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	Thursday, Sept. 8, 2011

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Have a safe day!

Thursday, Sept. 8
2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Alejandro de la Puente, University of Notre Dame
Title: Signals of CP Violation Beyond the MSSM in Higgs Physics
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Accelerator Physics and Technology Seminar - One West
Speaker: Tim Maxwell, Northern Illinois University
Title: Electro-Optic Sampling for Ultra-Fast Diagnostics at the A0 Photoinjector

Friday, Sept. 9
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speakers: Ruth van de Water, Brookhaven National Laboratory
Title: Searching for New Physics at the Frontiers with Lattice QCD

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

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Chance of showers
73°/61°

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Current Security Status

Secon Level 3

Wilson Hall Cafe

Thursday, Sept. 8

- Breakfast: Apple sticks
- Minnesota wild rice w/ chicken
- Tuna melt on nine grain bread
- Smart cuisine: Italian meatloaf
- Chicken casserole
- Buffalo crispy-chicken wrap
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Smart cuisine: Chicken pecan salad

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Friday, Sept. 9
Dinner
- French onion soup
- Filet w/ morel sauce
- Cauliflower gratin
- Sautéed spinach
- Profiteroles

Wednesday, Sept. 14
Lunch
- Buttermilk pecan chicken
- Sweet potatoes
- Sautéed zucchini
- Apple crisp cake

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

Carl Lindenmeyer retires after
40 years at Fermilab

Carl Lindenmeyer

There will be a farewell party for Carl Lindenmeyer today from 3 to 5 p.m. in the music room at the User's Center. Refreshments will be served.

Carl Lindenmeyer is precise. A mechanical designer at Fermilab for over 40 years, Lindenmeyer still uses a pencil and paper to map out his projects. The hand-drawn sketches are frequently as accurate as computer-generated models. Lindenmeyer retires tomorrow, Sept. 9.

“Ever since I was a kid, I always enjoyed figuring out how things worked,” Lindenmeyer said. “I ruined several clocks in my day.”

Lindenmeyer was part of the team that maintained the bubble chamber film scanning machines and built the manually operated measuring machines. He also contributed to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey project.

“Carl’s work is excellent. He was instrumental in designing and building several machines and tools,” Dan Green, the head of the CMS department in PPD, said. “There are Fermilab-made products all over the world. Carl had a hand in a lot of them.”

Mike Crisler, a Fermilab physicist, describes Lindenmeyer’s ability to mentally conceptualize mechanical problems, and their solutions, as outstanding.

“I would tell him the problem, and he’d go away with his pencil and paper,” Crisler said. “A remarkably short time later, he’d come back with a beautifully-drawn answer to whatever the issue was.”

During his years at Fermilab, Lindenmeyer was regarded as someone who could help solve a problem. And if Lindenmeyer didn’t know the answer, he would turn to his bank of filing cabinets.

“This cabinet system is huge,” Crisler said. “Carl would go over and pull out exactly what you needed, no matter what your question was.”

—Ashley WennersHerron

Photo of the Day

An egret peeks and poses

This egret spotted the camera and struck a pose near Swan Lake. Photo: Marty Murphy, AD

Special Announcement

Calling enthusastic scientists

The Society of Physics Students (SPS) is partnering with NOVA, the PBS series, in an effort to encourage groups all around the country to host cosmic-themed science cafés, Cosmic Cafés. The SPS is looking for enthusiastic and engaging scientists to be a part of these cafés. The cafés are open to everyone and feature an engaging conversation with a scientist about a particular topic.

Please visit the SPS website for more information and to register for a café.

From Quantum Diaries

WIMPs – The most ubiquitous term in the ‘verse

Wimps, they are everywhere! They pervade the Universe to its furthest reaches; they help make this little galaxy of ours spin right round like a record (we think); and they can even be found with all the fruit in your local grocery store.

