Professional Development expands fall, winter courses

If you're planning to step into a new role or if you just want to upgrade your job skills or strategies, the Professional Development Office has you covered.

The Professional Development Office recently kicked off its fall and winter courses and this time offers more to learn than ever. Course areas for the remainder of 2010 and winter 2011 include leadership and management skills, computing skills and other professional and technical development topics. The offerings also include new management courses, such as adaptive leadership, a course that offers advice on how to approach different individuals with different coaching strategies. Adaptive leadership takes place on Nov. 30. The full course schedule is here.

Barbara Brooks, manager of the Professional Development Office, said that the office added new courses because employees expressed interest in the topics.  Also, the skills taught in the courses are needed at the laboratory.

In 2010, nearly 1,200 employees completed 104 internal classes through the Professional Development Office. Brooks hopes that even more employees enroll in the courses offered this year.

“Take advantage of the opportunity to maximize your current skills as a supervisor, project manager or individual contributor," Brooks said. "The Professional Development Office can help you expand your knowledge and skill base through its ongoing development programs."  If you or your work unit have specific training needs, please contact Barbara Brooks at bbrooks@fnal.gov.

QuarkNet reaches out overseas

QuarkNet's Tom Jordan works with physics instructor Christophe Hugou to install a cosmic-ray detector in the Collège Prévessin, a junior high school 50 meters from CERN's Prévessin site. Jordan, previously an employee in the Fermilab Education Office and now with the University of Florida, spent Monday and Tuesday at the junior high school working with the 20 physics workshop students to build, install and analyze data from the detector. QuarkNet has installed 550 cosmic-ray detectors in schools in 19 countries; the detector in the Collège Prévessin was the first to be installed in France. Through a partnership with a neighboring school, students near Lausanne, Switzerland, will also have the chance to work with the cosmic-ray detector.

Fermilab theorist sees dark matter evidence in public data

The Milky Way's galactic center. A new paper reports that very-high-energy gamma rays coming from the center of the Milky Way originate from dark matter collisions. Image courtesy of: NASA/CXC/UMass/D. Wang et al.

A Fermilab theorist and his colleague at NYU might have found clues to some of the universe’s juiciest secrets at the center of the Milky Way.

In their analysis of public data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, Dan Hooper, Fermilab scientist, and Lisa Goodenough, a graduate student at New York University, report that very-high-energy gamma rays coming from the center of the Milky Way originate from dark-matter collisions.

“We went out of our way to consider all causes of backgrounds that mimic the signal, and we found no other plausible astrophysics sources or mechanics that can produce a signal like this,” Hooper said.

A recent paper, published on the pre-print server arXiv, outlines their findings.

Astrophysicists have long postulated a wide range of dark matter particles, including axions, super heavy particles and particles that fall in between: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs.

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CALICE goes digital

This weekend, CALICE has opened a new chapter of calorimeter testing: Our first full physics prototype of a digital hadron calorimeter saw its first pions at Fermilab! So, what is this about?

As you know from many previous posts here, the CALICE collaboration develops calorimeter technologies for future experiments based on particle flow event reconstruction. On the hadron calorimeter side, so far we've been looking at a highly granular analog hadron calorimeter: Many small plastic scintillator tiles, each read out with a tiny silicon-based photon sensor, and all that sandwiched between layers of steel absorbers, 38 of them. The "analog" in the name means that each of these cells gives out a signal that is (approximately) proportional to the energy deposited in it by throughgoing particles. By summing up the energy of all cells that saw something, we get the energy of the particle that hit the calorimeter. Of course there are very sophisticated techniques how the "summing up" is done precisely, which results in better measurements. In total, this device has close to 8000 electronics channels, all packed into one cubic meter.

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