Tuesday, Nov. 27, 2012
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Tuesday, Nov. 27

2 p.m.
LHC Physics Center Topic of the Week Seminar - WH11
Speaker: Sara Bolognesi, Johns Hopkins University
Title: Characterization of the Newly Discovered Boson: Is it the Long-Awaited SM Higgs?

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

THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY

Wednesday, Nov. 28

2 p.m.
LHC Physics Center Topic of the Week Seminar - WH11
Speaker: Si Xie, California Institute of Technology
Title: The Present and Future of the Higgs Sector

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

4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - One West
Speaker: Thomas Handler, University of Tennessee
Title: Science and Public Policy

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Tuesday, Nov. 27

- Breakfast: All-American breakfast
- Hungarian pork goulash soup
- Twin chili cheese dogs
- Cuban steak with black bean salsa
- Smart cuisine: Mediterranean baked tilapia
- Rachel melt panini
- Personal pizza
- Chicken BLT ranch salad

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, Nov. 28
Lunch
- Oven-roasted trout with lemon dill stuffing
- Steamed green beans
- Blueberry crisp

Friday, Nov. 30
Dinner
- Clam chowder
- Grilled lamb chops with balsamic glaze
- Stuffed tomatoes with pesto
- Julienne of zucchini
- Amaretto cheesecake

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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Feature

IARC building aims for LEED certification

Fermilab is constructing the IARC Office, Technical and Education Building with a view to being green. The new building is on track to receive the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification. Rendering: Ross Barney Architects

If you travel Fermilab's streets, you've no doubt seen that work is proceeding quickly on the Illinois Accelerator Research Center. When it's finished, the project team hopes the new building will become the laboratory's first to achieve the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification.

And because of changing Department of Energy regulations, it will also likely be the last.

When it's completed next year, IARC will cover about 83,000 square feet, and approximately 48,000 of that will be new construction. (The new building will join with the existing CDF assembly building, which will be refurbished after construction is completed.) The new center will house mostly offices and technical and educational facilities, and its purpose will be to bring private companies together with Fermilab scientists to find further practical uses for the lab's research.

It will also be remarkably energy-efficient, according to IARC building Project Manager Rhonda Merchut. The IARC team is aiming for a LEED gold certification for the new building, as required by the DOE at the time of the project's inception. That means that every element of the project, from design to purchasing materials to construction, has been carried out with the environment and energy conservation in mind.

For instance, the building has been designed with a geothermal HVAC system, consisting of 40 wells drilled 510 feet into the ground, allowing the earth to be used as a heat source in winter and a heat repository in summer. Seventy-six percent of the steel used in the building so far contains recycled content, Merchut said, and to date 91 percent of all waste generated by the construction has also been recycled. The goal is to maximize the amount of material that comes from local sources, she said.

The energy-efficient design of the new building is expected to save 30 percent over the baseline energy costs of a similar-sized building. In fact, that's a requirement to get the points needed for a LEED gold certification, Merchut said.

The new IARC building will include a pair of green roofs—essentially grass and vegetation planted on sections of the roof. The layer of soil and grass absorbs heat, Merchut said, and provides a nicer view for those in offices overlooking it.

With so many benefits, why is DOE turning away from LEED certification for its new buildings? Ironically, it's because they found a way to be more efficient.

DOE initially required LEED gold certification for any new buildings costing more than $5 million, starting in 2008. But according to Rod Walton, FESS environmental officer, a new DOE order issued in May 2011 signaled a different approach—federal guiding principles will now be the standard for environmentally friendly and energy-efficient projects.

