|
Have a safe day!
Monday, July 29
PARTICLE ASTROPHYSICS SEMINARS WILL RESUME IN THE FALL
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
All Experimenters' Meeting - Curia II
Tuesday, July 30
Noon
Undergraduate Lecture Series - One West
Speaker: Mark Pankuch, Central DuPage Hospital
Title: Cancer Therapy
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY
Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.
Ongoing and upcoming conferences at Fermilab
|
|
Monday, July 29
- Breakfast: oatmeal raisin pancakes
- Breakfast: sausage, egg and cheese croissant
- Fermi burger
- Smart cuisine: country baked chicken
- Veal parmesan
- Classic club sandwich
- Buffalo chicken salad
- Chicken and sausage gumbo
- Texas-style chili
- Assorted pizza by the slice
Wilson Hall Cafe menu
|
|
Wednesday, July 31
Lunch
- Antipasto salad
- Amaretto cheesecake
Friday, Aug. 2
Dinner
Menu unavailable
Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
|
|
Batavia Road entrance closed July 30 - Aug. 1
The Batavia Road entrance to the laboratory will be closed tomorrow, July 30, at 6 a.m. to accommodate repairs to the Canadian National Railroad track crossing. It will reopen on Friday, Aug. 2, at 6:30 a.m. Vehicles entering or exiting the site should use the Pine Street entrance during this time.
If weather conditions delay construction work, the entrance closure may be extended through Friday, Aug. 2. In this case, the entrance will reopen on Saturday, Aug. 3, at 6:30 a.m.
|
From accelerator to art
 |
Fermilab physicist Todd Johnson spends his work and vacation hours with accelerators. What he produces during each are two very different things. Photos: Todd Johnson
|
Twice a year, Todd Johnson drives 400 miles from the Fermilab campus in Illinois to a commercial polymer crosslinking facility in Ohio, which is generally used to prepare plastic tubing for uses like heating systems in houses. Johnson is there for its linear accelerator, something with which he is quite familiar, given his day job working in Fermilab's Accelerator Division.
But on these two days a year, Johnson is not using the accelerator for science—although there is a lot of science involved. Johnson is making Lichtenberg figures, fractal patterns that result from the lightning-bolt-like movements of excited electrons. The hobby is a popular one among accelerator scientists, but Johnson says he and the friends he works with are working to explore the limits of the process.
"The end purpose is to do it as art," Johnson says. "But we also do a lot of experiments to push it further. It's a technical challenge involving physics and a little mad science, if you'll pardon the expression. And you have art when you're done."
Every six months, Johnson arrives at the facility with stencils laser-cut from steel or handmade from sheet lead; clear acrylic hunks of varying sizes; and a lot of ideas. He sends his pieces of acrylic through the accelerator's electron beam, which is designed to break chemical bonds in plastics. Because acrylic is an insulating material, the beam scatters through the material, losing momentum as it goes. Only areas of the acrylic not covered by a stencil are exposed to the beam, allowing Johnson to create shapes. Eventually the beam coalesces into a pool of electrons that desperately want to escape but can't—an invisible puddle of potential energy.
Releasing that energy is a simple but arresting process. To do it, Johnson uses a hand-made tool reminiscent of a crude, oversized syringe. It works like a click pen—press on one end and the tip comes out the other with enough force to puncture the acrylic. The instant the tool punctures the surface, there's a burst of white light as the pool of excited electrons escapes from the material, leaving trails of vaporized acrylic in its place.
Read more
—Laura Dattaro
|
Accelerator update, July 26, 2013
 |
Technicians slide the V108-3 magnet into place at NuMI. Photo: Marty Murphy, AD |
Main Injector:
Main Injector experts and vacuum and mechanical technicians continued to work on the MI vacuum system, recovering the MI10 vacuum and repairing three bad pumps in MI30.
NuMI:
Technicians at NuMI replaced a bad magnet. Electrical, instrumentation, water, alignment, rigging and vacuum personnel completed this difficult task safely and in record time.
