Fermilab Today

	Wednesday, April 25, 2012

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Have a safe day!

Wednesday, April 25
2 p.m.
LHC Physics Center Topic of the Week Seminar - Sunrise, WH11
Speaker: Michele Papucci, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Title: Natural and Flavored SUSY at the LHC
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium -
One West
Speaker: Kerry Bernstein, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Title: The Post-CMOS Switch: Benchmarking the Replacement Candidates

Thursday, April 26
2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Michele Papucci, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Title: Higgs and Naturalness
3:30
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Accelerator Physics and Technology Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Vladimir Shiltsev, Fermilab
Title: ((Far) Future) Colliders: Invitation to Discussion

Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Wednesday, April 25

- Breakfast: English muffin sandwich
- Smart cuisine: Cajun style lentil soup
- Cajun chicken ranch
- Caribbean jerk pork chops
- Chicken parmesan
- Smoked turkey panini pesto mayo
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Chicken alfredo fettuccine

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, April 25
Lunch
- Grilled pork kabobs w/ manchamantel sauce
- Spanish rice
- Margarita cake

Friday, April 27
Dinner
Guest chef: Martin Murphy
- Mixed greens, red wine vinegar & olive oil, seasoned dressing
- Baked mostacholi w/ meat sauce
- Traditional Sicilian antipasto
- Sicilian pork spidini
- Roasted vegetables
- Cannoli

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

LBNE reconfiguration workshop - today

A workshop on the reconfiguration of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment will take place today and tomorrow at Fermilab. All interested parties are invited to attend. The workshop will inform the community about and seek input for the reconfiguration study. The workshop is organized by the LBNE reconfiguration steering committee as part of the response to Office of Science Director Brinkman's charge to Fermilab to find a path forward to reach the goals of LBNE in a phased approach. The committee, led by Deputy Director Young-Kee Kim and including many LBNE stakeholders, will prepare a preliminary report to DOE by June 1.

Feature

Fermilab's Open House was fun for the whole family

Students from Hamilton High School introduce Open House visitors to Bernoulli's Principle at the Fermilab Family Open House. Photo: Spencer Pasero

More than 1,500 people attended Fermilab's annual Family Open House on Sunday, April 22. The free event provided hands-on activities, tours and presentations for children and adults alike to enjoy.

Spread throughout Wilson Hall's atrium, families spent time at various touch stations, learning about physics. Many of the activities were designed and presented by students from local high schools.

"This is the second year we had high school students volunteer to do this," said Spencer Pasero, an education program leader in the Education Office. "The younger kids enjoyed interacting with the high school students, and I think the teenagers really enjoyed the opportunity to teach the younger kids and share their knowledge."

Parents had a good time, too. Local resident Mandy Hanson attended with her six-year-old child and the rest of her family. She sent a thank-you email to Pasero after the event.

"We brought one child interested in science and left with a family in love with science!" Hanson said.

According to Pasero, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. He attributed the program's success to the employees and volunteers who organized and contributed to the open house.

"It took a lot of people working together to pull this off," Pasero said. "We were pleased with the turn out."

—Ashley WennersHerron

In the News

Cosmic-ray theory gets the cold shoulder

From physicsworld.com,
April 23, 2012

One of the leading theories describing how the most energetic cosmic rays are produced may need a rethink in light of a new study by physicists at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. The team had set out to detect the extremely energetic neutrinos that are expected to be produced alongside high-energy cosmic rays in the violent explosions that mark the deaths of massive stars – but after looking at hundreds of these explosions, no such neutrinos have been found.

High-energy cosmic rays are charged particles such as protons with kinetic energies in excess of 10¹⁸ eV – a million times more energetic than the particles collided by the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN particle-physics lab.

The mystery of where these cosmic rays originate has baffled astrophysicists for decades. Likely candidates include gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), which occur when a massive star explodes.

In the News

Viewpoint: Rethinking the Neutrino

From Physics, April 23, 2012

The Daya Bay Collaboration in China has discovered an unexpectedly large neutrino oscillation.

To some, this may be the year of the dragon, but in neutrino physics, this is the year of θ₁₃. Only one year ago, this supposedly "tiny" mixing angle, which describes how neutrinos oscillate from one mass state to another, was undetected, but the last twelve months have seen a flurry of results from experiments in Asia and Europe, culminating in the result from the Daya Bay Collaboration, now being reported in Physical Review Letters, that shows that θ₁₃ is not small after all. A not-so-tiny mixing angle forces us to rethink theory, calling for new explanations for why quarks and leptons are so different. It also opens the door to new experiments, potentially allowing the discovery of CP violation—a difference between neutrinos and antineutrinos that may be related to the matter asymmetry of the early universe.

From the Accelerator Division

Accelerator and NuMI upgrades for NOvA

Paul Derwent

Paul Derwent, the associate project manager for the NOνA experiment, wrote this week's column.

Fermilab's proton beam will turn off on Monday, April 30, for 11 months, so that we can upgrade our infrastructure in preparation for our next steps into the Intensity Frontier, with NOvA.

The NOvA experiment is a second-generation neutrino mixing experiment. Neutrinos exist as three different types, and NOvA researchers will look at the rates that neutrinos shift between those types. If the rate differs between neutrinos and antineutrinos, it could explain why there's more matter than antimatter in the universe.

Like most neutrino experiments, NOvA will request a lot of protons. To meet the experimenters' scientific goals in six years, the Accelerator Division has to double the current capabilities of the accelerator complex. To increase the total protons on target, there are two options: increase the intensity per pulse or increase the frequency of pulses. We will do both.

In current operations, protons from the Booster are injected and accumulated in the Main Injector. In the Main Injector, the energy of the protons is increased by a factor of 15 and sent to the neutrino production target. In the future, protons will accumulate in the Recycler, increasing the frequency of the pulses to the target by 55 percent. With improved technical components, the pulse intensity is increased by 30 percent. The combination of increased frequency and increased intensity doubles the performance.

The Accelerator and NuMI upgrades for NOvA started six years ago. From conceptual designs, the project has advanced through many reviews, procurement and fabrication to be ready for the upgrades. It is a significant change in operations, requiring a significant access period to the accelerator tunnels.

During the shutdown, we will install the hardware to make this operational change. This hardware will include new transfer lines from the Booster to the Recycler and from the Recycler to the Main Injector, as well as additional radio-frequency hardware in both the Recycler and the Main Injector. The NuMI target hall will also have significant upgrades to handle the higher pulse intensity and frequency. There will be about 40 technicians, from AD, PPD and TD, working full time on the upgrades for the next year.

At the end of this long shutdown, AD will be prepared to deliver the desired protons per year to the NOvA experiment, opening up new windows on the understanding of neutrino mixing.

Safety Update

ES&H weekly report, April 24

This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ES&H section, contains two recordable incidents. An employee had a back strain after taking water samples from several different wells over a two day period. He received medical treatment and significant work restrictions, making this case a DART. Another employee experienced wrist pain after working on her laptop all day. She received medical treatment, and the case is recordable.

Find the full report here.

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