Have a safe day!
Wednesday, Dec. 19
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO FERMILAB COLLOQUIUM THIS WEEK
Thursday, Dec. 20
THERE WILL BE NO THEORETICAL PHYSICS SEMINAR THIS WEEK
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY
SEMINAR TODAY
Friday, Dec. 21
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar- One West
Speaker: Mayda Velasco, Northwestern University
Title: Recent Studies of the Higgs Boson at CMS
THERE WILL BE NO SEMINARS FROM DEC. 24, 2012 TO JAN. 6, 2013
Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.
Ongoing and upcoming conferences at Fermilab
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Wednesday, Dec. 19
- Breakfast: breakfast casserole
- Golden broccoli and cheddar soup
- Chicken cordon bleu sandwich
- Traditional turkey dinner
- Smart cuisine: beef bourguignon
- Turkey bacon Swiss panini
- Assorted calzones
- Blackened chicken alfredo
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu |
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Wednesday, Dec. 19
Lunch
- Pork tenderloin with brandy cream sauce
- Sweet potatoes
- Sautéed green beans
- Assortment of Christmas cookies
Friday, Dec. 21
Dinner
Closed
Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
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Happy holidays from Fermilab
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Click on the image above to view it as a full-size holiday greeting card, then scroll down past the image for instructions on how to e-mail the card to your friends. View the original photo. Photo: Reidar Hahn
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This is the final issue of Fermilab Today for 2012. Fermilab Today will begin publishing again on Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2013. Happy holidays!
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Thanks and appreciation
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The Fermilab Director Search Committee town hall meeting, chaired by Norm Augustine, seated by the microphone, took place on Dec. 11 in Ramsey Auditorium.
Photo: Reidar Hahn
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On behalf of all of the members of the Fermilab Director Search Committee, I wish to thank those on the laboratory staff and in the user community who took time to meet with the committee during our two-day, onsite visit last week, as well as those of you who have submitted written comments to us on the search website. The committee especially appreciates the thoughtfulness and candor of the input from meeting participants and correspondents. We are in admiration of the community's deep interest in the future of Fermilab, and in the selection of the next director as a leader of both the laboratory and the field.
Your comments and suggestions are extremely valuable as the committee continues its process of broadly soliciting and assessing input on the search for the next Fermilab director. For those who have not had the opportunity to provide input to the committee, we invite you to submit comments by visiting the search website or, if you prefer, by contacting an individual committee member.
With appreciation and best wishes for the holidays,
—Norm Augustine, Chair,
Fermilab Director Search Committee
Editor's note: The Fermilab Director Search Committee town hall meeting that was held on Dec. 11 in Ramsey Auditorium is available for viewing online. The one-hour-long video features former Lockheed Martin chairman and CEO Norman Augustine, chair of the Search Committee, moderating a discussion with fellow committee members regarding the search process. The video also includes a question-and-answer session with audience members. For more information on the search for Fermilab's new director, please visit the Director Search website.
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California Institute of Technology
NAME:
California Institute of Technoogy
HOME TOWN:
Pasadena, Calif.
MASCOT:
Beaver
COLORS:
Orange and white
COLLABORATING AT FERMILAB SINCE:
1960s
WORLDWIDE PARTICLE PHYSICS COLLABORATIONS:
BaBar (SLAC), CMS, ILC, MINOS, Mu2e, NOvA, SuperB (INFN), SuperCDMS
NUMBER OF SCIENTISTS AND STUDENTS INVOLVED:
Eight faculty, eight postdocs, two scientific staff, 12 graduate students
PARTICLE PHYSICS RESEARCH FOCUS:
The work on LHC physics at Caltech focuses on a wide range of lepton, photon, jet and missing ET signatures. The Caltech group has focused on the search for the Higgs in the bosonic channels, with a long tradition of searching in the diphoton channel and, more recently, the WW and ZZ channels. The group also focuses on the search for SUSY and, more generally, for dark matter particle candidates using its game-changing new set of "razor" analysis methods (developed with colleagues from LPC/Fermilab and CERN). The group has been central in ECAL monitoring and calibration for over 15 years and, more recently, in the HCAL and trigger groups. The group has had central roles in the study of neutrino and antineutrino oscillations as well as the measurement of theta-13 in MINOS and in construction, trigger, readout, reconstruction and analysis for NOvA. The flavor physics analysis efforts at BaBar have recently set new limits on dark-sector particles, and the work on SuperB and Mu2e has focused on rare heavy-quark and charged-lepton decays. The theory group effort covers string theory, field theory, beyond-the-Standard Model weak-scale physics, early-universe cosmology, Standard Model physics and LHC phenomenology. Barry Barish, a professor at Caltech, leads the ILC Global Design Effort.
WHAT SETS PARTICLE PHYSICS AT CALTECH APART?
Caltech has a long history of collaboration with Fermilab, starting with work on deep inelastic scattering and neutrino physics in the lab's early days and continuing with the Tevatron and work on MINOS, NOvA, CMS and Mu2e today. Caltech is small, with a low student-to-faculty ratio and a special focus on term-time and summer research for undergraduates as well as grad students. This continues to attract outstanding students in experiment and theory, many of whom have worked at CERN in recent years.
