|
Have a safe day!
Wednesday, Feb. 22
1:30
Particle Astrophysics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Henning Back, Princeton University
Title: DarkSide and its Low Radioactivity Argon Target
2 p.m.
LHC Physics Center Topic of the Week Seminar - Sunrise WH11
Speaker: Michael Peskin, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Title: Light Composite Higgs: The Third Way to Electroweak Symmetry Breaking - Part 1
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO FERMILAB COLLOQUIUM THIS WEEK
Thursday, Feb. 23
2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Gerben Stavenga, Fermilab
Title: Proton Decay and Non-Perturbative Proton Stability
3:30 p.m.
LHC Physics Center Topic of the Week Seminar - Sunrise WH11
Speaker: Michael Peskin, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Title: Light Composite Higgs: The Third Way to Electroweak Symmetry Breaking - Part 2
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Accelerator Physics and Technology Seminar -
One West
Speaker: David Bruhwiler, TechX
Title: Coherent Electron Cooling Simulations for Parameters of the BNL Proof-of-Principle Experiment
Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.
Upcoming conferences
|
|
Wednesday, Feb. 22
- Breakfast: English muffin sandwich
- Smart cuisine: Beef barley soup
- Gyros
- Fish florentine
- Baked linguine and cheese
- Beef and cheddar panini
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Grilled chicken bowtie w/ tomato cream
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu |
|
Wednesday, Feb. 22
Lunch
- Oven roasted trout w/ lemon dill stuffing
- Steamed green beans
- Blueberry crisp
Friday, Feb. 24
Dinner
Closed
Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
|
|
The Tevatron's proud legacy
 |
|
The Tevatron at night. Photo: Reidar Hahn |
Fermilab's game-changing accelerator revolutionized the world of particle physics research.
Just after 2:30 p.m. on Sept. 30, Fermilab accelerator pioneer Helen Edwards prepared to stop the circulation of subatomic particles in the Tevatron collider for the last time. She was a fitting choice; Edwards and her husband, Don, had led the Tevatron start-up nearly three decades earlier. Now she would lay the massive collider to rest.
She pushed the button to dump the beam. Nothing happened.
The Tevatron–for years the most powerful particle collider on Earth–wasn't going to go quietly.
Laughter eased the tension for several hundred people watching the event on screens in Fermilab's main auditorium a hundred yards away. Edwards' second try succeeded, and the scientists who had gathered at the lab for the occasion took an afternoon to reflect on this remarkable machine.
"Physicists here took the Tevatron I got to help build and improved it and continued to do physics far beyond what it was originally designed for," says Rich Andrews, a mechanical engineer at Fermilab. "In many ways, it changed the world–not just with physics, but also with the technology that came out of it."
For 28 years, between 1983 and 2011, scientists at the Tevatron used its beams of subatomic particles to gain a better understanding of matter, energy, space, and time. Their experiments revealed many new particles, most famously the top quark, and yielded countless achievements in detector, accelerator, and computing technology.
What began as a revolutionary idea in the early 1970s grew into one of the most successful physics programs of all time, a testament to the dedication, creativity, and indomitable spirit of thousands of people at Fermilab who made it happen over the years. Their innovation and stubborn determination made possible the success of the Tevatron's design and commissioning, its subsequent upgrades, and the impressive legacy it leaves behind.
Read more
—Rhianna Wisniewski
|
New employees - Feb. 13
 |
| From left: Alex Melnychuk, TD, and Moses Chung, APC. Photo: Cindy Arnold |
|
New camera to help solve mysteries of the universe in 3D
From the Medill newsroom at Northwestern University,
Feb. 20, 2012
An international team of more than 120 scientists will take the next step Monday toward solving the mystery of dark energy, one of physics' most perplexing conundrums. At Cerro Tololo, an American-operated observatory in the Chilean Andes, the high-powered telescope called Blanco will be shut down to prepare for the placement of the team's huge, new state-of-the-art camera.
The camera is a crucial component in the Dark Energy Survey, said Josh Frieman, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, who heads the project. Through their study, Frieman and his team aim to understand the properties of dark energy, the mysterious substance theorized to comprise more than 70 percent of our universe.
The initial steps Monday represent the culmination of years of work, said Brenna Flaugher, who managed the creation of the five-ton, 570-megapixel camera behemoth.
