Friday, Feb. 24, 2012
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Have a safe day!

Friday, Feb. 24
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Joshua Spitz, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Title: Results from ArgoNeuT

Monday, Feb. 27
THERE WILL BE NO PARTICLE ASTROPHYSICS SEMINAR THIS WEEK
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
All Experimenters' Meeting - Curia II
Special Topics: Changes to PPD Engineering Organization; SeaQuest/E-906 Ready for Beam

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Secon Level 3

Wilson Hall Cafe

Friday, Feb. 24

- Breakfast: Chorizo burrito
- Old-fashioned ham & bean soup
- Philly-style chicken
- Chicken pot pie
- Smart cuisine: Baked fish over rice
- Roasted veggie & provolone panini
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Carved baked ham
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Friday, Feb. 24
Dinner
Closed

Wednesday, Feb. 29
Lunch
- Braised beef w/ rosemary-mushroom sauce
- Whipped potatoes
- Broccoli
- Espresso-walnut cake

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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Special Announcement

All-hands meeting - Feb. 27

An all-hands meeting will take place 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.

In Brief

Nominations sought for Employee Advisory Group

If you have insights, suggestions and concerns about Fermilab policies and programs that affect your workplace, the Directorate needs you. Nominations are now being sought for eight new members to serve on Fermilab's Employee Advisory Group. The EAG provides Fermilab's senior management with recommendations from an employee perspective as the laboratory develops and implements new and revised workplace policies and programs.

Nominations are encouraged from all job categories, all divisions, sections and centers, and from new and long-time employees. Members serve three-year terms, attending meetings approximately once per month. EAG members are expected to communicate with their fellow employees about issues under consideration to expand the range of viewpoints represented in their advice to laboratory management.

Nominations are due by March 16. Employees are welcome to nominate their colleagues or to self-nominate. Nomination forms are available online or in the Office of Communication on the atrium level of Wilson Hall. More information about the EAG is available on the EAG website.

Feature

EDIT school a success

EDIT school participant Lauren Jeanty works on her group's detector at the Fermilab Test Beam Facility. Photo: Reidar Hahn

Arms heavy with a coil of wires, Laura Jeanty, a Harvard University student, scrambled to plug her group's particle detector in before time ran out. Here, at the Fermilab Test Beam Facility, Jeanty and her group would soon test their detector in an actual beam – a valuable learning experience found only at the EDIT school.

From Feb. 13 to today, 64 international EDIT students have been gaining a in-depth understanding of detectors and instrumentation technologies.

The intensive hands-on approach stems from feedback at the first school at CERN. With the success of the two EDIT schools and the promise of a future one at the Japanese laboratory KEK next year, organizers are continually improving this enormously popular approach.

"You get to see the whole spectrum of the detector," said PPD's Doug Jensen, explaining how students first examine a wire chamber in pieces before studying another one that is set up and connected to actual readout from the test beam.

"You get a frame with the first experience. Then you hang things on it until you get the full picture. And you build experience through multiple exposures," he said. "Students coming directly onto a big detector can never really get their hands dirty like this."

Read more

Brad Hooker

In the News

Good news for Higgs: Physicists pinpoint W boson

From msnbc.com, Feb. 23, 2012

Work helps understand exotic particles, narrows range of possible 'God particle' energies

Physicists at Fermilab in Chicago have improved the measurement of a subatomic particle called the W boson. Their result won't just help physicists better understand exotic particles; it also narrows the range of possible energies of W's flashier cousin, the Higgs boson, dubbed the "God particle" in the media.

To obtain their new-and-improved value for the W boson mass, physicists working on the CDF (Collider Detector at Fermilab) experiment analyzed data from hundreds of trillions of particle collisions inside the Tevatron, a particle accelerator at Fermilab. The Tevatron no longer plays pingpong with particles — it shut down for good last fall — but this trove of data was gathered in the four years before its retirement.

Read more

Physics in a Nutshell

Our gothic universe

It's a dark, dark, universe out there…positively gothic. Ninety five percent of the universe is governed by dark matter and energy of which we know only a small amount.

This might shock you: All the stuff you've ever seen makes up a paltry five percent of the universe. And scientists don't have a definitive theory to describe the remaining 95 percent. We think that 95 percent is made of two mysterious substances - dark matter (23 percent) and dark energy (72 percent). Today's column focuses on the latter.

In 1998 and 1999, two collaborations were measuring how the expansion of the universe was changing. They expected to see that the expansion was slowing, based on this simple fact - gravity attracts. Throw a ball up and it slows and then falls back down. If you had Superman's arm, you could throw the ball hard enough for it to escape the Earth's gravity. But even in that case, the ball would slow down as it flew into space.

The expectation was the same with the expansion of the universe. Early in the history of the universe, the expansion was faster and gravity should have slowed it down in the intervening eons. Scientists were then shocked to find that the expansion of the universe wasn't slowing down. It was speeding up! Something was overcoming the force of ordinary gravity. What could that be?

Einstein added a cosmological constant to his equations of general relativity. The formulas said the universe should be expanding or contracting, and the new constant protected against a Big Crunch. When Edwin Hubble discovered in the 1920s that the universe was expanding, Einstein abandoned the cosmological constant and called it his biggest blunder.

With the observation of the speeding expansion of the universe, the cosmological constant was revisited. The idea is that the universe has an energy field throughout it with constant density. Cosmologist Michael Turner coined the term "Dark Energy" to describe this energy field.

Click here to read the expanded column on Dark Energy and current research into this phenomenon.

Want a phrase defined? Have a question? Email Fermilab Today.

Don Lincoln

Announcements

Latest Announcement

Deadline approaching for summer 2012 on-site housing requests

PowerPoint 2010: Intro. - Feb. 28

No on-site prescription safety eyewear - Feb. 29

URA Visiting Scholars Program deadline - Feb. 29

Butts & Guts - Mar. 1

Free ACU demo "Understanding Credit Reports" - Mar. 1

The University of Chicago Tuition Remission Program deadline -
March 2

Gallery Series present Arianna String Quartet - Mar. 4

NALWO Luncheon - Mar. 8

Word 2010: Intro Mar. 6

Excel 2010: Intro. - Mar. 8

Fermilab Arts Series presents Eileen Ivers & Immigrant Soul - Mar. 10

Access 2010: Intro. - Mar. 14

Fermilab Lecture Series presents "The Intensity Frontier" - Mar. 23

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

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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