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Have a safe day!
Tuesday, Feb. 1
12:30 p.m.
Special Seminar
Speaker: To Be Announced, KPMG, LLP
Title: The Unexpected Tax Obligations of Foreign Nationals Visiting the U.S.
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY
Wednesday, Feb. 2
12:30 p.m.
Physics for Everyone - CANCELED
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - CANCELED
Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.
Upcoming conferences
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Tuesday, Feb. 1
- Bagel sandwich
- Creamy turkey vegetable soup
- Chili dog
- Country-fried steak
- Chicken cacciatore
- Italian panini with provolone
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Super burrito
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu
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Wednesday, Feb. 2
Lunch
- Closed
Friday, Feb. 4
Dinner
- Closed
Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
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Winter weather warning
A winter weather system will move across the Chicago area this afternoon and into Wednesday, bringing possible blizzard conditions tomorrow morning.
Despite the predicted weather, Fermilab will very likely remain open. If Fermilab closes, a note will be posted on the homepage, http://www.fnal.gov/, and information will be submitted to local radio and television stations.
If the laboratory remains open, an employee may choose not to come to work because of inclement weather. Employees who choose not to attend work must notify their supervisors. The day will be counted as vacation time or leave without pay. This option allows employees to use their discretion in regard to their safety and family needs without being penalized during heavy snow or dangerous conditions.
If the laboratory is open, employees arriving up to three hours late due to inclement weather will be paid for the full day, subject to supervisory approval.
Read the complete Inclement Weather and Snow Policy for details.
The National Weather Service website, http://www.noaa.gov, is the best source for the latest weather information.
And remember, whatever the weather, please drive carefully.
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CERN announces LHC to run in 2012
Jan. 31, 2011
CERN today announced that the LHC will run through to the end of 2012 with a short technical stop at the end of 2011. The beam energy for 2011 will be 3.5 TeV. This decision, taken by CERN management following the annual planning workshop held in Chamonix last week and a report delivered today by the laboratory's machine advisory committee, gives the LHC's experiments a good chance of finding new physics in the next two years, before the LHC goes into a long shutdown to prepare for higher energy running starting 2014.
"If LHC continues to improve in 2011 as it did in 2010, we've got a very exciting year ahead of us," said CERN's Director for Accelerators and Technology, Steve Myers. "The signs are that we should be able to increase the data collection rate by at least a factor of three over the course of this year."
The LHC was previously scheduled to run to the end of 2011 before going into a long technical stop necessary to prepare it for running at its full design energy of 7 TeV per beam. However, the machine's excellent performance in its first full year of operation forced a rethink. Expected performance improvements in 2011 should increase the rate that the experiments can collect data by at least a factor of three compared to 2010. That would lead to enough data being collected this year to bring tantalising hints of new physics, if there is new physics currently within reach of the LHC operating at its current energy. However, to turn those hints into a discovery would require more data than can be delivered in one year, hence the decision to postpone the long shutdown. If there is no new physics in the energy range currently being explored by the LHC, running through 2012 will give the LHC experiments the data needed to fully explore this energy range before moving up to higher energy.
Read more
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UEC offers tax presentation at 12:30 p.m. today
Each year, after individuals receive W-2s in the mail, both Fermilab's Visa Office and Payroll Department are overwhelmed with questions.
To help foreign nationals visiting the U.S. understand the tax system, the Users Executive Committee has organized a presentation. KPMG, LLP, a tax, audit and advisory services firm, will give the presentation, titled "The Unexpected Tax Obligations of Foreign Nationals Visiting the U.S." at 12:30 p.m. today in the Wilson Hall One West conference room. The event will be streamed live to Argonne National Laboratory.
The presentation will include information for foreign nationals visiting the U.S. either briefly or for long-term stays. Topics will include how to tell when a person is a resident of the U.S. for tax purposes and how a person's travel schedule can affect this determination. It will also cover taxation of different types of income; double taxation treaties, and more. Many foreign visitors are unaware that even short, occasional visits to the U.S. can create U.S. tax reporting or other obligations. We encourage visitors and employees on both short visits and longer stays to attend this informative meeting.
This is the second in a series of presentations for Fermilab Users who are not U.S. citizens. The UEC, in cooperation with Fermilab WDRS and the Finance Section and the Argonne Visa Office, is hosting this event.
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Black holes not affected by dark matter, say astrophysicists
From Technology Review, Jan. 27, 2011
In recent years, astrophysicists have found growing evidence that super massive black holes sit at the heart of most galaxies, and certainly those with bulges in the middles.
The one at the centre of our galaxy is about 6 light hours across (not light years), about the size of the orbit of Neptune, and is equivalent in mass to several million Suns. We can see one extraordinary star, called S2, orbiting it every 15 years or so.
Read more
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FALC
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Members of FALC, the informal group for communication among principal particle physics funding agencies worldwide, at a meeting in January. |
FALC has been a useful informal avenue for communication among the principal funding agencies that support particle physics in the world. Starting last year, the Director of KEK, Atsuto Suzuki, and I were added to this group in order to have one laboratory director from each of the three major regions, the Americas, Europe and Asia. Up to that point, FALC was limited only to participants from funding agencies, except in the case of the CERN director general who had been included in the original FALC not as a CERN representative but as representing the “small European countries.” I attended my second meeting of this group last week at SLAC.
The original name of this informal group was Funding Agencies for the Linear Collider, later changed to Funding Agencies for Large Colliders. The name may evolve further: at our meeting one of the participants suggested we change the name to Funding Agencies for Large Collaborations. Indeed, a great deal of the discussion revolves around how the agencies would come together to fund a very large global project such as a linear collider.
An important item of discussion was establishing what should follow the ILC Global Design Effort when the Technical Design Report for the ILC is finished in 2012. It is likely that the case for the ILC will take longer to be established, certainly if the case were in the affirmative. Presently the GDE is a creature of the International Committee for Future Accelerators through its sub-committee, the ILC Steering Committee. The proposal on the table is that something analogous to the GDE be created by the laboratories that are actively engaged in ILC R&D. This new group would report to the laboratories, not to the ILCSC. There are other suggestions on how to combine this ILC group with CLIC and muon colliders. Our position is to have well-defined teams that can develop the designs and keep control of the machine parameters separately for each of the three lepton collider projects. In the detector arena, however, it would be most useful to have tight coordination of the R&D and physics studies by the community so that comparative studies could be completed.
One of the most-useful parts of the meeting was to hear firsthand reports by the various funding agencies about the current situation and plans in the various regions. On listening to these reports, it is striking the great degree of uncertainty in the American program relative to other regions. This is not from the absence of plans, but from the peculiar uncertainties that afflict our program with year-to-year funding and sudden changes in direction by the funding agencies, such as the recent failure to provide interim funding to the NSF DUSEL project. It is also clear that the accelerator-based program at Fermilab with NOvA, MINVERvA, MicroBooNE, Mu2e, LBNE and ultimately Project X is of great interest to many countries and would bring strong international collaborations, in much simpler and well-tried forms than the models contemplated for very large colliders.
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Snow
