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Thursday, Aug. 19
- Breakfast: Apple sticks
- Tomato Florentine
- BBQ pork sandwich
- Smart cuisine: Kielbasa & sauerkraut
- Smart cuisine: Chicken Marsala
- Smoked turkey melt
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Southwestern chicken salad w/ roasted corn salsa
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu
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Friday, Aug. 19
Dinner
Guest Chef: Gustavo Cancelo
Argentinian Night
- Empanadas
- Locro
- Matambre relleno al horno w/ vegetables
- Flan
Wednesday, Aug. 24
Lunch
- Crab cakes w/ remoulade sauce
- Parmesan orzo
- Lemon cheesecake
Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation. |
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Governor visits Fermilab booth at state fair - Aug. 11
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Illinois Governor Pat Quinn talks with Fermilab scientist Chris Polly at Fermilab's booth in the Governor's tent "Illinois Innovation!" at the Illinois State Fair on Aug. 11. Fermilab will staff a booth at the fair through this weekend. Photo: Reidar Hahn |
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On-site volunteer cleanup opportunity today
Help keep Fermilab's site clean. Join the Third Thursday Lunchtime Cleanup crew to clean areas of the site from 11:45 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. today. Meet at the east ground floor entrance of Wilson Hall for transportation to the cleanup site. Cleanup gear will be provided. Hot dogs and refreshments will be served.
Contact Jeannette Olah via email or at x3303 for more information or to sign up.
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DOE counterintelligence personnel visit Fermilab today
Members from the Department of Energy's Chicago Office of Counterintelligence will visit Fermilab today. 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:
- To protect Fermilab personnel, research, technologies and information and cyber systems from unauthorized exploitation by intelligence collectors and intelligence activities.
- 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.
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New employees - July 25
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Row 1 from left: Katie Galassi, Maung Han, Giovanni Pinamonti, Fabio Anza, Paolo Neri, Giacomo Bighin, Marco Pagliazzi and Pietro Marino. Row 2 from left: Irene Martinelli, Martina Gerbino, Margherita Merio, Luca Somaschini, Jessica Cenni, Silvia Zorzetti, Linda Finco, Ottavia Bertolli and Matteo Mantoani. Row 3 from left: Stefano Gelain, Luigi Marchese, Marino Missiroli, Steve Krave, Marco Menchicchi, Lorenzo Posti, Gabriele Grittani, Enrico Zanetti and Giacomo Ragni. Photo: Cindy Arnold |
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No Higgs is good Higgs!
Much has been said about the Higgs boson, mostly how great it would be to find it. But what about if we do not find it? Could that be useful? In fact, yes, that’d be a great discovery.
Finding the Higgs or proving beyond any doubt that it does not exist, will be equally useful as Rolf Heuer, CERN Director General reminded the audience at the recent European Physics Society meeting. The first outcome would be immediately gratifying: job done! But excluding a Higgs boson, at least one of the kind predicted by the Standard Model, our current theoretical model, will put theorists on the right track. What we need is not the Higgs boson per se but understanding how it all works.
The Higgs boson is the simplest solution to the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism, a mathematical trick named after the three physicists who developed it. This is what we need to provide mass to all elementary particles such as the electrons, the quarks, and all the heavy bosons we have seen here at CERN and elsewhere, namely, the W and Z bosons.
Read more
—Pauline Gagnon
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China–US neutrino facility
From spaceworld.com, Aug. 16, 2011
The first major science project in China that has been built through a genuine international collaboration has begun operation. Once fully complete next year, the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment – a partnership between 19 Chinese and 16 US universities – will begin searching for the final undetermined neutrino "mixing angle", known as θ13.
Neutrinos are difficult to detect because they interact weakly with matter. They come in three "flavours" – electron, muon and tau – that change or "oscillate" from one to another as they travel in space. The oscillation strength between different types of neutrino is characterized by three "mixing angles" – known as θ12, θ23 and θ13 – with Daya Bay designed to determine θ13 by measuring the disappearance of electron antineutrinos.
The US Department of Energy is providing about half of the cost of the $68m facility, with China paying for the other half and all of the civil-engineering costs.
Read more
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Beware of penguins!
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| This is the signal from the decay of a Λb particle into a Λ particle and a pair of muons, observed with a significance of 5.8 sigma.
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We know to be mindful of the geese around the Fermilab site, but penguins? Yes, they’re here, and they can be aggressive, especially against the Standard Model.
Penguin decays, which take their name from their diagramed shape, are a class of particle decays important in indirect searches for new particles or interactions at the Tevatron. If new particles or interactions exist, it’s very likely that they participate in these processes. For some types of new particles, searching the penguin decays might be the best chance to detect them. However, the penguin processes are very weak. Their effects can only be seen in rare decays, so scientists must search through a lot of data.
Sifting through 6.8 inverse femtobarns of data (roughly 10 trillion Tevatron collisions), a team of CDF scientists looked for a particularly noble species of penguins: the decays of particles containing a bottom quark (B hadrons) into lighter particles containing a strange quark and a pair of muons. These decays are special because they offer a full suite of measurement opportunities, each sensitive to a different facet of new physics. However, only a few per million B hadrons decay this way, resulting in only hundreds of signal events observed in the CDF data. Still, these are among the world’s largest samples available so far.
The data analysis, which uses 12 distinct decay modes, is challenging. But the results, totaling more than 20 different measurements, are very rewarding. The CDF scientists obtained the world’s best measurements of decay rates and their asymmetries. The asymmetries are the difference between the decay of the B particle and the B anti-particle, and they are especially sensitive to the presence of new particles. The CDF scientists also reported asymmetries that had not been previously measured.
As a very welcome bonus, the CDF team observed the first process involving a B baryon, which is a heavier cousin of the proton. They reconstructed 24±5 candidates for the decay of a Λb baryon into the Λ baryon and two muons , which makes this the rarest decay ever of a B baryon. Overall, the results are consistent with the predictions of the Standard Model. But this is far from being the end of the story, since the precision of measurements is still limited by the small event samples.
The results are described in two letters submitted to Physical Review Letters and will be shown at the upcoming Wine and Cheese seminar this week.
Learn more here and here.
—Edited by Andy Beretvas and Diego Tonelli
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| The primary authors of this analysis, from left: Fumihiko Ukegawa, Hideki Miyake and Shinhong Kim, all from the University of Tsukuba in Japan. |
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Sunny