We started talking about the project at the very end of 2003," she said. "We eventually got the funding in place from the Department of Energy about 2008 and we finished building the camera about a year ago."
Read more
|
Sam Aronson to step down as Brookhaven Lab director
From Brookhaven Today, Feb. 17, 2012
The Brookhaven Science Associates (BSA) Board of Directors, which manages and operates Brookhaven National Laboratory, today announced that Lab Director Samuel Aronson has decided to step down and return to a research position. Dr. Aronson will continue to serve as Lab Director until a successor is identified and in place. The BSA Board will immediately initiate an international search for his successor.
Aronson was named in 2006 as Brookhaven Lab's eighth director after serving in the Nuclear and Particle Physics Directorate for nearly 30 years in positions of increasing responsibility. During his five-plus years as director, Aronson oversaw a period of remarkable scientific achievement, significant expansion, and enhanced operations at the Laboratory.
"We are proud of Dr. Aronson's leadership and his record of achievement during his tenure as Lab Director" said BSA Board Chair Ronald D. Townsend, who is also Executive Vice President, Global Laboratory Operations for Battelle. "We are committed to finding a replacement who will continue Dr. Aronson's unwavering commitment to advancing the Department of Energy's essential science mission at Brookhaven."
During Aronson's tenure, the Lab announced major discoveries at its Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), including a measurement of the temperature produced in RHIC's collisions of gold ions that showed this "perfect liquid" to be the long-sought quark-gluon plasma that existed microseconds after the Big Bang; found evidence consistent with bubbles of "broken symmetry" that may help explain the matter/antimatter imbalance in the universe, and the discovery of the heaviest antinucleus ever observed.
Read more
|
|
PPD engineering departments organize for the future
 |
|
Peter Wilson
|
Peter Wilson, PPD Associate Head for Engineering and Support, wrote this column.
This month our division rolled out a new organization chart, completing changes to the engineering side of the division that we had started in early 2011. The realignment of groups and departments will help PPD to meet the demands and challenges of the Fermilab experimental program in the coming decade.
Our engineering departments support experiments from start to finish. They work closely with scientists from PPD, other Fermilab divisions and institutions around the world to research and develop detector technologies, design and construct detectors and detector upgrades, and operate and maintain experiments.
Fermilab's diverse experimental program requires us to master a tremendous range of technologies. For example, our engineering departments are designing and building the NOvA and MicroBooNE detectors. Members of our technical staff helped the Dark Energy Survey collaboration build and now install one of the world's largest digital cameras on a telescope in Chile. Other people in our division are developing upgrades to the giant CMS and ATLAS collider detectors at CERN. Another group of people works on liquid-argon technology and has helped demonstrate the scalability of the technology, which has become the technology of choice for the proposed LBNE experiment.
While the number of PPD engineering departments remains the same as in January 2011, the reorganization broke up two departments and created two new ones, with adjustments to the two remaining departments. We now have the following engineering departments in our division:
- Detector Development and Operations Department (DDOD), led by Rick Ford: DDOD has wide-ranging expertise of particle detectors, including R&D on new detector technologies, assembly and installation of detectors and support of operating experiments. The new department comprises the technician groups of the former Mechanical Department and most groups of the former Technical Centers Department.
- Electrical Engineering Dept (EED), led by acting head Marcus Larwill: This department, which earlier this month lost its leader, Bob DeMaat, has great expertise in the design of custom integrated circuits, analog and digital electronics for detector readout and electronics infrastructure.
- Mechanical Engineering Dept (MED), led by Kurt Krempetz: This department focuses on mechanical design of experiments, including detector components, mechanical structures, cooling systems, cryogenics and controls. It comprises the engineering and design groups of the former Mechanical Department.
- Alignment and Metrology Department (AMD), led by Horst Friedsam: This department is based on the Alignment and Metrology Group of the former Technical Centers Department. It has retained the expertise and responsibilities of the old group, providing alignment services to the whole laboratory.
Our engineering departments will continue to collaborate on large projects and often provide teams that involve members from two or three departments. If you have any questions, please let me know.
|
ES&H weekly report, Feb. 21
This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ES&H section, contains three incidents. An employee suffered a small laceration that needed first-aid treatment. Another employee needed first-aid treatement after being scratched by a rusty nail. A third employee was diagnosed with a cumulative trauma resulting in medical treatment, making this case is recordable.
Find the full report here. |
|
Mostly sunny
