Thursday, Jan. 17, 2013
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Have a safe day!

Thursday, Jan. 17

2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Raoul Rontsch, Fermilab
Title: QCD Corrections to WW Production in Association with Jets

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

THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY

Friday, Jan. 18

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

4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Tom Junk, Fermilab
Title: Final Combination of CDF's Searches for the Higgs Boson in the Standard Model and Extensions

8 p.m.
Fermilab Lecture Series - Auditorium
Speaker: Todd Kuiken, Northwestern University
Title: Building Bionics
Tickets: $7

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Thursday, Jan. 17

- Breakfast: Mexican omelet
- New Brunswick stew
- Ranchero steak tacos
- Stuffed pork chops
- Smart cuisine: Baked penne with chicken and mushrooms
- Turkey BLT panini
- Assorted pizza
- Buffalo chicken tender ranch salad

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Friday, Jan. 18
Dinner
Closed

Wednesday, Jan. 23
Lunch
- Stuffed cabbages
- Mashed potatoes
- German chocolate cake

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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In Brief

Fermilab winter weather closing notifications

It's happened before: the February 2011 blizzard forced Fermilab to close for one day. If something similar should happen this year, keep your eyes and ears open for severe weather notifications from the laboratory. Photo: Reidar Hahn

While the 2012-13 winter season has been relatively trouble-free so far, there are still several months until spring, with plenty of time for snow and inclement weather.

Please be aware that if Fermilab will close early, open late, or not open at all because of severe weather, notifications will be posted or sent via:

  • All-hands e-mail messages
  • Messages on the fnal.gov home page
  • Emergency closing center announcements (broadcasted via local newspapers and radio and television stations)

Every effort will be made to notify employees, users and visitors as soon as a decision is made to modify facility and site hours. To ensure safe travel to and from work, you are encouraged to check for Fermilab closing notifications in the event of severe weather.

In Brief

Call for applications: URA Visiting Scholars Program

Universities Research Association Inc. has announced a deadline of Feb. 25 for the submission of applications for the spring 2013 cycle of awards in the URA Visiting Scholars Program at Fermilab. Award recipients will be notified at the end of March.

These awards provide financial support for faculty and students from URA's 85 member universities to work at Fermilab for periods of up to one year. URA makes two rounds of awards each year, in the spring and fall. The application deadline for the fall 2013 cycle is Aug. 26, 2013.

Proposed visits can range from attendance at Fermilab conferences or summer schools to year-long research stays. Support from this program can include transportation costs and local lodging expenses during a series of shorter visits or salary support during a longer visit. Individual awardees may receive up to a maximum of $50,000 in any 12-month period.

The program is sponsored by URA. The URA-member universities each have agreed to contribute $5,000 a year for five years in support of joint Fermilab-URA research and education initiatives.

For details on the URA Visiting Scholars Program at Fermilab, including eligibility, application process, award administration and the names of past award recipients, visit the URA Visiting Scholars website.

Photo of the Day

Water strider

A distant coyote furtively skips across A.E. Sea. Photo: Jack Manprasert, CCD
In the News

The largest structure ever observed in the universe

From The Atlantic, Jan. 14, 2013

Those dots may not look like much, but they represent the 73 quasars that in all make up the largest object ever discovered in our observable universe. At its longest, the quasar group (known technically as U1.27 but more colloquially as Huge-LQG for "large quasar group") runs about 4 *billion* light years, and about 1.6 billion at most points. For comparison, our Milky Way galaxy is approximately just ("just") 100,000 light years across.

Read more
Frontier Science Result: DZero

Right size, wrong shape for Z's with b's

Models of strong force interactions must use input from experiments to improve their predictions of the size and shape of important processes.

To estimate a signal or background process at a particle collider, two seemingly simple questions must be answered: "How much of it is there?" and "Where will it appear in the detector?" Knowing the rate and shape of each process is necessary to build an analysis that can reject backgrounds while keeping and measuring the signal. But interactions that involve the strong force are particularly difficult to predict directly from the theory and instead are estimated from models that are constrained by experimental data. Some of these processes, especially those involving weak force bosons and b's, or bottom quarks, are important backgrounds to precision studies of the top quark and the Higgs boson. A recent analysis at DZero focuses on testing whether models are correctly estimating the rate and shape of events with a Z boson and a bottom quark.

The complication in this analysis is that quarks are never seen alone. If a quark is produced in a particle collision, strong force interactions quickly begin to generate more quarks and gluons until the initial quark is part of a spray of many particles, called a jet. Jets produced from a bottom quark tend to be separated by a few millimeters from the rest of the particles produced in an event. DZero scientists looked for this signature to separate bottom quark jets from other jets to create an enriched sample of Z bosons with one or more bottom quarks. By comparing the bottom quark-enriched sample to the total production of Z bosons and jets, they were able to reduce the total uncertainty of the measurement.

The new result is the most precise measurement of the ratio of Z-boson-plus-bottom-quark production to all Z-boson-plus-jets production at the Tevatron and agrees well with the rate predicted by models. However, the analyzers also compared the shape of the data to the predicted distributions and found that none of the models tested provided a consistent description with all of the variables examined. This information will be used to constrain future models and lead to better predictions of Z boson-plus-bottom quark events.

Mike Cooke

These physicists made major contributions to this analysis.
Brad Abbott (University of Oklahoma) is the Tevatron's representative on the Council of the Open Science Grid, which was used to reconstruct particles from raw detector output and is used to generate simulated events that model the signal and background in most DZero analyses.
Announcements

Today's New Announcements

Series on the Bible book of Daniel - begins Jan. 22

URA Visiting Scholars Program deadline - Feb. 25

Fermilab Lecture Series - Building Bionics - Jan. 18

Gallery Chamber Series - Metropolis Quartet - Jan. 20

NALWO Armenian cooking demonstration - Jan. 24

Fermilab Arts Series - Tomas Kubinek - Jan. 26

January 2013 float holiday for timecard use

UChicago panel discussion on Higgs discovery - Feb. 7

2013 FRA scholarship applications accepted until April 1

Fermilab Management Practices courses available for registration

Interpersonal Communication Skills course offered in May

Abri Credit Union - member appreciation

International Folk Dancing Thursday evenings in Kuhn Barn

Indoor soccer

USA Athletic Club and Spa discount for employees

Interested in a Vaughan Athletic Center membership discount?

Employee discounts on AAA membership