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Have a safe day!
Thursday, April 19
2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Can Kilic, University of Texas
Title: Topics in Dark Matter: Flavored Dark Matter and Limits on Gamma-Ray Lines from Unitarity
3:30
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK -
2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Accelerator Physics and Technology Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Kavin Ammigan, Illinois Institute of Technology
Title: Planar Laser-Induced Fluorescence Imaging of Fuel Droplets Exposed to Asymmetric Radiant Heating
Friday, April 20
1 p.m.
LHC Physics Center Topic of the Week Seminar - WH11
Speaker: Can Kilic, University of Texas
Title: Two Topics that Connect Dark Matter and the LHC: Flavored Dark Matter and the COnsequences of Grand Unification
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Joint Experiment-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Yannis Semertzidis, Brookhaven National Laboratory
Title: A Sensitive Storage Ring Electric Dipole Moment Experiment
for the Proton
Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.
Upcoming conferences |
| Thursday, April 19
- Breakfast: Apple sticks
- Santa Fe black bean soup
- Steak tacos
- Chicken wellington
- Chimichangas
- Baked ham & Swiss on a ciabatta roll
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Smart cuisine: Crispy fried chicken salad
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu |
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Friday, April 20
Dinner
Closed
Wednesday, April 25
Lunch
- Grilled pork kabobs w/ manchamantel sauce
- Spanish rice
- Margarita cake
Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
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Fermilab Earth Day activities
Fermilab will celebrate Earth Day in several ways this year. The ES&H Section-sponsored Earth Day fair will take place from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. today in the atrium of Wilson Hall. Join your colleagues to learn about ways to protect the Earth and enter to win raffle prizes.
Today is also third-Thursday lunchtime cleanup. Interested participants should meet at noon on the East side of Wilson Hall. A shuttle and cleaning gear is provided, and a picnic lunch will be served afterwards.
Tomorrow, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu will host a live chat on the benefits of transitioning to a clean energy economy at 9:45 a.m.
Adjacent to the Fermi site, the eighth annual Earth Day celebration and Big Woods Forest Preserve clean up will take place on both Saturday, April 21, Sunday, April 22. Volunteers are invited to participate on one or both days. For more information, click here.
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Tevatron Symposium - June 11
A symposium celebrating the Tevatron program's lasting impacts on science, technology and society will take place in Ramsey Auditorium on Monday, June 11. All Fermilab employees and users are invited to attend. The symposium, which begins at 1 p.m., will feature a keynote address by Harvard physicist Lisa Randall as well as presentations on the history and achievements of the Tevatron accelerator and experiments, the Tevatron's legacy in particle physics, technology, and at the LHC, and the future of Fermilab. A reception will follow at 6 p.m. in the Wilson Hall atrium. Please visit the symposium website for more information and to register for the event.
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Fermilab offers demonstrations and hands-on activities for the entire family at Family Open House
This year's Family Open House at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will take place from 1 to 5 p.m. on Sunday, April 22. More than 2,000 people are expected to attend.
The Open House offers family-style hands-on activities, science shows and Q&A sessions with scientists. The event is free of charge and registration is not required for any event except for a tour of the Linac and former Antiproton Source, which is being retooled for use with a muon experiment. Register for the tour here.
The highlights of this year's program will include hourly cryogenics shows by Jerry Zimmerman as "Mr. Freeze," the popular Ask-a-Scientist session on the 15th floor of Wilson Hall, and hands-on exhibits designed and built by area high school physics students.
Click here to read the full press release.
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Particle physics: A matter of detail
From Nature, April 18, 2012
American neutrino physicists are getting the measure of their quarry in ultra-high precision.
"It's like Christmas shopping at the specialist boutiques," says Phil Adamson, as he describes his recent US$250,000 buying spree. Adamson, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, leads a team that has spent the past few months acquiring and installing three ultra-high-precision atomic clocks; six Global Positioning System receivers; more than a kilometre of optic fibre; two auxiliary detectors and at least one pair of timing-interval counters ("kind of fancy stopclocks", he says) — all to time subatomic neutrinos with nanosecond precision as they pass through the detectors of Fermilab's Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS).
Read more
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Science In America: Crisis looming, physicists warn
From The Huffington Post,
April 6, 2012
The United States is at risk of ceding its leadership in science, a number of physicists agreed Monday (April 2), though there was less of a consensus on a clear solution to the problem.
Five physicists shared their worries about America's scientific future during a panel discussion here at the April 2012 meeting of the American Physics Society, saying that governmental funding for science research is in crisis, and not enough U.S. students graduate with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math.
Read more
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Is the bottom quark a spectator or a team player?
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A bottom quark doesn't last long before it decays into a charm quark or an up quark. Does its company during that brief moment affect the length of its life? Quarks are never seen on their own. Only their groupings, by twos into mesons or by threes into baryons, are observable. If the bottom quark were just a spectator in its own composite particle then all mesons and baryons containing bottom quarks would have the same lifetime before they decayed, due to the bottom quark inside of them decaying. But the complex web of strong interactions between the quarks may play a role in the lifetime of these composite particles.
A recent DZero analysis focused on comparing the observed lifetimes when the bottom quark teamed up with different sets of partner quarks. In one case, it was teamed up with an up quark and a down quark into a Λb baryon. In the other case, the bottom quark partnered with an anti-down quark into a B0 meson. The analyzers focused on events where each of these composite particles decayed by emitting charmonium, a charm-anticharm meson. Such Λb baryon and B0 meson decays leave a similar signature in the DZero detector. The analyzers looked for events with two pairs of two tracks with each pair emanating from positions that may be centimeters apart within the detector. Measuring the lifetimes of these composite particles in such similar events allows many uncertainties to cancel out when taking the ratio of their lifetimes.
If the bottom quark were simply a spectator, the lifetimes of these two composite particles would be equal. DZero measures the Λb baryon's lifetime to be about 86 percent that of the B0 meson, which agrees well with the latest theoretical predictions about the changing behavior of the bottom quark when acting as a team player.
—Mike Cooke
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| These physicists made major contributions to this analysis.
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| The DZero electrical support team provides support and maintenance for critical power and monitoring systems around the clock throughout the Tevatron run.
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Mostly sunny
