Monday, Feb. 17, 2014
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Monday, Feb. 17

2:30 p.m.
Particle Astrophysics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Cullen Blake, University of Pennsylvania
Title: Detecting Small Planets Orbiting Small Stars

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

4 p.m.
All Experimenters' Meeting

Tuesday, Feb. 18

10 a.m.
Research Techniques Seminar (NOTE TIME) - Curia II
Speaker: Jong Hee Yoo, Fermilab
Title: R&D for Solid Xenon Particle Detector

11 a.m.
Academic Lecture Series - One West
Speaker: Carter Hall, University of Maryland
Title: Searches for Double Beta Decay

3 p.m.
LHC Physics Center Topic of the Week Seminar (NOTE DATE) - WH11NE
Speaker: Frank Petriello, Northwestern University
Title: Opportunities in Higgs Physics at the LHC Run II

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

4 p.m.
Accelerator Physics and Technology Seminar (NOTE LOCATION) - Curia II
Speaker: Trevor Butler and Fernanda Garcia, Fermilab
Title: Upgrade Plans for Linac 201.25 MHz RF Power Plant within PIP

4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium (NOTE DATE) - One West
Speaker: Lucio Rossi, CERN
Title: The High Luminosity LHC Project and Beyond

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Secon Level 3

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Monday, Feb. 17

- Breakfast: pancake sandwich
- Breakfast: sausage, egg and cheese croissant
- Philly chicken sandwich
- Smart cuisine: herbed pot roast
- Spaghetti and meatballs
- Spicy buffalo chicken wrap
- Baked potato bar
- Minestrone
- Texas-style chili
- Assorted pizza by the slice

Wilson Hall Cafe menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, Feb. 19
Lunch
- Cheese fondue
- Marinated vegetables
- Gingered pear crisp

Friday, Feb. 21
Dinner
- Roasted cherry tomato salad
- Pecan-crusted halibut with dijon cream sauce
- Wilted spinach
- Potato and onion gratin
- Lacy fruit cup with saboyan sauce

Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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Photo of the Day

Happy Presidents' Day

Happy Presidents' Day. In honor of the holiday, Julie Kurnat, TD, drew likenesses of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln on the Trailer 157 chalkboard. Image: Julie Kurnat, TD
In the News

UK backs huge US neutrino plan

From BBC News, Feb. 14, 2014

US researchers have given details of a plan for one of the biggest physics experiments ever built.

Scientists at Fermilab, just outside Chicago, want to fire a beam of particles called neutrinos through 1,300km (800 miles) of rock some 30km below the surface.

The experiment's aim is to learn more about how the Universe was created.

BBC News has learned that the UK has now agreed to be part of the $1.5bn (£1bn) project.

Those involved describe it as the most important experiment since the search for the Higgs boson.

"It is the next big thing in particle physics," said Prof Stefan Soldner-Rembold of the University of Manchester, who is working at Fermilab.

"It is as big as the search for the Higgs and will revolutionise our understanding of physics."

British component
The director of Fermilab, Nigel Lockyer, told BBC News that the plan to build the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) was well under way and he was seeking international partners.

"We think that the experiment will cost $1.5bn to build and the US has committed to putting $1bn on the table. So it is a kind of 2/3rds to a 1/3rd arrangement, and so you shop around and see who wants to contribute what."

The UK, through its Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), could contribute up to £20m to the project.

BBC News understands that nine British universities would be involved. These include Manchester, Cambridge, Oxford and University College London.

The head of STFC, John Womersley, described the development as a "win-win situation".

"The UK has shown its interest in the Fermilab initiative. What I hope is that other European participants will get involved. If it can go ahead, it will be an important step for the US and an important step for Europe for a global physics programme."

The UK's role would be to help to build a giant neutrino detector. The detector is likely to be about 12m (39ft) across.

Read more

From symmetry

Quarks in the looking glass

A recent experiment at Jefferson Lab probed the mirror symmetry of quarks, determining that one of their intrinsic properties is non-zero — as predicted by the Standard Model. Photo courtesy of Jefferson Lab

From matching wings on butterflies to the repeating six-point pattern of snowflakes, symmetries echo through nature, even down to the smallest building blocks of matter. Since the discovery of quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, physicists have been exploiting those symmetries to study quarks' intrinsic properties and to uncover what those properties can reveal about the physical laws that govern them.

A recent experiment carried out at Jefferson Lab has provided a new determination of an intrinsic property of quarks that's five times more precise than the previous measurement.

The result has also set new limits, in a way complementary to high-energy colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, for the energies that researchers would need to access physics beyond the Standard Model. The Standard Model is a well-tested theory that, excluding gravity, describes the subatomic particles and their interactions, and physicists believe that peering beyond the Standard Model may help resolve many unanswered questions about the origins and underlying framework of our universe. The result was published in the February 6 edition of Nature.

