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	Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2012

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Have a safe day!

Wednesday, Jan. 11
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - One West
Speaker: J Provine, Stanford University
Title: Surface Forces in Nanomechanical Systems: Living on the Edge
5:15
After-hour shuttle
With pick-up in front of Wilson Hall, the free shuttle has service to SiDet, CDF, DZero and the User's Center.

Thursday, Jan. 12
2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - WH2NW
Speaker: Alexander Knochel, University of Heidelberg
Title: Superluminal Neutrinos
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY

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

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Secon Level 3

Wilson Hall Cafe

Wednesday, Jan. 11

- Breakfast: English muffin sandwich
- Smart cuisine: Chicken noodle soup
- Steak sandwich
- Smart cuisine: Maple Dijon salmon
- Smart cuisine: Mongolian beef
- California club
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Chicken pesto pasta

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, Jan. 11
Lunch
- Northern Italian lasagna
- Caesar salad
- Spumoni ice cream

Friday, Jan. 13
Dinner
- Coquille St. Jacques
- Pork tenderloin w/ marsala sauce
- Steamed broccoli
- Roasted potatoes w/ onions
- Apple turnover w/ cream chantilly

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

Today's "Physics for Everyone" lecture rescheduled

The "Physics for Everyone" lecture originally scheduled for today has been rescheduled. The lecture on the Mu2e experiment, given by Doug Glenzinski, will take place on Wednesday, March 21.

Feature

Patty McBride heads CMS Center for US LHC

Patty McBride

Fermilab's CMS Center has a new director. Patty McBride, the deputy head of the former Computing Division, will now lead the CMS Center.

"2012 looks like it'll be a good year for CMS. We're expecting a lot of exciting results," McBride said. "It'll be a great opportunity for me to concentrate on the experiment and to work with the whole Fermilab CMS team."

As center head, McBride will interact with scientists at Fermilab and in the CMS group at CERN. A member of the CMS since 2005, McBride has already worked closely with the group.

"Patty has a tremendous range of experience," said Joel Butler, the operations program manager for US CMS. "She's really superbly qualified for the role of center head."

McBride contributed to the building and commissioning of CMS, as well as for the first round of data collection and analysis. She will oversee the next year of data collection and the two-year long shutdown of CMS for upgrades.

"Patty brings a wealth of experience to running CMS from the computing side of things," Greg Bock, associate laboratory director for research, said. "She has a vision for the future of CMS, and she will ensure that the collaboration is well-attended to."

Vicky White, the associate lab director for Computing, agreed.

"We know she'll do an excellent job as the head of the CMS Center, just as she did an excellent job in computing," White said.

Lothar Bauerdick, McBride's predecessor, created the CMS Center and led the group through the latest round of data analysis.

"Lothar did a wonderful job shepherding us to this point," Butler said. "Patty will take us through the center's refocusing on physics analysis and upgrades. We're sure she'll excel in this new position."

McBride, who served as chair of the Division of Particles and Fields for the American Physical Society and is a member of the Preparatory Group for European Strategy for Particle Physics, plans to work on finding a beneficial balance for Fermilab's role in the detector, the computing aspects and the physics.

"She's a leader in the field. Everyone is delighted that she's moving into the position," Bock said.

—Ashley WennersHerron

In Brief

Mu2e website launched

The Mu2e collaboration launched a public website to provide information on the proposed muon-to-electron conversion experiment at Fermilab.

The site offers a brief overview of the scientific questions the experiment could answer, how it fits into the particle physics field and how it will work. R&D for the new Intensity Frontier experiment is being conducted by researchers in more than five countries and at more than a dozen institutions.

Mu2e is considered a top priority by the U.S. Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, P5, and Fermilab's Particle Physics Division.

From Quantum Diaries

Why you should care about SDSS's giant dark matter map

The image on the left shows a single picture of galaxies from the SDSS Stripe 82 area of sky. The image on the right shows the same area with a layered effect, increasing the number of visible, distant galaxies. Photo courtesy of SDSS

The largest map of dark matter made with direct measurements, unveiled today by two teams of physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) removes a key hurdle for tracing the history of dark energy in the universe using ground-based telescopes.

This work done by members of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey collaboration points to greater successes for upcoming sky surveys, including the Dark Energy Survey, which will turn on the Dark Energy Camera on the Blanco Telescope later this year, and then the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and the HyperSuprimeCam survey.

To find and map the invisible dark energy and dark matter that make up about 96 percent of the universe, physicists look at their effects on the matter and radiation we can see, namely galaxies.

—Tona Kunz

From the Center for Particle Astrophysics

Happy new year from the Cosmic Frontier

Craig Hogan

Craig Hogan, director of the Center for Particle Astrophysics, wrote this week's column.

In time for the holidays, our friends in Chile received a big wooden box from Fermilab with a really nice, big, shiny digital camera: one of the largest cameras ever made, with more than half a billion cryogenically-cooled pixels and a beautiful wide-field lens a meter across. Parts of this giant Dark Energy Camera have been arriving in the Chilean Andes over the last year and are now in the mountaintop dome at Cerro Tololo, ready for assembly.

The camera will be mounted on the 4-meter Blanco telescope and take data for the Dark Energy Survey, the widest, deepest survey of the sky ever made. Last year, three scientists received the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the accelerated expansion of our universe, attributed to a mysterious force we call dark energy. It's no coincidence that their prizewinning work also started with images from the Blanco telescope, one of the best sites in the world to peer deep into the heavens. Will the Dark Energy Survey now discover how dark energy actually works?

Across the Andes, in Argentina, our Pierre Auger Observatory collaborators celebrated their summery new year by capturing light flashes caused by the world's highest energy particles—a wonderful display of subatomic fireworks, if you have Auger's eyes to see the cosmic-ray showers in Earth's atmosphere. Will the observatory move closer this year to discovering the source of these ultra-high-energy cosmic rays?

Scientists of the COUPP dark-matter experiment rang in the new year with plenty of bubbly—or, more precisely, bubble chambers. The 4-kilogram COUPP chamber recently shattered new records for limits on some properties of dark matter particles, and this year, the 60-kilogram COUPP chamber will start recording bubbles from dark-matter candidates in the deep SNOLAB mine in Canada.

Fermilab's other dark-matter experiments expect to have a great new year as well. SuperCDMS will operate its new, wintry-cold, zero-background iZIP detectors in the Soudan mine in Minnesota, and Darkside is preparing its ultra-pure liquid-argon detector for operations at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory, located deep under a mountain east of Rome. Who will be the first to have firm evidence for dark-matter particles? Might we be celebrating with some real bubbly before the year is out?

Back home, here on the Fermilab prairie, the members of the Holometer team have been busily bolting together a shiny new machine, like parents on Christmas morning. They installed 40-meter-long outdoor vacuum tubes in time to beat the winter storms. They are now indoors working on the precision optics and fast electronics that will measure whether spacetime wobbles with a tiny bit of quantum tipsiness. The Holometer will look for a billionth of a billionth of a meter deviation in the flash of a microsecond. By the time of our next new year's celebration, the Holometer should be the most sensitive machine in the world for testing whether reality can walk in a straight world-line!

It is going to be an exciting year at the Cosmic Frontier.

Safety Update

ES&H weekly report, Jan. 10

This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ES&H section, includes one recordable injury. While removing ceiling tiles, debris fell into an employees eyes. He was wearing safety glasses, but he still needed first-aid treatment. He received prescription eye drops, making this incident recordable.

Find the full report here.

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