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	Thursday, Sept. 15, 2011

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Have a safe day!

Thursday, Sept. 15
2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Jamie Gainer, Argonne National Laboratory/Northwestern University
Title: The Matrix Element Method for Higgs Discovery and Spin Determination
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY

Friday, Sept. 16
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speakers: Costas Vellidis, Fermilab
Title: Measurement of the Cross Section for Prompt Isolated Diphoton Production at CDF

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a weekly calendar with links to additional information.

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Secon Level 3

Wilson Hall Cafe

Thursday, Sept. 15

- 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

Chez Leon

Friday, Sept. 16
Dinner
Closed

Wednesday, Sept. 21
Lunch
- Southwestern beef & bean lasagna
- Gazpacho salad
- Tres leches cake

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

Fermilab physicist directs "Copenhagen"- Sept. 16-25

From left: Steve Blount as Niels Bohr, Susan Able Barry as Margrethe Bohr and Geoffrey Maher as Werner Heisenberg. Photo courtesy of John Congram

"Copenhagen," a play by Michael Frayn and directed by Mike Albrow, premieres on Sept. 16 at the Elgin Art Showcase. It will run through Sept. 25. For more information, please visit the Vex Theatre website.

A discussion between two physicists in 1941 could have determined the face of the future. The details of the conversation between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, nuclear physicists on opposite sides of World War II, are unknown. And, after the war, the two men disagreed on what was said during their meeting. "Copenhagen," directed by Fermilab physicist Mike Albrow, explores the choices made by these two scientists and their consequences.

“This was a famous meeting, and we don’t know much about it,” Albrow said. “If one of them had said or done something differently, it could have changed the course of history.”

A first-time director, Albrow saw "Copenhagen" performed in London more than a decade ago. He knew he wanted to bring the play to people at Fermilab, so he did a reading of the play with three actors from Wheaton Drama in April at Fermilab.

“It was an intimate setting, and the acting was superb,” said Fermilab physicist Craig Moore, who attended the reading. “It was interesting for me, as a physicist, to see how these two legends were portrayed.”

—Ashley WennersHerron

Photo of the Day

Smoky sunset over Fermilab

Smoke from a Minn. fire reached Fermilab on Sept. 13 and lasted through Sept. 14. Photo: Marty Murphy, AD

In the News

Collaborative grants aid in medical and scientific advancements

From The University of Chicago newsroom, Sept. 12, 2011

Three teams of University of Chicago and Fermilab researchers receive $225,000, collectively, in seed grants to advance promising collaborations.

Encryption that typically requires 100 years of calculation time to crack might be done in minutes or even seconds with a quantum computer, a device that uses the power of atoms to perform memory and processing tasks.

“We use vast amounts of computer time to model climate, and predict weather and disease,” says Lance Cooley, a scientist in Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s technical division. “However, the scale of energy needed to run future massive computers is immense.”

Cooley has teamed up with University of Chicago assistant professor of physics David Schuster, who is pioneering basic elements of quantum computers called Qubits.

In the News

FY 2012 Senate Appropriations Bill for the Department of Energy: Science

From FYI: The AIP Bulletin of Science Policy News, Sept. 12, 2011

The Senate Appropriations Committee has approved its version of the FY 2012 Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill. Accompanying this bill, H.R. 2354, is Senate Report 112-75 that details the committee’s funding and policy recommendations that were developed by subcommittee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and her colleagues...

High-Energy Physics

The FY 2011 appropriation was $795.4 million. The FY 2012 administration request was $797.2 million. The FY 2012 House-passed bill provides $797.2 million, an increase of $1.8 million or 0.2 percent from the current budget. The Senate Appropriations Committee bill provides $780.2 million, a decrease of $15.2 million or 1.9 percent.

With the shutdown of the Tevatron at Fermilab at the end of fiscal year 2011 and the successful operation of the most powerful energy particle collider in the world, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, U.S. dominance of the energy frontier has come to an end.

Result of the Week

The odd life of B_s⁰ mesons

The red line shows the fit to the B_s⁰ --> J/ψ f₀ decay mode. The blue dashed line shows the fit to the background.

The B_s⁰ meson is a particle with the peculiar property that it can transform itself into its antiparticle. This process is described by the Standard Model of particle physics, and it was first observed by the CDF collaboration back in 2006.

Now, with much larger data samples than originally used, physicists at the Tevatron are searching for deviations from the predicted behavior of the B_s⁰ meson. These deviations could indicate the existence of new physics processes and might help explain the matter and antimatter asymmetry in our universe.

One of the most promising places to look for deviations from the Standard Model is the behavior of B_s⁰ mesons under the so-called CP transformation. This CP transformation exchanges particles and antiparticles, while flipping the spatial coordinates. Particles that are unaffected by the CP transformation are labeled “CP even” while particles that affected are labeled “CP odd.”

The B_s⁰ mesons observed in experiments are usually a mixture of both CP even and CP odd components. The mixture depends on how the B_s⁰ meson decays. Since the CP even and CP odd components each have a different lifetime, the mixture also determines the measured lifetime of the
B_s⁰ meson’s decay. To date, the B_s⁰ lifetime was only measured in decays that were a mix of CP even and odd components. Sophisticated analysis techniques are required to untangle the two lifetimes.

Recently, CDF scientists used a B_s⁰ decay that has only the CP odd component to directly measure its lifetime alone for the first time. The measured lifetime is 1.70 +0.12/-0.11 (statistical) ± 0.03 (systematic) trillionths of a second. Within the current experimental precision, the result is compatible with the expectation from the Standard Model. Extensions of this analysis, which investigate the behavior of B_s⁰ mesons in this decay mode under CP transformation, will increase the sensitivity to new physics processes.

—Douglas Glenzinski and Andy Beretvas

These physicists were responsible for this analysis. From left: Thomas Kuhr, Matthias Huschle and Michael Feindt, all from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany; and Michal Kreps, University of Warwick in the United Kingdom.

Accelerator Update

Sept. 12-14

- One store provided ~5 hours of luminosity
- Tevatron personnel conducted two more 450 GeV 3x3 study stores
- MI ground fault found and repaired
- Tevatron cryo system down during wet engine repair
- Power glitch caused problems with Linac RF, Booster RF, Main Injector kickers and the Tevatron ramp

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

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