Fermilab Today

	Tuesday, Aug. 28, 2012

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Have a safe day!

Tuesday, Aug. 28

3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over

THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY

Wednesday, Aug. 29

3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over

THERE WILL BE NO FERMILAB COLLOQUIUM THIS WEEK

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a weekly calendar with links to additional information.

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Tuesday, Aug. 28

- Breakfast: All-American breakfast
- Golden broccoli and cheddar
- Ye olde fish and chips
- Country fried steak
- Smart cuisine: honey dijon pork chops
- Gourmet chicken salad sandwich
- Personal pizza
- Kiwi pecan chicken salad

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, Aug. 29
Lunch
- Stuffed bacon-wrapped chicken breast stuffed w/ mushroom, cheese, onion and garlic
- Parmesan orzo
- Lemon cheesecake w/ blueberry sauce

Friday, Aug. 31
Dinner
Closed

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

Small but powerful

Members of the CERN-Fermilab team wind the magnet coil. From left to right: M. Whitson, A. Zlobin, B. Auchmann, M. Karppinen, F. Nobrega and J. Alvarez. A. Zlobin (Fermilab) and M. Karppinen (CERN) are the technical heads of the 11 T Collaboration. Photo: CERN

Magnet size is crucial to an accelerator as it determines the final circumference and power. This spring, Fermilab unveiled a 10.4-Tesla magnet that is shorter than the 8-Tesla magnets currently installed in the LHC. These new magnets will be a valuable asset to the HL-LHC, the next step of the LHC machine.

The HL-LHC (High Luminosity LHC) represents the future of CERN's flagship accelerator. From around 2020, this major upgrade will allow a substantial increase in the rate of collisions compared to today. The project poses various technical challenges, some of which appear to be close to being resolved.

The success of the HL-LHC hinges on two essential conditions: the installation of more powerful magnets to guide the beams and the addition of extra collimators to mitigate the increase in radiation. However, one of the key questions is how to insert additional collimators in a 27-km ring already full to bursting. The answer is to replace the current magnets by shorter but more powerful magnets, which is what Fermilab's engineers have been working on in collaboration with CERN.

"The idea originated from a proposal made by Lucio Rossi, the head of CERN's Magnets, Superconductors and Cryostats group, in 2010," explains Giorgio Apollinari, head of Fermilab's Technical Division. "During a discussion he suggested replacing a few of the LHC's 8-Tesla dipole magnets with shorter 11-Tesla magnets. His idea aligned well with the goals of Fermilab's R&D programme for projects including the muon collider, so we decided to collaborate."

It was not long before the decision started to pay off. In spring 2012, only 20 months after the research had begun, Fermilab unveiled a 10.4-Tesla two-metre-long prototype magnet. Once several more development phases have been completed, an 11-metre-long magnet should see the light of day. Nothing short of a revolution when you think that the existing magnets are 14 metres long.

"We achieved this using niobium-tin (Nb₃Sn) instead of niobium-titanium (NbTi), which was the material used in the manufacture of the superconducting cables of the LHC magnets in the 1990s," adds Giorgio Apollinari.

Looking at what the CERN-Fermilab collaboration has achieved in less than two years, we think it's safe to assume that 11-Tesla magnets are not far off…

—Anaïs Schaeffer

Photos of the Day

Morning has broken

Sun shines through Broken Symmetry early Saturday morning.

The hyperbolic obelisk and Wilson Hall reflect morning's golden hues.
Photos: Ruben Carcagno, TD

In the News

Spin-orbit coupling comes in from the cold

From Physics, Aug. 27, 2012

One thriving area of cold-atom research is the development of techniques allowing dilute gases at nanokelvin temperatures to reproduce phenomena central to other fields, such as solid-state or nuclear physics. By precisely tuning properties such as density, temperature, and interaction strength, one can gain unprecedented quantitative insights into many physical processes. As reported in Physical Review Letters, two groups of researchers, Pengjun Wang at Tsinghua University in China and colleagues, and Lawrence Cheuk from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and colleagues, have expanded the cold-atom experimental toolbox by engineering a system of fermionic atoms in which lasers induce strong spin-orbit coupling. One can envision that this technique may be combined with Feshbach resonances (which control the interatomic interactions) and optical lattices (which mimic the lattices in real materials), enabling the production of exotic states found in condensed-matter systems such as topological insulators. Even more importantly, one hopes to realize novel states of matter (e.g., "fractional topological insulators"), which are anticipated by many theoretical studies but are hard to create and analyze experimentally.

Director's Corner

This week's Director's Corner will appear tomorrow, Wednesday, Aug. 29.

From WDRS

Revitalizing new-employee orientation

Kay Van Vreede, head of the Workforce Development and Resources Section, wrote this column.

Kay Van Vreede

Over the past year, we in WDRS have worked to make welcoming new employees to Fermilab even more welcoming, and we plan to expand the effort by offering a more comprehensive orientation.

First-day new-employee orientation receives high marks from participants (4.75/5.0 according to the results of our feedback questionnaire) thanks to our friendly orienteer, Jason Johnson, and to a streamlined, largely online on-boarding process. Suggestions from the Employee Advisory Group, as well as from individual employees, on additional improvements such as a revamp of the benefits section have made orientation day more interactive and informative. Human Resources generalists also come by to greet the new employees who are starting in their respective sectors and help get them to the right place after orientation.

On the first day of orientation, the orienteer makes sure the employees' paperwork is in order and provides them with essential information. The following day, each employee's department manager begins offering more information and education using a checklist provided by Human Resources.

Many people have asked us for a more comprehensive orientation that covers the organization and work of the laboratory. In response, we are putting together a new program that will be offered to new employees within their first month of employment. We've begun this process by conducting a focus group of some newly hired employees. We've also expanded the initiative to a survey, sent out on Aug. 24, to solicit feedback from anyone hired within the last year. If you were sent one of the surveys (from Survey Monkey), please help us by filling it out. If you are not eligible to take the survey but have ideas on what could be included in the new orientation, please send them to Barb Brooks.

On another note, most of our summer interns have departed for school. We have had another successful year thanks to the students, Carol Angarola, Sandra Charles, Dianne Engram, Liz Quigg and all of the wonderful staff involved. If you would like to see what kind of research our students are involved in or read their papers, please visit the summer internship website.

Construction Update

Excavating a tunnel to NOvA Near-Detector Hall

Subcontractors begin excavating the access tunnel to the future NOvA Near-Detector Hall. Photo: Cindy Arnold

With the site preparation and utility relocation phase of the construction of the NOvA Near-Detector Hall nearly complete, subcontractor Kiewit Infrastructure Co. has recently begun the excavation phase.

Kiewit workers have removed the protective layer of shotcrete and mesh from the area that will be mined to create an access tunnel to the new hall. The tick marks identify the areas where rock bolts will be installed to strengthen the rock mass between the existing tunnel and new hall.

The picture shows the first of two entrances that will be dug out. The subcontractor will excavate a second entrance to the right of the one pictured.

The hall will be located just upstream (closer to the proton source) of the MINOS near detector and the MINERvA detector in the NuMI tunnel.

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