FUNDING AGENCIES:
DOE, NSF
View all university profiles.
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Know your neutrinos
From The Economist, Nov. 21, 2012
Editor's note: Near the end of every year, The Economist issues a special print issue that focuses on the following year. This year, "The World in 2013" has a one-page article on the NOvA experiment. It is one of seven articles in the Science and Technology section of the print issue.
For physics buffs, 2012 was all about the Higgs boson. In July scientists at last nabbed the elusive particle, 48 years after it was first predicted. The Higgs, which is involved in giving other particles mass, is the keystone of the particle-physics rulebook known as the Standard Model. But long before they finally netted the Higgs, physicists were looking beyond that standard model, which leaves some fascinating questions unanswered—such as why the universe is made of matter. One of their most promising ways forward is the study of particles long since discovered but persistently perplexing: neutrinos.
These diaphanous particles, far more abundant than the electrons and protons atoms are made of but loth to interact with them, have long been a source of head-scratching among physicists (not to mention, when it was claimed that they might travel faster than light, a certain amount of embarrassment). In 2013 an experiment in America, called NOvA, will begin probing two of their particularly enigmatic characteristics: their mass and their ability to morph from one type (or "flavour") to another.
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The first LHC protons run ends with new milestone
From CERN, Dec. 17, 2012
Geneva, 17 December 2012. This morning CERN completed the first LHC proton run. The remarkable first three-year run of the world's most powerful particle accelerator was crowned by a new performance milestone. The space between proton bunches in the beams was halved to further increase beam intensity.
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Computing matters at CMS
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Lothar Bauerdick
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Oliver Gutsche
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Burt Holzman
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Lothar Bauerdick, Oliver Gutsche and Burt Holzman, members of the CMS group at Fermilab, wrote this column.
On Monday, the LHC ended its collisions of protons on protons for 2012 and is not scheduled to resume running until 2015 when the long shutdown for energy upgrades is complete. The completion of proton collisions this week marks the end of an era for the LHC, one during which the world got its initial peek at a new energy scale, even though the collider ran at reduced energy. In this relatively short three-year run, the LHC was able to gather a sufficiently sizable data set to observe what looks like the Higgs boson and make a broad range of interesting physics measurements. CMS has published more than 200 refereed physics publications to date on this data set and will continue to mine this data for the coming years while it repairs and upgrades its detectors.
Collecting the data is just the first step in the process of physics publications. That data has to then be reconstructed, calibrated and put into a form that is useful for the 2000-plus collaborators to perform physics analysis. Furthermore, a parallel simulation effort must also be coordinated and executed in order to get the physics out. The scale of computing at CMS is something that particle physics has never seen before, using hundreds of thousands of processors located at Fermilab and around the world.
All of the CMS computing professionals at Fermilab's Scientific Computing Division have had a significant impact on the success of CMS. These professionals operate the CMS Tier-1 at Fermilab, the largest computing facility for CMS outside of CERN, as well as the LHC Physics Center, a highly regarded resource for analysis.
You often hear in the corridors of physics departments that if you're under pressure and need to get your analysis done quickly and reliably, one of the best places to get the job done is the CMS analysis farm at Fermilab.
Although mostly working in the background, the entire collaboration knows and appreciates the effort undertaken by the facility and operations teams, maintaining the computing centers in FCC and GCC and manning the Remote Operations Center on Wilson Hall's first floor. With quiet efficiency, these teams have made Fermilab what it is today for CMS, a beacon of excellence in computing reliability and service. In the last quarter, the facility did not experience a single unscheduled downtime – demonstrating the commitment of the team to keeping this facility available for scientists worldwide to use.
With the most successful year yet for CMS winding down, the work doesn't stop. While the physicists enjoy their well-deserved rest and recharge their batteries for an equally promising 2013, the computers will dutifully process data, analyze results and prepare for the higher-energy run to start in 2015, all under the watchful eyes of the CMS computing team at Fermilab.
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In a reindeer-drawn sleigh, Santa wishes Fermilab happy holidays
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Julie Kurnat, TD, made this chalk drawing of Santa sailing over Wilson Hall. It is on display in Trailer 156 in the Technical Division.
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Wish upon a shooting star
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Late on the night of Dec. 13, Marty Murphy, Accelerator Division, captured on camera four meteors of the Geminid meteor shower streaking across the winter sky. This is a composite of the four pictures.
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Fermilab holiday celebration
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An audience applauds a group of children and their singing performance at the Dec. 13 Fermilab annual holiday celebration last week. Photo: Reidar Hahn
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Festively dressed for the occasion, Deputy Director Young-Kee Kim dips into a bag of presents for the brave child performers at last week's holiday celebration. Photo: Reidar Hahn
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The Fermilab Singers entertain with holiday tunes while a singer in gorilla costume dances along to a song about King Kong and Christmas. Photo: Reidar Hahn
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A Santa Pier Oddone and elfish John Kent smile for the camera. Photo: Reidar Hahn
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ESH&Q weekly report, Dec. 18
This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ESH&Q section, contains one incident.
An employee received a minor laceration on his hand. He received first-aid treatment.
Find the full report here. |
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Cloudy
