Thursday, June 2, 2011
spacer
Search
spacer
Calendar

Have a safe day!

Thursday, June 2
9 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Annual Users' Meeting - Auditorium
2 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - WH, 3NW
Speaker: Rakhi Mahbubani, CERN
Title: Counting Dark Matter at the LHC
THERE WILL BE NO DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK TODAY
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY

Friday, June 3
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Michael Albrow, Fermilab
Title: Observation of Exclusive Two-Photon Production in CDF

Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.

Upcoming conferences

Campaigns

Take Five

Weather

Weather Chance of thunderstorms 75°/60°

Extended Forecast
Weather at Fermilab

Current Security Status

Secon Level 3

Wilson Hall Cafe

Thursday, June 2

- Breakfast: Apple sticks
- Southwestern chicken tortilla
- Philly-style cheese steak
-*Garlic herb roasted pork
- Smart cuisine: Mardi Gras jambalaya
-*Southwestern turkey wrap
- Assorted sliced pizza
-*Marinated grilled chicken Caesar salad

*Carb-restricted alternative

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Friday, June 3
-Scallops w/ bacon & maple cream
- Spencer steaks w/ red wine-shiitake sauce
- Fresh corn & cheddar cheese soufflé
- Haricots verts
- Strawberry crepes

Wednesday, June 8
- Flounder w/ puttanesca sauce
- Orzo
- Walnut & coffee tart w/ coffee cream

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

Archives

Fermilab Today

Director's Corner

Result of the Week

Safety Tip of the Week

CMS Result of the Month

User University Profiles

ILC NewsLine

Info

Fermilab Today
is online at:
www.fnal.gov/today/

Send comments and suggestions to:
today@fnal.gov

Visit the Fermilab
home page

Unsubscribe from Fermilab Today

Special Announcement

44th annual Users' Meeting continues today

Registered users and Fermilab employees with their supervisor’s approval can attend lectures and events at the laboratory's 44th annual Users' Meeting, which continues today. Today's presentations include results from the Tevatron, CMS and neutrino experiments and talks by Fermilab Director Pier Oddone and the DOE High Energy Physics Research and Technology Division Director Glen Crawford.

A Town Hall meeting will also take place. A special Festa Italiana will begin following the sold out public lecture by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu.

For more information on the Users’ Meeting or to register, visit the event website.

Feature

Users’ Meeting focuses on results and Fermilab's future

Stuart Henderson, Fermilab's associate director for accelerators, spoke in a lecture yesterday on that laboratory's plans for the accelerator complex and about Project X, a proposed accelerator.

Fermilab’s exciting future was the focus of the first day of the laboratory’s annual Users’ Meeting. The two-day event features physics results, future initiatives and presentations from leaders of the scientific policy community.

On Wednesday, a few hundred particle physicists and graduate students gathered in Fermilab’s Ramsey Auditorium, where speakers from NOvA, Mu2e, muon g-2 and other current and proposed experiments at the Intensity Frontier gave overviews and status updates for their experiments. Attendees also learned about new results from experiments at all three frontiers. The collaborations that presented results included CDMS, NOvA, the Tevatron experiments and CMS.

Craig Group, a researcher from the University of Virginia with an appointment at Fermilab, gave a summary and status of Mu2e, the muon-to-electron conversion experiment planned at the laboratory. Brendan Casey, a member of the proposed muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab, explained that knowledge from this, and similar experiments, is necessary to help us understand what we see at the Tevatron and the LHC.

Associate Director for Accelerators Stuart Henderson gave an overview of laboratory plans for its accelerator complex the Tevatron shuts down at the end of FY11. He also explained how Fermilab will build its future using Project X, a proposed accelerator that would serve as a platform for U.S. leadership at the Intensity Frontier.

“We have a very strong program we can build on,” Henderson said.

He gave an overview of the experiments that would rely on Project X, and outlined Project X would be the cornerstone for a neutrino factory and a powerful program at the Energy Frontier.

However, he explained, any future program relies on advancing accelerator science and technology. Fermilab can enable that future by continuing to focus its efforts on the laboratory’s superconducting radio-frequency program, high-field magnet advancements, collimator studies at the Tevatron and more, he said.

The Intensity Frontier was also a topic of a talk by KEK Director General Atsuto Suzuki, who touched on earthquake recovery plans and near, long-term and far-future plans for high-energy physics in Japan.

Power Point presentations and pdf versions of talks from the meeting are available online. Video from the meeting will be made available online at a future date.

— Rhianna Wisniewski

Feature

Tom Schwarz wins 2011 Tollestrup Award

Tom Schwarz

When Tom Schwarz began working on CDF nearly eight years ago, he didn’t expect to contribute to potentially game-changing results. But Schwarz’s work on the measurements of top quark properties has earned him a chance to dream big and this year’s Tollestrup Award.

The Tollestrup Award is given annually for outstanding work conducted by a postdoctoral researcher at Fermilab or in collaboration with Fermilab scientists. Schwartz accepted the award Wednesday and gave a talk about his research during Fermilab's annual Users’ Meeting.

“Many things I identify within those measurements I feel very proud of,” Schwarz said. “There are plenty of postdocs and graduate students working on these measurements. I feel honored.”

