LBNE collaborators discuss project details in Deadwood

LBNE collaboration members at their meeting in South Dakota.

During the last week of May, residents of the small mining town of Deadwood in the Black Hills of South Dakota found themselves surrounded by scientists from the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE).

The scientists converged on the tiny 1,400-resident town of Deadwood for their collaboration meeting, which focused on beginning the process of choosing a configuration for the project.

Although Deadwood is famous for its gold rush in the late 1800s, LBNE scientists aren’t there looking for gold – they’re hunting for elusive neutrinos. The proposed LBNE experiment would use protons from Fermilab’s Main Injector to create a neutrino beam that would travel through the Earth to large neutrino detectors in the NSF’s proposed Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) in the nearby Homestake Mine.

LBNE received DOE’s CD-0 approval in early January, establishing the project’s mission need, and is now preparing for CD-1 review in December when the project will present its Conceptual Design Report (CDR). Depending on funding, construction could start in 2015 and start of operations in 2020.

"Over the next couple months, the collaboration will focus on putting together a science report to evaluate the scientific sensitivities and costs for all potential variants of the experiment - what type of beam and detectors to use and how deep underground the detectors should be," said LBNE co-spokesperson Robert Svoboda.

To produce the report, the collaboration established a physics working group for each major area of study. The collaboration's science report will provide input for the project's CDR.

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URA Thesis and Tollestrup prizewinners

Justin Evans of University College London receives the Tollestrup award from Alvin Tollestrup. Evans received the award for his contributions to measuring neutrino and antineutrino oscillation parameters with the MINOS experiment.

Fred Bernthal, URA president, gives the URA Thesis Award to Tingjun Yang. Yang's thesis was entitled "A study of Muon Neutrino to Electron Neutrino Oscillations in the MINOS Experiment."

Unexpected antineutrino masses a puzzler for Standard Model

From Ars Technica, June 14, 2010

Two weeks ago, experimental results seemed to indicate that we're getting a handle on the low-mass particles called neutrinos. Today, Fermilab announced results generated using antineutrinos that suggests we may need to make major revisions to the Standard Model of physics. The textbook description of antimatter is that it's like a mirror image of more familiar particles. But new work from Fermilab indicates that the mass differences among antineutrinos aren't the same as those for regular neutrinos. If the findings hold up, they would call for some new physics to explain the discrepancy.

Like the earlier results, the new data relies on observations of neutrino flavor changes. Neutrinos and antineutrinos, unlike other particles, appear not to have a fixed nature. They exist as a mixture of three identities—electron, muon, and tau—and a given particle oscillates among these identities in a probabilistic manner that depends in part on the mass differences among the three classes. So, if we can observe these oscillations, we can get some indication of the relative masses of these extremely light particles.

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Aspirin and dental floss: Homespun high-energy physics

From New Scientist, June 15, 2010

As the first physics results begin to emerge at the expensively engineered and hugely complex Large Hadron Collider, New Scientist looks at the everyday equipment that particle physicists couldn't live without - from aspirin to dental floss.

Aspirin tablets
Aspirin cures a different sort of headache for the engineers at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.

In Fermilab's particle accelerator, components called radio-frequency (RF) cavities generate an alternating electric field that pulls and then pushes bunches of charged particles as they pass through the accelerator. Leaks in the cooling system can drip water into the RF cavities, which could cause an electrical arc that would damage the accelerator hardware. But radiation stops technicians making repairs while the accelerator is running.

In the mid-1970s Fermilab engineers came up with an ingenious way of detecting leaks before they caused problems. They placed an aspirin tablet over a hole at the lowest point of the accelerator cavity, with part of an electrical switch holding it in place. When water dissolves the aspirin away, the switch is tripped and shuts off the high voltage in the RF cavity.

"It turned out that the aspirin tablets were the most reliable of methods tried," says John Reid of Fermilab.

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