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	Monday, Sept. 24, 2012

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Have a safe day!

Monday, Sept. 24

2:30 p.m.
Particle Astrophysics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Anastasia Fialkov, Tel Aviv University
Title: Velocity and Feedback Enhanced 21-cm Signal from First Stars at z~20

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

THERE WILL BE NO ALL EXPERIMENTERS' MEETING THIS WEEK

Tuesday, Sept. 25

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

THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY

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a weekly calendar with links to additional information.

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Secon Level 3

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Flags at full-staff

Wilson Hall Cafe

Monday, Sept. 24

- Breakfast: pancake sandwich
- Italian minestrone
- Creole jambalaya
- Spaghetti and meatballs
- Smart cuisine: herbed pot roast with vegetables
- Philly chicken sandwich
- Garden beef wrap
- Breakfast pizza

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, Sept. 26
Lunch
- Crab cakes w/ Cajun aioli
- Lemon orzo
- Sautéed tri-color peppers
- Sour cream pound cake with raspberry sauce

Friday, Sept. 28
Dinner
Closed

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

Norman Augustine to chair director search committee

Norman R. Augustine, the retired chairman and chief executive officer of the Lockheed Martin Corp., has agreed to chair the search committee for the new director of Fermilab. Current director Pier Oddone announced in August that he would retire on July 1, 2013, prompting Fermi Research Alliance LLC Board Chairman and University of Chicago President Bob Zimmer to begin the process of appointing a committee to conduct an international search for Oddone's successor.

Augustine is a member of the Universities Research Association Board of Trustees. FRA will now work with Augustine to assemble a committee to conduct the search. The process will include input from the particle physics community as well as Fermilab employees.

Feature

Performance recognition awards go to employees

Exceptional Performance Recognition Award recipients accepted their awards Sept. 7.

Fermilab recognized a group of dedicated employees for their outstanding contributions with Exceptional Performance Recognition Awards. The employees were nominated by their divisions and sections. Fermilab Director Pier Oddone handed out the awards at a reception on the 15th floor of Wilson Hall Sept. 7.

See all award recipients here.

From symmetry

Explain it in 60 seconds: Klystron

Klystrons are at the heart of particle accelerators, radar, cancer treatments and some radio telescopes. Image: Sandbox Studio, Chicago

Klystrons are what make linear accelerators—as well as radar, cancer treatments and some radio telescopes—work. Invented at Stanford University about 75 years ago, klystrons convert electricity into radio and microwave energy, a far more powerful version of what’s generated by your kitchen microwave oven.

Klystrons do this by sending a low-power wave of energy at a stream of electrons. The electrons that interact with the crests of the wave are pushed forward and accelerated. Meanwhile, the electrons that interact with the trough of the wave are pulled back and slowed down. The result is an electron beam broken up into a series of discrete bunches, each playing follow-the-leader with the bunch in front of it. This process is repeated in a series of vacuum cavities within the klystron, each one compressing the bunches further and increasing the empty space between them. Much as air blown into a pipe organ creates vibrations that flow into the surrounding air as sound waves, the bunched electrons cause the klystron’s output cavity to resonate, “ringing” out high-energy micro- or radio-waves.

At SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s linear accelerator, which is powered by about 240 klystrons, this process results in microwaves with 64 million watts of power. The energetic microwaves travel through a copper pipe to the accelerator, where they boost the energy of electrons that are bound for experiments.

Think about that the next time you’re heating lunch in the microwave.

—Diane Rezendes Khirallah

Read similar explanations in the symmetry archive

In the News

Discovery Channel video on dark matter search at SNOLAB

From Daily Planet, Sept. 19, 2012

Editor's note: Fermilab scientist and Northwestern University Assistant Professor Eric Dahl is featured in this Discovery Channel video on dark matter research at SNOLAB.

Dark matter is something that physicists believe makes up about 25 percent of our universe, but no one has ever seen it. Daily Planet's Jay Ingram traveled underground to visit a team of scientists who are looking to find this dark matter in Canada.

View video

Tip of the Week:
Cybersecurity

Managing web content

Don't let the Web get the better of you. Register your web servers and directories. Photo: Derek Harper

Fermilab takes great pride in presenting the laboratory and our scientific results to the public. Much of this is accomplished through publicly viewable Web pages. At the same time, some Fermilab Web pages are meant only for internal communication or to be accessed only by certain groups.

The cybersecurity team is in the process of modifying several cybersecurity practices to provide additional control over what is publicly viewable on the web. These measures, which will go into effect in October, include:

Registration of Web servers. It has long been laboratory policy that any Web servers meant to be visible from off site must be registered. Unregistered websites are blocked at the site border. Until now, enforcement of this policy has concentrated on web servers using standard Web ports (80 and 443). New tools will allow us also to block websites using non-standard ports, so these sites must also be registered and renewed annually. Site owners can register their websites through the Service Desk.

Forbidding directory browsing. Websites that support directory browsing (making Web content visible in the same manner as a file system) are a common cause of exposed content not intended to be made public. Lab policy forbids configuring Web servers to enable directory browsing by default. Web server managers who require this functionality must separately register each directory that allows browsing. This registration form is available through the Service Desk.

Directory browsing will be disabled on the central Web servers on or about Oct. 1. Therefore, those hosting Web pages on the central servers that need directory browsing will need to both register their site and configure .htaccess files in their Web areas (instructions for which will be provided by the Web support team).

Regulation of content. Each website owner is responsible for the content of his or her site servers. In the past, this site owner was ordinarily the same individual who registered the website for external visibility. However, content owners are becoming increasingly distinct from the Web server managers. The security team is developing procedures to ensure all laboratory Web pages have a specific individual who takes responsibility for the Web content. Again, the ownership information will be renewed annually.

Further details about each of these processes will be made available through the Service Desk and to Web server managers as they go into production.

—Irwin Gaines

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