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Have a safe day!
Wednesday, Jan. 25
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - One West
Speaker: Hugh Montgomery, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
Title: Jefferson Lab: The Next Ten Years and Beyond
Thursday, Jan. 26
2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Brian Shuve, Harvard University
Title: A WIMPy Baryogenesis Miracle
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.
Upcoming conferences
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Wednesday, Jan. 25
- Breakfast: English muffin sandwich
- Smart cuisine: Beef barley soup
- Gyros
- Fish florentine
- Baked linguine
- Beef and cheddar panini
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Grilled chicken bowtie w/ tomato cream
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu |
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Wednesday, Jan. 25
Lunch
- Crispy chipotle lime tilapia w/ avocado sauce
- Corn & black bean salad
- Cold lime soufflé
Friday, Jan. 27
Dinner
- French onion soup
- Medallions of beef with merlot sauce
- Potato gratin
- Steamed green beans
- Marzipan cake w/ bittersweet chocolate sauce
Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
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Fermilab Colloquium with Hugh Montgomery - today
Hugh Montgomery, director of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and the former associate director of research at Fermilab, will give a lecture at 4 p.m. today in One West. The talk, titled, "Jefferson Lab: The Next Ten Years and Beyond," is part of the Fermilab Colloquium series. Coffee will be served before the talk at 3:30 p.m.
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Pushing technology, expanding industry
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PAVAC President Ralf Edinger (left) and associate Doug LaPointe inspect a vacuum chamber the company is manufacturing for an electron beam welder. Photo: Ralf Edinger
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PAVAC Industries has a way with electron beams, and with the help of a boost developing superconducting radiofrequency technology, they're taking their beams to the next level
Electron beams aren't just for colliding. They also happen to be useful tools for welding metals and treating greenhouse gases.
PAVAC Industries of Richmond, Canada is all about electron beams – manipulating them and manufacturing machines that use them. The company is currently contracted to develop superconducting radiofrequency technology (SRF) for the ILC. That assignment, along with an entrepreneurial desire to expand, has given the business both impetus and incentive to grow.
Last year PAVAC successfully expanded into the US, establishing a second location a stone's throw from Fermilab in Batavia, where they'll eventually produce ten accelerator cavities for ILC research.
"I wanted to go to Arizona because there's sun and it's warm – a nice place to be, especially in winter," said PAVAC President Ralf Edinger.
Read more
—Leah Hesla
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Scientists finish installation of 80-ton 'particle thermometer' at ALICE detector
Scientists on the ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider just completed the installation of a crucial component for tracking high-energy particle jets. Without it, physicists would be lacking critical tools to select which events out of billions to store and analyze.
Engineers and physicists around the world worked intensively over five years to complete the electromagnetic calorimeter, or EMCal. The United States, supported by the Department of Energy's Nuclear Physics Office, contributed 70 percent of the project costs. Scientists installed the last two pieces of the 80-ton device on Jan. 18.
The EMCal's heft comes from its many sheets of lead absorbers, which it needs to stop particles coming from collisions in the detector in order to measure their energy. "The calorimeter measures the energy of individual photons and electrons," said ALICE physicist Peter Jacobs. "It's a sort of particle thermometer."
The ALICE detector's calorimeter was specifically designed to study the most complex collisions at the LHC, those created using beams of heavy ions.
Read more
—Amy Dusto
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Astronomy: we've all got stars in our eyes
From The Telegraph, Jan. 24, 2012
When did astronomy become so mainstream? A few years ago, it was thought of as the stuff of introverted hobbyists in suburban attics, telescope trained through a skylight while their spouse watched television downstairs. Now it's taking over the small screen – astronomy is the poster child for the new pop-science culture, in which the word "geek" is a compliment and people show off their knowledge of particle physics in the way they used to name-drop obscure indie bands.
If that sounds hyperbolic, it's not. In recent years, the BBC series Wonders of the Universe made Professor Brian Cox, the ever-smiling Mancunian physicist, one of the biggest names on British TV, with its combination of extraordinary visuals and Cox's boyish zeal. As a result of his latest show, BBC Two's Stargazing Live, sales of astronomical telescopes have gone up sixfold.
Read more
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Greener, better computing
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Jon Bakken
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Jon Bakken, head of the Core Computing Division, wrote this week's column.
Fermilab's Grid Computing Center building has received the Energy Star award for 2012, a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. GCC comprises 16,000-square-foot of floor space and houses computers for the data analysis of Fermilab's particle physics experiments, computers for Lattice QCD computations and about half of our archival tape systems. The award recognizes buildings that measurably cost less to operate and improve the quality of the environment. The Energy Star award webpage lists in detail the energy efficiency measures employed at the GCC.
In December, contractors finished a two-year-long project to upgrade the Feynman Computing Center, funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. We created a new high-availability computer room on the third floor of the Feynman Computing Center, improved cooling and electrical power in the existing high-availability computer room on the second floor and retired the computer facility on the first floor. The project has created much improved computing facilities for the laboratory while providing work for local contractors.
The Computing Sector continues to review its operations to improve performance and address the significant cooling and energy efficiency challenges associated with computing buildings. A recent engineering study commissioned by FESS shows that by removing the unneeded earthen berm near GCC, we can dramatically improve the cooling airflow to the building. The berm stems from the time when parts of the building where used for particle physics experiments. We are now working with FESS to get this berm removed, which will be an important step in improving GCC availability during very hot summer days.
The joint efforts of the Computing Sector and FESS teams have resulted in the outstanding computing facilities we have here at Fermilab, which help us accomplish our physics research goals, reduce cost and protect the environment.
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ES&H weekly report, Jan. 24
This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ES&H section, contains one report. An employee felt lower left abdominal discomfort when he tried to pick up a fallen co-worker. The incident was reported, but neither employees required treatment.
Find the full report here. |
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Mostly sunny