While the top quark was discovered in 1995, it has taken a long time to collect enough data to learn more about it. Collaborators such as Schwarz are now using that larger data set to gain more information about the top quark, the Standard Model and even to look for new physics. Schwarz, who is co-convener of CDF’s top quark group, is particularly excited about one 3-sigma top quark measurement that was the subject of his Ph.D. thesis.

As he explained it, in particle collisions involving protons and antiprotons, top quarks are produced in the directions that the particles are traveling. Schwarz and his collaborators found that more top quarks were produced in one direction, and that this asymmetry was a larger effect than the Standard Model predicted.

What it means, Schwarz explained, is there could be something strange happening in production. It also means that collisions are producing more top quarks than expected. Schwarz hopes that precision measurements from DZero or the LHC experiments can tell them why this happens.

“One of many possibilities is that there is a new particle produced just out of the Tevatron’s reach that is having an effect on the asymmetry,” Schwarz explained.

Emanuela Barberis, from Northeastern University and chair of the Tollestrup Award committee, said Schwarz’s work on a wide range of measurements and searches in the top quark sector was impressive, thoughtful and original.

"We had a very competitive group of submissions," Barberis said. "Tom led measurements that pertain to both our fundamental understanding of the top quark and to new physics. The work he has done has helped make great strides in the field."

The award, which is sponsored by Universities Research Association, Inc., highlights the work Schwarz has already done.

— Rhianna Wisniewski

Result of the Week

Subatomic cubic zirconia

In a search for diamonds, one has to learn to how to remove the rest of the gems. Some, like the opal and freshwater pearl are easy to remove from the pile, since they look quite different. However, eventually you are left with gems that are indistinguishable from diamonds and you need to know just how many fakes there are. If the number of predicted fakes is 10 and you have 20 gems, you know you have some diamonds.

Nowadays the Tevatron is focused on searching for the very rare. These rare things often have a distinct signature in our detectors that allow us to identify them. The problem is that more common processes can sometimes mimic the signature of the collisions for which we’re searching, just as cubic zirconia can mimic diamonds. Given that the common processes can occur millions of times more often than the stuff we’re looking for, a tiny fraction of the common things can mimic the rare things and hide the real signature.

Physicists spend an awful lot of their time inventing selection criteria that allows them to keep the desired collisions (signal) and throw away the undesired look-alike stuff (background). However, there comes a point where the remaining background looks so much like signal that the selection criteria can’t remove one without also removing the other. We call this type of remaining background the irreducible background.

If you can’t further reduce the background, the next best thing is to know precisely how many background events to expect. If physics calculations predict that the background should contain 100 collisions with specific characteristics, and you see 150, those extra 50 events could be the sign of a discovery.

The most pressing new physics pursued by DZero is the search for the Higgs boson. One popular technique is to look for collisions in which a Higgs boson is produced at the same time as a W boson. The Higgs boson then decays into two bottom quarks, which produce jets of particles. Events with a W boson and two jets are a great place to start looking for Higgs bosons.

However, events with W bosons and jets are much more commonly produced by more ordinary mechanisms. A precise understanding of the simultaneous production of W bosons and jets by ordinary mechanisms is a crucial step in searching for the Higgs boson. Today’s analysis is a very careful study of these kinds of background events and represents a considerable improvement over earlier studies. In addition to helping with Higgs searches, this measurement is interesting in its own right as a study of collisions involving both the strong and weak nuclear forces. Physicists can also use it to understand the background in searches for other rare phenomena.

Don Lincoln

These physicists performed this analysis.
Modern physics analyses hinge on being able to generate many millions of simulated events to investigate how sensitive the analysis is to small variations in the data selection techniques. These physicists are responsible for submitting the computer jobs that generate these simulated events.
Accelerator Update

May 30 - June 1

- Three stores provided ~40.75 hours of luminosity
- MI-52 Kicker problem fixed
- Electron Cooling problems slowed shot setup for store 8782
- Lightning strike caused loss of store 8782 - No quench
- MI RF troubled by vacuum burst
- MTA (MuCool) took beam
- Tevatron accessed June 1 for wet engine repairs

Read the Current Accelerator Update
Read the Early Bird Report
View the Tevatron Luminosity Charts

Announcements

Latest Announcements

Users' Center opening delayed until 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 2

Introduction to LabVIEW class - June 16

Youth swim lesson deadline - June 6

Yoga class now offered on Thursdays

Fermilab Family Outdoor Fair - June 12

Creative writing - June 2

International Folk Dancing will not meet June 2, resumes June 9 in Ramsey Auditorium

Silk and Thistle Scottish dancing moves to the Auditorium through August

Bill Brinkman talk at UChicago - June 8

Town hall meeting: former worker medical screening program - June 7

10,000 Steps-A-Day heart rate watch winner

Deadline for U Chicago tuition remission program - June 23

DASTOW 2011 - June 22

SciTech summer camps June 20 - Aug. 12

Fermilab Arts Series presents Chicago Afrobeat Project - June 18

Change in cashier's office hours

Registration is now open for Accelerated C++: a short course in practical programming by example - June 6

Argentine Tango classes through June 8

Water aerobics at the pool - June 13

Adult swim lessons at Fermi pool -June 13

Beginner swim lessons at the pool

Learn to scuba dive at Fermi - June 15

Preschool swim lesson deadline - June 6

Aqua Tots deadline - June 6

Pool opens - June 7

Jazzercise discount for employees

Security, Privacy, Legal  |  Use of Cookies