E-mail, Internet server outage explanation

At approximately 12:27 p.m. Tuesday, the emergency circuit that shuts off power to the computing rooms on Feynman Computing Center's first and second floors tripped, causing a sudden power outage.

The circuit that failed triggered an emergency system required by the National Fire Protection Agency code. This system also shut off the backup power. The emergency circuit that tripped is designed to shut off all power to the facility in case of a fire or other emergencies.

Since the machines were not able to go through the correct shutdown procedures, they did not recover smoothly. The laboratory's e-mail and Internet servers are controlled by computers in the building and were affected, causing widespread Internet and e-mail outages.

Two systems in particular were affected for the entire afternoon: the Exchange e-mail server and imapserver3.

The computers that control these systems have now recovered, and all servers are back online. No one should experience any loss of e-mail.

US CMS contest predicts first high-energy collisions at CMS

A plot shows the distribution of predictions of when the first high-energy collisions will take place at CMS.

When Jim Freeman needed to set the LHC Physics Center's countdown clock to predict the exact date and time for CMS to get its first high-energy collisions, he turned to a tried and true scientific method: create a contest.

He sent a call out to US CMS collaboration members and asked for their estimates as to when CMS will get its first 3.5 -on 3.5-TeV collisions. He requested specific dates and times using the time in Geneva, Switzerland. The results are in.

Around 55 collaboration members submitted guesses, yielding a noticeable peak on April 1. "Other than that, it's a pretty 'physics' looking distribution," Freeman said.

Will April Fool's Day throw everyone for a loop this year? Stay tuned..

-- Elizabeth Clements

Jim Freeman stands in front of the LPC's countdown clock.

URA Visiting Scholars applications due Feb. 19

Applications for the spring 2010 cycle of awards in the Universities Research Association, Inc. (URA) Visiting Scholars Program at Fermilab are due Feb. 19. Successful applicants will be notified at the end of March. These awards provide financial support for faculty and students from URA's 87 member universities to work at Fermilab for periods of up to one year.

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Scientists explore the future of high-energy physics

From The University of Chicago,
Feb. 8, 2010

Fermilab scientist Lance Cooley, works with niobium to create the next generation of high-energy physics experiments.

In a 1954 speech to the American Physical Society, the University of Chicago's Enrico Fermi fancifully envisioned a particle accelerator that encircled the globe. Such would be the ultimate theoretical outcome, Fermi surmised, of the quest for the ever-more powerful accelerators needed to discover new laws of physics.

"How much energy you can put into a particle per meter corresponds directly to how big the machine is," says Steven Sibener, the Carl William Eisendrath Professor in Chemistry and the James Franck Institute at UChicago. This means that future accelerators must either grow to inconceivable sizes, at great costs, or they must somehow pump far more energy into each particle per meter of acceleration than modern technology will allow.

Sibener and Lance Cooley, AB'86, of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, are working on the latter option with $1.5 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. They aim to improve the efficiency of superconducting radio frequency (SRF) cavities made of niobium to accelerate beams of subatomic particles in the next generation of high-energy physics experiments.

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