Read more

Andre Salles

Photo of the Day

Coyote on the move

A coyote near MI10 trots through the grass. Photo: Marty Murphy, AD
In the News

Viewpoint: new temperature probe for quark-gluon plasma

From Physics, Nov. 26, 2012

At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), lead ions are collided at several tera-electron-volts to produce a soup of quarks and gluons called the quark-gluon plasma. Measuring the temperature of the plasma, which only survives for ~10−23 seconds and is hotter than the Sun's interior, would be impossible with any normal thermometer. Instead, researchers gauge the plasma's temperature by measuring its effects on other particles created in the collision. Interpreting these "particle thermometers," however, has not been entirely straightforward. Now, the collaboration running the CMS experiment at the LHC reports in Physical Review Letters that the detected yields of Upsilon mesons (bound states of a bottom quark and its antiparticle) in the plasma provide a comparatively clean measure of the plasma's temperature. The CMS researchers have made the first statistically significant detection of the suppression of the first two excited states of the mesons, a suppression that becomes more pronounced at higher plasma temperatures.

Read more
Director's Corner

This week's Director's Corner will run tomorrow, Nov. 28.

From symmetry

Contributing to an LHC experiment, no transatlantic travel required

Scientists participate in the CMS experiment from afar using remote operations centers such as the Fermilab Remote Operation Center, or ROC. Photo: Reidar Hahn

Physicist Sam Hewamanage woke up, got ready and made his usual 15-minute drive to work. He parked his car, walked inside and sat at his workstation before digging into his primary task for the day: monitoring a particle detector located 100 meters underground on the border of Switzerland and France.

Hewamanage doesn't live in Europe. He lives in Batavia, Ill., just outside of Chicago. But he can work on the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider as if he were on the CERN campus, thanks to the Remote Operations Center at Fermilab.

The ROC at Fermilab has allowed more than 100 people to log nearly 3000 hours of shifts for the CMS experiment this year alone, making hands-on experience much more accessible for people who don't have the opportunity to travel overseas. They will complete upward of 1000 more hours before the LHC goes into a long shutdown in February.

"It is very different from learning about the detector by reading the manual," says Hewamanage, a Florida International University postdoc.

The ROC is located on the first floor of Fermilab's iconic Wilson Hall. It's a big room built to mirror the CMS control center at CERN, with several workstations and monitors displaying the conditions in the CMS detector. Scientists and students connect to the control room at CERN via a live feed, so workers can converse with their colleagues across the ocean in real time.

Shifts are carefully divvied up to give as many collaborators as possible a chance to contribute. In a year and a half, Hewamanage has logged around three weeks in the ROC.

"There are a lot of people who come stay for a week or two weeks and do their shift and go back to their institutions," Hewamanage says. "The main goal is that everyone contributes."

Read more

Signe Brewster

In the News

The perils of translational research

From Scientific American, Nov. 26, 2012

In 1969, one of the more memorable incidents in the public advocacy of science took place. The American physicist Robert Wilson was asked to testify before Congress in support of the construction of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, known as Fermilab. For Wilson, building this huge machine had been a labor of love and nobody had a better background for it. He had worked on the Manhattan Project where he was the youngest group leader in the experimental division, and after the war he had become a professor at Cornell University.

Wilson was a first-rate amateur architect who saw accelerators as works of art. He lovingly designed Fermilab with his own hands and, in order to add to the aesthetic appeal of the place, turned the surrounding acres into a wilderness housing bison and geese. His efforts paid off; Fermilab would become the largest accelerator in the United States and CERN's primary competitor. In 1969 Wilson was asked to justify the expenditure for the multi-million dollar laboratory in front of Congress. The Cold War was raging, most research and especially physics research was being viewed in the context of national security, and Wilson was specifically asked what contribution the new laboratory would make to national defense. He replied in words that should be etched on the foundation stone of every center of basic research. The research, he said, had no direct bearing on national defense.

Read more
Announcements

Environment, Safety & Health Fair - Nov. 29

NALWO Holiday Tea - Dec. 4

C2ST screening of "A Beautiful Mind" - Dec. 6

Holiday stress relief massages - Dec. 20

Professional development courses

International Folk Dancing every Thursday through December

Indoor soccer

Fermilab employee discounts

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