Thursday, Sept. 6, 2012
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Have a safe day!

Thursday, Sept. 6

2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar (NOTE LOCATION) - WH3NE
Speaker: Heribertus (Bayu) Hartanto, Florida State University
Title: NLO Predictions for Z Boson + Photons Final States at the LHC

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

THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY

Friday, Sept. 7

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

4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Kalanand Mishra, Fermilab
Title: Search for New Physics in Di-Boson Events at CMS

8 p.m.
Fermilab Lecture Series - Auditorium
Speaker: Dr. Alex Ruthenburg, University of Chicago
Title: Is the Age-Old Debate about Nature vs. Nurture Merely a Question of Packaging?

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Thursday, Sept. 6

- Breakfast: Greek omelet
- Green pork chili
- Barbecue chopped-pork sandwich
- Southern fried chicken
- Smart cuisine: baked Swiss steak
- Italian loaf sandwich
- Chef Juan pizza
- Tex-Mex grilled-chicken salad

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Friday, Sept. 7
Dinner
- Potato, bacon and cheese soufflé
- Lobster tail with champagne butter sauce
- Spaghetti squash
- Snowpeas
- Strawberry crepes

Wednesday, Sept. 12
Lunch
- Stuffed fillet of sole with lemon butter sauce
- Steamed green beans
- Lemon tart with coconut crust

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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From symmetry

A love of science, conveyed through YouTube

Michael Wilson raps about why vibrating strings may unravel reality and why dark matter is funky.

Michael Wilson, 29, could be considered a member of the Millennial generation. He's been expressing himself online since he was a teenager posting videos on inline skating forums.

So when he got interested in string theory, he had a very Millennial response: He decided to make a music video about it for his YouTube channel.

Wilson first heard about string theory—the idea that everything in the universe is made up of small, vibrating strings—when physicist S. James Gates Jr. gave a public SciCafé lecture at the American Museum of Natural History. He was intrigued, but he knew he needed to learn more. He wanted his song to be more than catchy; he wanted it to be educational.

"You can listen to someone give a definition of something, and you can repeat that without knowing what you're saying," he said. "You need to truly master information before you can tell other people about it."

It's a skill Wilson has been practicing for eight years as a member of a team of guides, called "explainers," at the New York Hall of Science.

Wilson went straight to social media to research. He watched programs with science popularizers such as Michio Kaku and studied physics music videos on YouTube. He came up with a hook: "By studying the world around us, we can learn our history. What happened before time? Before Big Bang Theory? The answers to the universe remain a mystery. But vibrating strings may unravel reality."

Using his own time, a green screen he bought on eBay and the editing skills he'd picked up creating World of Warcraft videos, he created "String Theory Song." In the video, he plays the bass to demonstrate how a string vibrating at different frequencies produces different notes, just as microscopic strings might vibrate at different frequencies to create different subatomic particles. The video has gotten more than 13,000 views so far.

Read more

Kathryn Jepsen

Clarification

PPD and Fermilab Test Beam Facility management

In the Wednesday, Sept. 5 issue of Fermilab Today, an article about PPD reorganization of research departments gave some readers the impression that management of Fermilab's Test Beam Facility will be dissolved. Although the EPP Department will be dissolved on Oct. 1, management of the Test Beam Facility was moved to the Detector Development and Operations Department described by Peter Wilson in the Feb. 22 issue of Fermilab Today.

In the News

Shedding light on dark matter: Scientists believe proof of cosmic enigma has been found after 70-year hunt

From the Daily Mail, Sept. 5, 2012

Scientists believe they are on the verge of solving the 70-year-old mystery of dark matter.

The structure of the observable universe suggests there is a lot of matter that we simply cannot see, and astronomers, cosmologists and particle physicists have been looking for answers to what it could be.

But now the ESA Planck satellite has picked up radiation beams from the centre of the Milky Way, and scientists believe they have discovered proof that dark mater exists - otherwise the alternative would re-write physics as we know it.

Read more
In the News

Research on supernova explosion revealed

From the Irish Times, Sept. 5, 2012

BRITISH FESTIVAL OF SCIENCE: This summer we waited for final word that the Higgs particle exists. Now scientists have come up with yet another particle that may help solve one of the greatest mysteries of the universe.

This as yet unproven particle only exists on paper, the result of intense mathematical computations that describe its behaviour. And as with the discovery of the Higgs boson, Cern – Europe's nuclear research centre – has stepped forward, offering help to prove that the particle exists.

Details of the work were presented yesterday on the opening day of the annual British Festival of Science, taking place in Aberdeen. University of Aberdeen physicist Prof Charles Wang said the work, in which he was a team member, relates to the universe's single most dramatic event: a supernova stellar explosion.

Read more
Result of the Week

Do boson interactions break the rules?

Do photons and W and Z bosons interact with each other by the specific rules dictated by the Standard Model, or does their behavior indicate something unexpected?

The Standard Model dictates very specific rules that govern the way the photon (γ) and W and Z bosons interact with each other. In the Standard Model, the neutral photon and Z boson do not directly interact, but the charged W bosons can interact with each other or with the photon or the Z boson. Studying processes that include interactions between these force carriers gives physicists an opportunity to test whether the bosons are behaving by the Standard Model rules or cheating, like poker players passing cards beneath the table.

The interactions between photons and W and Z bosons can be modeled in a very general way by listing all of the possible couplings that could exist between those particles. The Standard Model predicts specific values for each of these triple boson couplings, but new physics could cause them to be something different. Measuring these couplings tests fundamental aspects of the Standard Model and places constraints on what new models of physics are possible.

At the Tevatron, triple boson couplings can be probed by WW, WZ or Wγ production. DZero scientists recently performed a comprehensive study of triple boson couplings, providing new limits for some channels and combining previous results from others across all three of these production modes. They provided new limits for events where either WW or WZ was produced and decayed into a lepton, neutrino and two jets and for events where a WZ was produced and decayed into three leptons and a neutrino. These results were combined with previous studies of WW and Wγ production to produce the most stringent limits on triple boson couplings from a hadron collider to date. No deviation from the predicted values was observed, so none of these players have been caught cheating under the Standard Model rules—at least for now!

—Mike Cooke

These physicists made major contributions to this analysis.
The offline-support team is responsible for providing the smooth and reliable storage and retrieval of data that is critical to performing physics analyses at DZero.
Announcements

Walk 2 Run - begins today

Fermilab Arts & Lecture Series: Epigenetics - Sept. 7

Barn dance - Sept. 9

NALWO annual autumn potluck luncheon at Users' Center - Sept. 10

International Folk Dancing returns to Kuhn Village Barn - Sept. 13

NALWO and Playgroup SciTech Museum visit - Oct. 6

Fermilab Arts & Lecture Series: Broadway's Next H!T Musical - Sept. 22

Scottish country dancing returns to Kuhn Village Barn

Road D closure - through mid-October

Professional development courses

Outdoor soccer - Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6 p.m.

Atrium work updates

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