View the AD Operations Department schedule.
|
After 6-week journey, giant magnet arrives at Fermilab
From Science, July 26, 2013
Physicists breathed a sigh of relief early this morning as a 15-meter-wide superconducting magnet rolled through the gates of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. It was the last step of a nail-biting 5000-kilometer journey that moved the delicate ring-shaped magnet from Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, to its new home on the prairie.
The ring is part of an experiment called Muon g-2, which hopes to precisely measure the magnetic moment of an elementary particle called the muon in hopes of detecting long-sought-after hints of new physics. An earlier experiment at Brookhaven produced a result that didn't agree with the standard model; now, the Fermilab team hopes to conclusively confirm or refute that result by repeating the experiment with an improved muon beam.
Read more |
|
Top off your fluid level to beat the heat
 |
| Stay hydrated to beat the heat and humidity. |
It's summer in Chicago, and that means heat and humidity, which can pose challenges for exercising.
If you are unaccustomed to exercising in these conditions, give yourself a chance to acclimate by building up your workout routine. It generally takes about two weeks for the body to fully adapt to warm weather.
The body typically cools itself by increasing surface blood flow or, on a windless day, relying on mainly evaporation. Add humidity, and our body's air conditioning system is severely taxed. Maintaining hydration can help. Electrolyte replacement is critical for ultra-endurance events, but for most, the normal diet allows the body to catch up on losses through perspiration.
With heavy exertion, an individual may lose up to 3 pounds of fluid per hour. During exercise, fluid replacement is required at the rate of 150-200 milliliters of fluid every 10 to 15 minutes. For most activities plain water suffices. For those whose exercise interrupts meals, sports drinks supply calories while hydrating. Sports drinks containing 4 to 8 percent glucose sugar are most readily absorbed. Higher glucose concentrations tend to reduce stomach emptying time, possibly leading to cramping. Excessive fructose sugar levels can produce diarrhea.
What you do prior to exertion in the heat also has a big impact on your heat tolerance. Alcohol can increase urine output, dehydrating you. It also can influence blood flow to the skin's surface, alter the body's temperature set point, and potentially augment heat stress further by diminished salt and water retention. Try avoiding alcohol for 24 hours prior to competition or exercise. If you do decide to imbibe alcohol post-exercise, rehydrate first and take the alcohol with a meal.
We're stuck with what weather we're dealt. How we weather the weather is largely left up to us.
—Brian Svazas, M.D., M.P.H.
|
The Muon g-2 magnet ring's land journey to Fermilab
 |
Last week, the Muon g-2 magnet ring made its way from Lemont, Ill., to Fermilab, culminating in a celebration on Friday evening. View photos of the ring's week-long journey to its new home at the laboratory. Above: Fermilab employees, users, their families and neighbors await the arrival of the Muon g-2 magnet ring as it approaches Wilson Hall. Photo: Cindy Arnold
|
|
New employees - July
The following regular employees started at Fermilab in July:
Minerba Bentancourt, PPD; James Hohbein, BSS; Chad Klopfenstein, CCD; Steven Nahn, PPD; Sriram Sankaranarayanan, CCD; Lita Scott, CS; Saba Sehrish, SCD; Don Watson, CCD.
Fermilab welcomes them to the laboratory.
|
Giant magnet resembling flying saucer attracts rock-star status on 3,200-mile trip to Illinois
From The Washington Post, July 26, 2013
GLEN ELLYN, Ill. — It skipped tolls. It had a Twitter hashtag and a GPS tracker. It even posed for photos with groupies.
The 50-foot-wide, 15-ton electromagnet attracted a sensation wherever it went during its slow, delicate 3,200-mile journey from New York to suburban Chicago. The land-and-sea trip culminated when scientists threw a rock star's welcome for the mysterious, shrink-wrapped cargo on Friday as arrived at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory to help study blazing-fast particles.
Read more |
|
Mostly sunny
Tip of the Week: Health