The experiment probed properties of the mirror symmetry of quarks. In mirror symmetry, the characteristics of an object remain the same even if that object is flipped as though it were reflected in a mirror.

The mirror symmetry of quarks can be probed by gauging their interactions with other particles through fundamental forces. Three of the four forces that mediate the interactions of quarks with other particles — gravity, electromagnetism and the strong force — are mirror-symmetric. However, the weak force — the fourth force — is not. That means that the intrinsic characteristics of quarks that determine how they interact through the weak force (called the weak couplings) are different from, for example, the electric charge for the electromagnetic force, the color charge for the strong force, and the mass for gravity.

In Jefferson Lab's Experimental Hall A, experimenters measured the breaking of the mirror symmetry of quarks through the process of deep-inelastic scattering. A 6.067 billion-electronvolt beam of electrons was sent into deuterium nuclei, the nuclei of an isotope of hydrogen that contain one neutron and one proton each (and thus an equal number of up and down quarks).

Read more

Kandice Carter

Tip of the Week: Cybersecurity

One-two punch: two-factor authentication helps prevent cyberattacks

Fermilab is moving to widespread use of two-factor authentication, which will help strengthen our defenses against hackers.

"Greetings. This is to inform you that your credit card information from our point-of-sale system has been accessed by unauthorized individuals."

Many of you may have received communications similar to this recently, as two major national retail chains have revealed that their systems containing customer personal information, specifically, credit card data, had been compromised. While Fermilab does not process any credit card data (all purchases from lab organizations utilize third-party processors), we do handle other sensitive information that we need to protect.

There are several different ways hackers can access sensitive data. Unpatched operating system vulnerabilities can enable outsiders to access these systems. Application software vulnerabilities can be exploited. Careless users may inadvertently download malicious code while browsing the Web or by clicking harmful links in email. But by far the simplest method of compromising is a system using an illicitly obtained identification credential, such as a password, of someone who already has access.

Fermilab takes care to protect passwords to limit this danger. We enforce strict segregation of duties so passwords in normal use are not valid for accessing sensitive systems; we check passwords at time of creation to make sure they meet security standards; we search lab offices for written passwords; and we provide mechanisms so that passwords used for logging in remotely are encrypted. For our most sensitive systems, we put further protection into practice: two-factor authentication.

There are three different "factors" you can use to identify yourself: something you know (typically a password); something you have (usually some hardware token or smart card you carry); and something you are (fingerprints or retinal scans). Two-factor authentication uses two of these elements to identify yourself before you're allowed to access sensitive computing systems. Most often, this authentication method uses a password in combination with a challenge code from your token or smart card.

Fermilab now operates a two-factor authentication service using tokens from a vendor called RSA, which will be distributed to those who need to access sensitive applications. They are already in use for access to our domain controllers, which affect access to all Windows systems at the lab. Soon, they will also be used for access to network control systems, for certain business applications and for certain types of remote access to sensitive systems. You will soon see more widespread use of these tokens at the lab as their use is extended to more systems.

Irwin Gaines

In the News

Fun science with Fermilab's Mr. Freeze

From NBC Chicago, Feb. 15, 2014

Fermilab's Jerry Zimmerman shows us some experiments that make science fun and talks about American Association for Advancement of Science Family Science Day.

View the video

In the News

Mega-doughnuts: CERN to study plan for 100-kilometer atom-smashers

From Science, Feb. 6, 2014

If you thought atom-smashers couldn't get any bigger, think again. European particle physicists will draw up plans for a pair of circular particle colliders, to be built one after the other, that would measure 80 to 100 kilometers in circumference and smash particles at unprecedented energies, officials at the European particle physics laboratory CERN announced today. The goal is to come up with the first "conceptual designs" in 5 years, in time to inform the next revision of the European particle physics strategy, which was formulated in 2006 and revised last May.

The plan would offer an alternative to the current widely held vision for the global future of particle physics, in which the next great collider would be an arrow-straight linear collider, not a circular one. "We have to make a choice at some point," says Patrick Janot, a physicist at CERN, located near Geneva, Switzerland. "Either we have to go linear or we have to go circular."

Read more

Announcements

Today's New Announcements

Direct from Ireland: Alan Kelly Gang - Fermilab Arts Series - March 1

Rembrandt Chamber Players - Gallery Chamber Series - March 9

Garden Club spring meeting - Feb. 20

URA Visiting Scholars Program deadline - Feb. 24

Interaction Management course - March 5, 12 and 19

Performance Review course: March 26 or 27

Summer 2014 on-site housing requests now accepted

Fermi Singers invites new members

Society of Philosophy Club

Martial arts

International folk dancing meets Thursday evenings at Kuhn Barn

Scottish country dancing meets Tuesday evenings at Kuhn Barn

Indoor soccer