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	Tuesday, March 19, 2013

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Calendar

Have a safe day!

Tuesday, March 19

2 p.m.
Computing Techniques Seminar - One West
Speaker: Adam Lyon, Fermilab
Title: ArtG4: A Generic Geant4 Framework for ART and Maybe Your Experiment

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

THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY

Wednesday, March 20

9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
LArTPC R&D Development Workshop - One West

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

THERE WILL BE NO FERMILAB COLLOQUIUM THIS WEEK

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a weekly calendar with links to additional information.

Ongoing and upcoming conferences at Fermilab

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Take Five

Weather

Chance of flurries
30°/13°

Extended forecast
Weather at Fermilab

Current Security Status

Secon Level 3

Current Flag Status

Flags at full staff

Wilson Hall Cafe

Tuesday, March 19

- Breakfast: All-American breakfast
- Old El Paso lime chicken
- Chopped-barbecue-pork sandwich
- Chicken pot pie
- Smart cuisine: honey dijon pork chops
- Gourmet chicken salad croissant
- Assorted pizza
- Kiwi pecan chicken salad

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, March 20
Lunch
- Ham and gruyere crepes with madeira sauce
- Cabbage salad
- Chocolate fondue

Friday, March 22
Dinner
Closed

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

Art show to feature employees' creative sides

A welded metal sculpture by artist Bill Gatfield, TD, stood on display in the Fermilab Art Gallery at the 2005 employee art show. Photo: Reidar Hahn

If art doesn't come to mind when you think of Fermilab employees, a new display at Wilson Hall's second-floor gallery may get you to think again.

Starting this week, the gallery will feature "Out of the Office: Employee Art Show 2013." The show runs from March 20 to May 7 and aims to showcase talents that Fermilab employees pursue in addition to working at the lab. A reception will take place March 22 at the gallery from 5 to 7 p.m.

"It's great that Fermilab supports this creativity outside of the workplace," said Visual Arts Coordinator Georgia Schwender.

The last employee-only art show occurred over a year ago, Schwender said. The event has been a mainstay since before she started working at the lab more than 10 years ago.

"It's been a while since the last employee art show, so the artists who are submitting work are really looking forward to it," Schwender said.

More than 50 employees are showing work in a variety of media. Submissions include paintings, pastels, textiles, stained glass and standing sculptures.

"I don't see the work until it's brought in the day of, so I'll be surprised at the submissions for sure," Schwender said.

Chris Olsen, particle accelerator operator, will display wet-plate photography, which involves a labor-intensive 19th-century photographic process.

Olsen said he is looking forward to seeing a different side of some of his co-workers.

"There is so much talent at the lab," he said. "You may work with a person for years and not even realize they pursue art as a hobby."

Schwender said she is looking forward to putting employees' talents on display.

"It's a great morale-booster and everyone's really proud of their work," Schwender said. "It's great being able to bring everyone together under a common ground of art."

—Sarah Khan

Photo of the Day

Merry mergansers

Hooded mergansers swam on the lake west of Wilson Hall last week. Photo: Barb Kristen, PPD

In the News

Does Illinois have a nuclear future?

From WBEZ, March 14, 2013

President Barack Obama was in town Friday visiting Argonne National Laboratory in the Western suburbs. The president talked about his "all of the above" energy policy, which includes alternative fuels and better batteries, but one area didn't get quite as much air time from the president: nuclear power.

Illinois continues to be the largest producer of nuclear power in the country.

And scientists at Argonne, and nearby Fermilab, want to keep it that way—by making nuclear part of our sustainable energy future.

But the future of nuclear here and across the country is shaky. After a long hiatus, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is licensing new reactors again, but most of those are in the Southeast, and none are in Illinois.

In the News

Feynman's double-slit experiment gets a makeover

From Physics World, March 14, 2013

Physicists in the US and Canada say that they have done the best job yet of realizing Richard Feynman's famous thought experiment about how single electrons pass through two slits. Although the researchers are not the first to recreate the experiment in the lab, they say that their incarnation best captures the essence of the original exercise.

Feynman originally outlined his thought experiment in volume three of his famous series The Feynman Lectures on Physics as a way of illustrating wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. In the book, he invites the reader to imagine firing individual electrons through two slits and then marking the position where each electron strikes a screen behind the slits.

