|
Have a safe day!
Tuesday, Sept. 27
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY
Wednesday, Sept. 28
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO FERMILAB COLLOQUIUM THIS WEEK
Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.
Upcoming conferences
|
|
Tuesday, Sept. 20
- Breakfast: Bagel sandwich
- Chicken & rice soup
- Italian sausage w/ peppers & onions
- Smart cuisine: Beef stroganoff
- Smart cuisine: Chicken tetrazzini
- Peppered beef
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Nachos supreme
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu
|
|
Wednesday, Sept. 28
Lunch
- Oven-roasted trout w/ lemon dill stuffing
- Fresh green beans
- Café au lait cake
Friday, Sept. 30
Dinner
Closed
Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
|
|
Discussion on underground science programs - Sept. 28
On Wednesday, Sept. 28, the U.S. House of Representatives Science, Space and Technology Committee will host a roundtable titled Department of Energy Underground Particle Physics Programs at Fermilab from 10 a.m. to noon. The roundtable will examine the future of the DOE's underground particle physics program, specifically regarding the future of the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, known as DUSEL. Fermilab employees and users are invited to watch a live video broadcast of the discussion in Ramsey Auditorium.
|
Bob Goodwin retires after 42 years at Fermilab
 |
|
Bob Goodwin |
There will be a farewell party for Bob Goodwin today at 11:30 a.m. at the Honey Jam Cafe in Batavia.
Bob Goodwin may be retiring Sept. 30, but it’s likely his colleagues will see him around Fermilab well after that date.
“As I retire from the lab, I’m not anxious to leave,” said Goodwin, who has worked at Fermilab developing software for 42 years. He hopes to return occasionally with the formal title of guest scientist.
That doesn’t surprise his colleagues in the Accelerator Controls Department. They nervously laugh about the panic they feel over losing Goodwin’s 42 years of experience, but know they can call him anytime and he’ll be happy to help.
“That’s Bob. It’s really phenomenal everything he has done,” said Mike Sliczniak, who has worked with Goodwin for nine years and learned a lot from him in AD. “He is a very impressive guy.”
Read more
—Victoria Pierce
|
Recording on the job training
There is a great deal of on-the job training (OJT) that occurs at Fermilab, but currently there is no efficient lab-wide means of reporting it. In order for employees to receive credit for participating in formal OJT, and to satisfy an open DOE assessment finding, a formal reporting system is now available.
As of Oct. 3, OJT reporting will become part of the ITNA process. It’s easy to use, with examples for guidance. Supervisors are only required to enter OJT data on new employees and transferring or promoted employees. Current employees do not require OJT, unless there is a change in job function.
For more information about the new OJT process, contact your Quality Assurance Representative.
|
Fermilab will double-check CERN's revolutionary claim
From Popular Science, Sept. 26, 2011
So far, the only thing moving faster than light is speculation. But in the wake of last week’s baffling neutrino news out of CERN, physicists are crunching numbers to test whether these ghostly particles really can move faster than photons. Physicists at Fermilab are re-examining some old data to help answer the question.
In case you live under a rock and missed it, physicists last week said they had evidence neutrinos were moving between Geneva and Gran Sasso, Italy, faster than the speed of light. About three years of data and 15,000 calculations suggested the neutrinos were arriving in Italy earlier than the time it would take light to travel the same distance.
An American experiment involving Fermilab and a Minnesota mine showed the same thing back in 2007, but the results were within a margin of error that kept anyone from jumping up and down about it. (The CERN results are within a margin of statistical certainty that, were this not such an unexpected result, it would be considered a new discovery.)
Read more
|
Physics turned on its ear catches attention at Fermilab
From The Beacon-News,
Sept. 24, 2011
The cafeterias, control rooms and elevators at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory buzzed with excitement Friday morning.
That’s because news of a collision halfway around the world — at CERN, Fermilab’s newer, bigger, European counterpart — could, if true, turn the world of particle physics on its head. European physicists announced they’d measured a neutrino particle shot from the Franco-Swiss border to Italy traveling faster than the speed of light.
“The most likely thing is that it’s a mistake,” said Don Lincoln, Fermilab physicist. “But they tried to destroy the finding, did everything they could to rule it out.”
Lincoln isn’t postulating out of jealousy. Far from it. Though he’s a Fermilab scientist who has worked on the lab’s DZero experiment on the Tevatron particle accelerator for years, like many of Fermilab’s scientists, he’s shifted his work to examining the data pouring out of CERN. He works in Fermilab’s Remote Operation Center, modern science’s most important remote control, which allows physicists in Batavia to initiate particle collisions in Europe.
Read more
|
|
Endings and beginnings
 |
|
Fermilab Director Pier Oddone |
This week we bid farewell to the Tevatron Collider, an accelerator whose far-reaching legacy spans particle physics, accelerator science and industry. The shut down will take place starting at 2 p.m. on Friday, and I invite all Fermilab staff and users onsite and at their home institutions to watch a live broadcast of the shutdown activities from Ramsey auditorium or online.
It’s fitting that, in the same week that we shut down the Tevatron, our laboratory will host an important discussion on the future of underground physics in the United States. Tomorrow the U.S. House of Representatives Science, Space and Technology Committee will hold a roundtable discussion on the DOE deep underground science program. The roundtable, which will be moderated by Representatives Judy Biggert and Randy Hultgren, will take place at Fermilab and will become part of the Congressional record. It will bring members and staff of the Science Committee together with the leaders of the various efforts connected to the deep underground laboratory, the head of the DOE Office of Science and the chairs of the various review committees who have analyzed science and costs of the deep underground laboratory. You can watch the round-table discussion via video in the Auditorium starting at 10 am.
As we bid farewell to the Tevatron, Fermilab is poised to become the premier laboratory at the Intensity Frontier. One aspect of research at the Intensity Frontier is the study of the ever-mysterious neutrinos. A second aspect is the measurement of rare transitions that carry the imprint of the world beyond the reach of the LHC. At Fermilab, we will initially use our present complex of facilities to drive four world-class experiments in neutrinos and two in muon transformations.
While the immediate Intensity Frontier program at Fermilab is world class, it will not stay this way into the future without developing forefront facilities and inventing new technologies. The first of these facilities is the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE), the most ambitious and profound experiment on the nature of neutrinos. The large LBNE detector will also study supernova neutrinos and proton decay, potentially unlocking some of the current mysteries in our understanding of particle physics. Beyond its own physics program, LBNE is critically important to the national program since it would be used as the vehicle to develop the deep underground laboratory in the Homestake site in South Dakota. Establishing the deep underground facility within the U.S. will enable a vital program of non-accelerator experiments searching for dark-matter particles directly or trying to understand whether neutrinos are their own antiparticles. Without a national deep underground facility we will be condemned to carry on multiple generations of these experiments offshore and lose the benefits of having the world’s vanguard deep-underground laboratory in South Dakota.
When it first starts up, LBNE can use the protons that will be produced from Fermilab’s accelerator complex after it has been upgraded for the NOvA neutrino experiment. To stay at the leading edge of particle physics, however, we need to upgrade the complex with an even higher-intensity source of protons to replace the current front–end machines, the Linac and Booster, that are the source of protons for the Main Injector. These front-end machines will be 50 years old in the early 2020s. The new source of protons, Project X, would multiply the flux of low-energy protons at Fermilab by a factor of 100 while at the same time tripling the power delivered to LBNE.
|
|
Showers