Steering Group develops roadmap drafts for Fermilab

Fermilab Deupty Director Young-Kee Kim spoke about Fermilab's current experiments and the lab's roadmap to the future at the 2007 annual Users' meeting Wednesday.

The successes of the past year and planning for the future were the focus of Deputy Director Young-Kee Kim’s talk yesterday at the 2007 Users’ meeting. “It has been an extraordinary year. We expect much more in the near future,” she said, summarizing the wealth of results that Fermilab users published in the areas of collider physics, neutrino physics and particle astrophysics in the past year.

Her main focus, however, was the future of the lab. Since the ILC is likely to move much more slowly along than its technically-limited schedule, it is important to develop a roadmap for the U.S. accelerator-based physics program at Fermilab that provides opportunity for discovery over a possibly extended period. Constructing such a roadmap is no small task as the roadmap must allow for the construction of the ILC as early as possible. In March, Director Oddone appointed Kim as the chair of the Fermilab Steering Group,whose members are developing drafts of such a roadmap. The Steering Group will submit its report to the director by August 1.

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-- Kurt Riesselmann

Yann Coadou to receive 2007 Tollestrup award today

Yann Coadou, now a CERN Fellow, is the recipient of the 2007 Tollestrup award for his work with DZero.

Yann Coadou will receive the prestigious 2007 Tollestrup award for his contributions to the DZero experiment. Coadou, formerly of Simon Fraser University and now a CERN Fellow, spent two and a half of his postdoctoral years working for Fermilab on single top quark analysis.

"Out of the many nominations for post-doc work, Yann's stood out as being driven in a creative sense by Yann and executed by Yann," said John Conway, chair of the 2007 Tollestrup Award Committee. "All high-energy physics requires a lot of people, but Yann was really dedicated to the single purpose of finding evidence of finding a single top quark."

Coadou, who was based for most of his post-doc years at a satellite location in Vancouver, said that the award signifies wide recognition of all of the hard work he and others put into making sure that the DZero data analysis was complete.

"If I think of myself as a good physicist I know that others think the same way," he said.

Coadou is also highly regarded for his contribution of the boosted decision tree technique, which essentially makes single top quark events easier to see.

The award will be presented by Alvin Tollestrup at 2:30 p.m. Thursday during the Users meeting.

-- Rhianna Wisniewski

Working the Camera: Real-Time Grid-Powered Surveillance

Two people happen to meet in a hallway. They begin to chat, and end up in deep discussion.

Suddenly, on the wall beside them, projected images appear. Video clips. Sounds. Information directly relevant to their discussion. And all made automatically available, where and when they need it most.

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From nature.com
June 5, 2007

Large Hadron Collider delayed

Scientists happy with extra time to tweak their instruments.

The particle-smashing project designed to look for the mysterious particle that gives objects mass will not be seeing any live action this year.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), based at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, was due to do a trial run in November this year, before switching on the scientific search for the Higgs boson in 2008. The test run would have seen a proton beam passing through the accelerator without actually being accelerated. But a number of setbacks - not least the spectacular failure earlier this year of some of the LHC's critical magnets - have led to a reassessment of the schedule, and the cancellation of the test run.

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