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Have a safe day!
Tuesday, May 1
10:30 a.m.
Research Techniques Seminar - One West
Speaker: Lindley Winslow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Title: ReƲolution? Neutrinos and Nanotechnology
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Accelerator Physics and Technology Seminar - One West
Speaker: Terry Hendricks, Sandia National Laboratories
Title: Instantaneous Heat Flux Measurements in Internal
Combustion Engines
Wednesday, May 2
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium -
One West
Speaker: Jeff Harvey, University of Chicago
Title: Strings and QCD
Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.
Upcoming conferences
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Tuesday, May 1
- Breakfast: Bagel sandwich
- Creamy turkey vegetable soup
- Chili dog
- Country-fried steak
- Chicken cacciatore
- Italian panini w/ provolone
- Assorted calzones
- Southwestern chicken burrito
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu
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Wednesday, May 2
Lunch
- Thai beef noodle salad
- Coconut panna cotta w/ tropical fruit
Friday, May 4
Dinner
Closed
Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
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IARC construction contract awarded for main building
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As envisioned, the Illinois Accelerator Research Center will provide approximately 83,000 square feet of technical, office and classroom space for scientists and industrial partners. |
On March 21, Fermilab awarded the Office, Technical and Education building construction contract for the Illinois Accelerator Research Center to Barton Malow, a national construction company with offices in Chicago. Construction will begin this month.
"Barton Malow is clearly qualified and offered the most competitive package of the contractors who responded," said Bob Kephart, the IARC program director. "Fermilab has worked with them recently on several ARRA funded projects, such as the Cryomodule Testing Facility and NML tunnel extension, and we were happy with the results.
Construction of the Illinois State funded 47,000 square foot OTE building is the next step in the long process of planning, designing, approving and developing of the IARC physical plant.
"I worked closely with a FESS team led by architect Rhonda Merchut and with the A&E firm Ross Barney Architects to arrive at the conceptual design for IARC," Kephart said. "Construction of the building is the last piece of the puzzle. The effort leading up to a successful award of the IARC OTE Building construction contract was a real team effort involving FESS, BSS, Finance, Legal and the Directorate."
As the construction on IARC commences, additional challenges remain as the CDF experimental equipment is removed by a team led by Johnathan Lewis from PPD. However, the largest challenge remains, namely, crafting a successful program for IARC, an effort which is currently deep in the planning stages.
Despite the future challenges of launching the IARC program, Kephart and FESS are excited to begin construction the IARC OTE building with the contractor they've chosen.
"All you need to do is look at the buildings Barton Malow has constructed at Fermilab and you can see they do quality work," Kephart said.
Read more
—Sarah Charley |
Liquid Argon Test Facility construction progresses
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| Civil construction of the The Liquid Argon Test Facility, located across the road from the MiniBooNE experiment, continues construction. Photo: Cindy Arnold |
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DASTOW 2012 - June 20
Fermilab's Daughters and Sons to Work day will take place on Wednesday, June 20.
Fermilab's DASTOW program returns with traditional favorite activities including Mr. Freeze's cryogenics show, a trip to see the bison, the FUNdamentals of Physics show and a demonstration of skills and safety at the Fermilab Fire Department.
For a complete schedule of events and to see photos from previous DASTOW events, visit the DASTOW website.
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Super-collider team discovers new subatomic particle
From msnbc.com, April 28, 2012
European researchers say they have discovered a new subatomic particle that helps confirm our knowledge about how quarks bind — one of the basic forces in the shaping of matter.
The CERN physics research center said Friday that the particle was discovered at the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of the Large Hadron Collider's two main general-purpose detectors, in collaboration with the University of Zurich.
Joe Incandela, the physicist in charge of the experiment involved with the discovery, told The Associated Press that the particle was predicted long ago, but finding it was "really kind of a classic tour de force of experimental work."
The particle, known as an excited neutral Xi-b baryon, could not be detected directly because it was too unstable. Instead, its existence was inferred by the pattern of its decay into other subatomic particles.
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Quantum entanglement can reach into the past
From LiveScience.com, April 30, 2012
Spooky quantum entanglement just got spookier.
Entanglement is a weird state where two particles remain intimately connected, even when separated over vast distances, like two die that must always show the same numbers when rolled. For the first time, scientists have entangled particles after they've been measured and may no longer even exist.
If that sounds baffling, even the researchers agree it's a bit "radical," in a paper reporting the experiment published online April 22 in the journal Nature Physics.
"Whether these two particles are entangled or separable has been decided after they have been measured," write the researchers, led by Xiao-song Ma of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the University of Vienna.
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Inauguration of the NOvA facility in Ash River, Minn.
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Officials from the U.S. Department of Energy, the University of Minnesota and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory dedicate the NOvA Laboratory near the Ash River, Minn. Photo: Reidar Hahn |
On April 27, more than 250 people gathered to inaugurate the NOvA facility near the Ash River in northern Minnesota. The facility consists of the huge far detector building, building fixtures and the impressive lifter that will position the NOvA blocks in their vertical position. When standing in the hall where the detector will be built, the building looks astonishingly large: it almost seems impossible that one day soon almost every square foot will be filled with detector.
The NOvA far detector, when complete, will be the largest plastic structure in the world. Sixteen-meter-long PVC tubes will form planes nearly 50 feet by 50 feet square. The planes will be stacked and glued 32 layers at a time and then pivoted to their final vertical position in the detector hall. Nearly 10,000 kilometers of wave-shifting fiber will be threaded through the 368,000 individual tubes, and finally the detector will be filled with 3,200,000 gallons of mineral oil loaded with scintillator.
More than 170 undergraduates are at work in the factory where individual modules are made before being shipped to the NOvA facility. They are manufacturing the detector planes and, in the process, learning all about running a large factory with the complex workflows and many quality assurance procedures required for successful production. Here at Fermilab, we have just begun upgrading our accelerator complex to produce the highest-power multi-GeV neutrino beam in the world starting in 2013.
The NOvA facility and our accelerator complex that creates the neutrino beam together constitute extraordinary means to carry out extraordinary science. The recent measurement by the Daya Bay reactor experiment in China, confirmed by the RENO reactor experiment in Korea, show us that the door is wide open for the next set of measurements in the neutrino sector. NOvA will be the first with the ability to tell us how the masses of the neutrinos are arranged.
The completion of the NOvA facility required exceptional efforts on multiple fronts. The collaboration generated an excellent detector design and, after testing it using a prototype detector on our Fermilab site, is ready to start building it at full scale. The University of Minnesota has done a remarkable job in managing the construction of the facility and running the Ash River laboratory. The facility's design firm and the construction company have also done a great job, and we continue to receive strong support from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. The DOE Fermi Site Office and the DOE Office of High Energy Physics have been extraordinarily helpful all the way along the process. And our legislators in congress have helped us overcome unusual turbulence along the road.
Building the extraordinary NOvA experiment has required extraordinary collaboration and determination. It has not been very long since the project's funding was zeroed out by the FY 2008 omnibus funding bill and the NOvA team dispersed to other projects. Friday's event shows that despite the nutty and unstable way in which we manage science in our country, we can still get big projects done.
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Chance of rain
73°/62°