In the News

Radio astronomy: The patchwork array

From Nature, March 13, 2013

The car toils upwards along the sinuous road, its engine tuned for the thin air. The clumps of cactus and grass along the road soon give way to bone-dry lifelessness. By the time the car reaches 4,000 metres above sea level, Pierre Cox has a bit of a headache. By the time it reaches the 5,000-metre-high Chajnantor plateau—one of the highest, driest places on Earth, and one of the best for astronomy—the altitude is affecting his bladder. Cox, the incoming director of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, is about to glimpse the giant telescope dishes he will soon be responsible for. But first he must find a toilet.

Director's Corner

HEPAP meeting

Fermilab Director
Pier Oddone

The High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, which advises the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, met in Maryland last week. The panel's two days of discussion covered many important topics, including the draft European Strategy and the report from the Facilities Subpanel charged by HEPAP to classify large high-energy physics facilities proposed to be built or upgraded over the next 10 years.

The European Strategy identifies long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments as one of the four high-priority global programs. The draft strategy encourages European scientists to explore collaborating with experiments in the United States and Japan. We hope that European groups' strong interest in liquid-argon time projection chamber technology will lead them to work with LBNE. There is a great deal of strength in Europe on liquid-argon technology, including the successful operation of the pioneering 600-ton ICARUS experiment at Gran Sasso and the large effort on the Long-Baseline Neutrino Observatory, a European Commission-funded project very similar to LBNE.

The modular nature of LBNE makes it possible to add modules of European design to increase the far-detector mass at Homestake. Significant participation from Europe would allow us to place a larger detector underground in the experiment's first phase. An investment of a larger far detector would have a huge scientific payoff in the long run, when high-power Project X beams drive a facility unequaled in the world. Our deputy director and the leadership of LBNE traveled last week to discuss these possibilities with our European colleagues.

DOE and NSF have asked a subpanel led by HEPAP Chair Andy Lankford to classify large high-energy physics facilities proposed to be built or upgraded over the next 10 years. When approved by HEPAP, the classification will be submitted to the Office of Science, which will prioritize large facilities across the various fields of science in its domain. The goal of the prioritization is to optimize the national benefit from federal investments in science. The target date for this prioritization is Sept. 30, 2013, and it will be based on: (1) the ability of the facility to contribute to world-leading science, (2) the readiness of the facility for construction and (3) an estimated construction and operations cost of the facility.

The classification by the Facilities Subpanel was presented to HEPAP with in-depth discussions that took several hours. Among projects that would be built on U.S. soil, LBNE, Mu2e and Project X were considered absolutely central facilities, ready to be built, with the first phase of LBNE considered an important step toward the realization of the full scope of LBNE. We will be working with the global high-energy physics community to bring enough resources to move the first phase of LBNE from an important step to an absolutely essential step. The nuSTORM muon ring and experiment were considered to have great potential but the subpanel concluded that the requirements are not yet fully defined and that we do not know enough yet to assess nuSTORM's role in U.S. world‐leading science. Among projects built off-shore and where Fermilab has major ongoing efforts, the high-luminosity LHC upgrades were considered absolutely central facilities, with R&D ongoing to resolve the remaining technical challenges.

So far it has been a very good outcome for the facilities based at Fermilab that serve our large user community.

Construction Update

MicroBooNE cryostat delivered to Fermilab

This team from PPD Detector Development and Operations Experimental Installations Department unloaded the cryostat and will prepare it for detector installation. From left: Bryan Johnson, Tom Olszanowski, Mark Shoun, John Voirin, John Cornele. Photo: Diana Brandonisio

On Friday, March 8, members of the MicroBooNE collaboration assembled near the Eola Road Gate to watch the arrival of the experiment's cryogenic vessel, which will hold 170 tons of liquid argon and the liquid-argon time projection chamber. Val Fab Inc., a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business in Neenah, Wisc., manufactured the vessel.

The vessel was delivered to the DZero building, where a PPD team unloaded it from the truck and placed it on temporary supports. This week they are removing the vessel end cap and will soon install the active detectors, the TPC and photomultiplier tubes. Once the TPC installation is complete, they will replace the vessel end cap and then transport the vessel to the Liquid-Argon Test Facility located on the Booster neutrino beamline. The collaboration hopes to have the vessel installed in LArTF by the end of the year.

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