Friday, Feb. 10, 2012
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Have a safe day!

Friday, Feb. 10
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Victor Bazterra, University of Illinois at Chicago
Title: Single Top: A Window to Top Quark Electroweak Interactions

Sunday, Feb. 12
2:30 p.m.
Gallery Chamber Series - 2nd Floor Art Gallery
Quintet Attacca
Tickets: $17

Monday, Feb. 13
THERE WILL BE NO PARTICLE ASTROPHYSICS SEMINAR TODAY
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
All Experimenters' Meeting - Curia II
Special Topics: Completion of Cryomodule-1 Tests

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Weather Chance of snow
34°/17°

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Secon Level 3

Wilson Hall Cafe

Friday, Feb. 10

- Breakfast: Chorizo burrito
- Smart cuisine: Italian vegetable soup
- Chicken fajita sandwich
- Southern fried chicken
- Smart cuisine: Mediterranean baked tilapia
- Eggplant parmesan panini
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Assorted sub sandwiches
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Friday, Feb. 10
Dinner
Valentines Dinner
- Roasted butternut salad w/ sherry vinaigrette
- Surf & turf
- Sautéed spinach
- Cauliflower gratin
- Chocolate pots de crème w/ fresh berries

Wednesday, Feb. 15
Lunch
- Roasted chicken-artichoke calzones
- Spiced marinated tomato salad
- Pumpkin cheesecake

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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Special Announcement

All-hands meeting - Feb. 27

Mark your calendars for an all-hands meeting on Monday, Feb. 27 at 11 a.m. in Ramsey Auditorium. Fermilab Director Pier Oddone will speak about the state of the laboratory, including the status of new programs and projects and the budgetary outlook for the coming year. Employees and on-site users are encouraged to attend in person and to bring their questions for the discussion period following the presentation.

For those who cannot attend in person, the meeting will be webcast and archived online for later viewing.

Milestone

Vladimir Shiltsev elected member-at-large of the APS's Division of Physics of Beams

Vladimir Shiltsev

Congratulations to Vladimir Shiltsev, Fermilab's Director of the Accelerator Physics Center, on his election as member-at-large for the American Physical Society's Division of Physics of Beams. Shiltsev will begin his three-year term in April.

Established in 1985, the Division of Physics of Beams works to gain and advance knowledge regarding the nature and behavior of beams and the instruments for their production and use.

From symmetry

Gallery: NOνA construction

The NOνA detector facility, under construction near Ash River, Minn., will house a 15,000-ton particle detector.

Editor's note: With the assembly of the NOvA detector starting next month, here's a look at a gallery of photos of the building that houses the detector in symmetry in Oct. 2011.

Luke Corwin traveled along a gravel road winding through woods populated with more lakes and ponds than people. His excitement grew as the giant building that will house his experiment came into view. Here in northern Minnesota, near an area known as the Boundary Waters, he might help discover how the universe became populated with planets and people.

Corwin is a member of the NOνA collaboration, which has been pushing back the Minnesota wilderness for 15 months to make room for a particle detector nearly the length of a professional football field. In 2013, Corwin, a University of Indiana postdoc, and 140 collaborators from 24 institutions will start using the detector to peer at particles too small for even the world's strongest microscope to see: neutrinos.

"Physicists have been dreaming about this project for over a decade," Corwin says, reflecting on his college days when he first heard about NOνA. "Now I get to be a part of making it a reality."

Like the fur-clad guides of old that mapped the area's rivers and lakes, NOνA experimenters expect to make important observations that prepare the way for the next generation of neutrino experiments, which aim to answer some of the most fundamental questions in physics.

Read more

Christine Herman

In the News

Big science's trickle-down effect

From BBC News, Feb. 8, 2012

One of the main justifications for the billions we spend on big, state-of-the-art science projects like the Large Hadron Collider is not the discoveries they make (although those are obviously important in their own right), but the way in which these showcase projects drive technological innovation across a range of other applications.

So the space race put a man on the moon, but it also generated dramatic advances in computing, engineering, materials science and navigation - advances that we all take for granted today.

In the same way the last big atom smasher at Cern, the LEP, gave us MRI scanners and the World Wide Web.

Now another team of physicists, this time working with the ALICE accelerator at the Science and Techhnology Facilities Council's Daresbury Science Laboratory in Cheshire, believe they may have come up with their own unique contribution to medical science.

ALICE is an advanced prototype energy recovery accelerator that focuses the radiation generated by charged particles - in this case electrons - into a powerful infrared laser. A light source that, as well as probing the atomic structure of matter, can illuminate the biochemical composition of human tissue.

Read more

Physics in a Nutshell

Extra dimensions: What's up?

Edwin Abbott's 1884 book "Flatland" describes in a very easy to understand way the idea of additional dimensions.

Extra dimensions pop up again and again in science fiction. For instance, an episode of Star Trek portrays a bearded Spock in a malevolent parallel universe. The idea of evil twins is pretty absurd, so how likely is that extra dimensions are a reality?

This scenario makes for an excellent plot device, but the idea of extra dimensions in physics has a more technical meaning. A single dimension is just a direction, like driving on a straight country road. You can go forward or backward. To identify a location in this one dimension, you need just one number. If you stop at a gas station to ask the location of the nearest restaurant, the clerk you talk to will tell you to drive half a mile up the road or a mile back the way you came. If we defined the direction you were originally driving as positive, scientists would say that the location of the restaurant was plus half a mile or minus a mile.

We live in more than one dimension. We can go forward or backward, right or left and up or down. For example, to tell someone my location in Wilson Hall, I'd need three bits of information: the east side, on the eighth floor, about 40 feet past the elevators. In order to set up a meeting, we'd also have to specify the time, say 3:30 p.m. Those three bits of spatial information and one time coordinate (east side, eighth floor, 40 feet, 3:30 p.m.) are necessary to identify my location in four dimensions.

Read more

Don Lincoln

Photo of the Day

Pi in the sky at Fermilab

An early January sunset silhouetted one of Fermilab's pi-shapped powerlines. Photo: Bob Niels, TD
Announcements

Latest Announcements

SciTech preschool open house -
Feb. 11, 18 & 25

On-site housing requests for summer of 2012 now accepted

Barn dance - Feb. 12

Outlook 2010: Intro. - Feb. 22

Embedded Design with LabVIEW FPGA and CompactRIO class scheduled - Feb. 23

Introduction to LabVIEW scheduled - Feb. 23

PowerPoint 2010: Intro. - Feb. 28

URA Visiting Scholars Program deadline - Feb. 29

The University of Chicago Tuition Remission Program deadline -
March 2

Word 2010: Intro Mar. 6

Excel 2010: Intro. - Mar. 8

Access 2010: Intro. - Mar. 14

FRA scholarship applications due Apr. 1

Python Programming class - April 16-18

Martial arts classes

Fermilab Management Practices courses are now available for registration

"5 Treasures" Qigong for stress relief

NALWO - Volunteers needed for English conversation

Tax presentation for users and visitors

Requests for on-site housing for summer

International folk dancing Thursday evenings in Kuhn Barn

Scottish country dancing Tuesday evenings in Kuhn Village Barn

Open badminton at the gym

Winter basketball league

Indoor soccer

Atrium construction updates

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