WIMPs: Weakly-Interactive Massive Particles, is an all-encompassing term used to describe any particle that has (1) mass, and (2) is unlikely to interactive with other particles. This term is amazing; it describes particles we know exist and is a generic, blanket-term that adequately describes many hypothetical particles.

Neutrinos: The Prototypical WIMP

Back in 1930, there was a bit of a crisis in the freshly established field of particle physics. The primary mechanism that mediates most nuclear reactions, known as β-decay (beta-decay), violated (at the time) one of the great pillars of experimental physics: The Law of Conservation of Energy. This law says that energy can NEVER be created or destroyed, ever. Period. Sure, energy can be converted from one type, like vibrational energy, to another type, like heat, but it can never just magically (dis)appear.

—Richard Ruiz

In the News

Month-end target mooted for finding "no Higgs"

From Reuters, Sept. 5, 2011

U.S.-based physicists said on Monday they hope to have enough data by the end of this month to establish if the elusive Higgs boson, a particle thought to have made the universe possible, exists in its long-predicted form.

If the answer is no, scientists around the globe will have to rethink the 40-year-old Standard Model of particle physics which describes how they believe the cosmos works.

The physicists, at the Fermilab research center near Chicago which operates the Tevatron collider, have been in friendly competition with colleagues at CERN near Geneva whose giant LHC machine is also seeking the Higgs.

Result of the Week

What can B_s mesons tell us?

This plot depicts measurements from three different experiments as well as the Standard Model prediction. All three measurements agree with one another pretty well and none differ very much with the prediction.

Inside a neutral B meson, the bottom antiquark can emit a W boson and convert to a charm antiquark. The W boson decays into a charm quark and strange antiquark, resulting in the J/ψ and Φ final state.

Since the mid 1950s, scientists have known that there are certain instances in which matter can change to antimatter and back again. This change, or oscillation, occurs only inside subatomic particles called mesons, which contain one quark and one antimatter quark. Further, this matter-antimatter flip only occurs in a few select classes of mesons. Subatomic particles called neutral B mesons (B_s) contain a bottom quark and a strange antiquark. Through the vagaries of quantum mechanics, the bottom quark can become a strange quark at the same time as a strange antiquark can become a bottom antiquark. In these instances, the quark and antiquark contents have become reversed, matter becomes antimatter and then back to matter in a grand oscillation.

The theoretical details behind this are quite daunting, but the fact that this process changes matter to antimatter and back again makes it an ideal spot to study some fundamental questions. One of these questions is why our universe naturally consists of only matter when matter and antimatter are made in equal quantities in our experiments.

One particularly interesting decay of B_s mesons is the decay into two other mesons (J/ψ and Φ). This decay is sensitive to the underlying quantum mechanics that governs the behavior of all subatomic matter. If something exists that influences the oscillation, its effect will appear in the measurements of the B_s lifetime. The Standard Model predicts certain productions of this decay. If an experimental measurement of the decay differs from the Standard Model, if could be a clue as to why we don’t see antimatter in the universe.

DZero studied this decay, and the result showed some interesting disagreements with the Standard Model. While the measurements are nothing to get too excited about, they are worth further investigation. At a recent conference, the LHCb experiment presented their similar result, which is more precise than what either Tevatron experiments achieved. The most recent results from all three experiments (DZero, LHCb and CDF) agree reasonably well with each other and marginally with the Standard Model. These results now suggest that the discrepancy between the measurement and the Standard Model might have been a fluctuation but more data, both at the LHC and the Tevatron, should settle the matter.

Learn more here and here

—Don Lincoln

These researchers performed this analysis.

Accelerator Update

Sept. 5-7

- Three stores provided ~36.75 hours of luminosity
- A Booster RF station (BRF7) tripped off many times
- The Tevatron quenched during shot setup due to a kicker prefire
- MI RF station (MIRF3) tripped
- Controls personnel repaired problems with the MI-30 beam position monitors

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

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