 17
Lunch
- Chicken breast stuffed w/ sundried tomatoes & goat cheese w/ shallot thyme sauce
- Orzo
- Sauteed spinach
- Italian cream cake
Thursday, Nov. 18
Dinner
- Mushroom duxelle
- Duck breast w/ blackberry sauce
- Brussels sprouts
- Panna cotta w/ cranberry wine sauce
Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
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Voluntary Separation Offer information and Q&A
On Thursday, Nov. 11, Fermilab Director Pier Oddone addressed employees in an all-hands meeting to present information about a Voluntary Separation Offer. The offer, which went out yesterday via e-mail to a subset of employees at the laboratory, will help to bring Fermilab operations into balance with the resources expected for the FY2011 fiscal year.
Watch an archived video of the all-hands meeting here
Below are a few questions and answers about the VSO. Visit the VSO website to read more comprehensive information and additional questions and answers, or to submit a question.
Q. My department has openings for which we are interviewing candidates. Might those openings be "taken away?"
A. There are no current plans to cancel job openings. We need to keep the lab running, and we need to shape our programs with a certain set of skills.
Q. If an employee is out on medical leave during the VSO notification period, how will they receive the VSO?
A. The VSO e-mail message was sent with an e-mail “read receipt.” If we do not receive the receipt or a response e-mail stating the employee received the information, we will send an e-mail asking the person if they received the message. If we still do not receive a reply, then we will investigate and mail a hard copy. If an employee is off work and receiving long-term disability benefits, they are not eligible for the VSO.
View more questions and answers |
Fermilab takes fun to DC
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| Jerry Zimmerman performs a cryogenics demonstration during the U.S. Science and Engineering Festival on the Mall in Washington, D.C. |
A group of preteen girls entered the Fermilab exhibit tent on the Washington, D.C. Mall and pushed forward to stare at the numbers whizzing by on an electronic counter. 6,000. 6,015. Their foreheads crinkled.
Adrian Mead, a high school senior, spoke directly to the girls.
“It’s counting the number of cosmic ray muons that go through the two detectors in a short time,” he said, pointing to a laptop-sized block covered in electrical tape with PVC pipe and wires sticking out of it. He marked off a space with his fingers that was smaller than a postage stamp. “There are thousands going through an area like this right now.”
The girls leaned forward to get a closer look.
Interactivity — and often an air of mystery — marked most of the more than 1,500 exhibits and 75 stage shows that took over the National Mall in late October for the first U.S. Science and Engineering Festival. Fermilab and 350 of the nation’s leading science and engineering organizations joined together in the hopes of engaging the nation in the wonders of science and inspiring youth to consider scientific careers. To meet the needs of a competitive global economy, science and engineering jobs in the U.S. have grown at twice the rate of the American workforce as a whole, reported the National Science Board.
Mead plans to pursue a career in mathematics, though he said that he’s really attracted to the gee-whiz-type facts that populate particle physics. He told the girls that the invisible muon particles the detector counts — cascading remnants of the energy of the sun — are all around them. He also told them that his friends in his Oakton High School science class made the detector to make the particles visible to the computer. He held off on telling them billions pass through their body each second. “I didn’t want to make them cry,” he said.
Read more |
Make something FABulous at Fab Lab presentation today
Fermilab’s Public Lecture Series will host Fab Lab demonstrations in the Wilson Hall atrium today from 1-8 p.m. At 8 p.m., Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, will give a lecture, “How to Make (Almost) Anything.” Tickets to the lecture are $7; the demonstrations are free of charge.
More information |
Fermilab offers buyouts, hopes to cut 50 workers
From Beacon News, Nov. 11, 2010
Budget woes are once again affecting the nation’s premier particle physics lab, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
On Thursday, Fermilab Director Pier Oddone, speaking to a packed house at Wilson Hall, announced to his staff that the lab would be offering incentives to some employees in hopes of reducing its work force by at least 50. The reason, Oddone said, is the ongoing question of the 2011 federal budget, and how Fermilab — and science in general — will fit in.
Fermilab is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Oddone said that even without any cuts by Congress President Barack Obama’s 2011 budget request for the Energy Department would leave Fermilab in a bind. Lab officials have run the scenarios, Oddone said, and in every one they come up short.
The buyout offer was made to roughly 600 employees, about one-third of Fermilab’s staff. Oddone said only those employees whose duties could be covered by the remaining staff were considered.
Part of Oddone’s distress comes from the high probability that the lame duck Congress will not pass a full budget by Dec. 3 and will instead approve another continuing resolution. This would leave the 2011 budget in the hands of the new Congress, one that would not include U.S. Rep. Bill Foster, D-Batavia, a former Fermilab scientist.
Read more
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On top of the world
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CMS physicists searching for top quarks have managed to ascend their first summit. |
Since 1995, the Fermilab Tevatron has been the only place where scientists can create and study top quarks. With today’s result, the CMS experiment has joined that most exclusive of clubs. The CMS collaboration is thrilled to announce it has submitted for publication its first measurement of the top quark production probability.
Top quarks are the heaviest subatomic particles known to man. They were co-discovered here at Fermilab by the DZero and CDF collaborations. During the last 15 years, physicists have made many painstaking measurements that identify the top quark’s properties. However, it will not be long before the LHC experiments gather as many top quarks as the Tevatron has. The reason is that the higher energy of the LHC means that the probability to make a top quark is more than 20 times higher than at the Tevatron, for an identical amount of delivered beam. Since the LHC turned on in March, it has created about 15 percent as many top quarks as have been observed at the Tevatron since the top quark's discovery. Given how rapidly the LHC beam brightness has grown, most of these were produced in the last few weeks of running. The LHC recently concluded its first proton-proton run and is now colliding heavy ions. Proton-proton collisions will start up again in the early spring, and we expect the number of top quarks observed by LHC experiments to surpass in 2011 the current CDF and DZero top quark count.
Today’s measurement describes events in which top quarks and top antiquarks are produced in pairs. Both of these particles decay into a bottom quark and a W boson. In order to simplify the analysis, CMS physicists only considered events in which the W bosons decayed into a lepton (muon or electron) and a neutrino. So the types of events that were studied included two bottom quark jets, two leptons and missing energy from the unobserved escaping neutrinos. The measurement, which used less than 10 percent of the data recorded so far, was in good agreement with Standard Model predictions.
--Don Lincoln
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| These physicists played important roles in achieving this first CMS top quark publication. |
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| After the construction of the detector and collection of data, one of the most fundamentally important tasks necessary for a successful experiment is the prompt reconstruction of the data and generation of simulated data. These individuals are playing a pivotal role in ensuring that CMS data is ready for subsequent analysis. |
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Fun at Sauk Circle playground
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| Children from Fermilab's Children's Center romp on new playground equipment on Sauk Circle. The equipment was installed on Oct. 30. |
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Slight chance of showers
