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Have a safe day!
Tuesday, May 10
2 p.m.
LHC Physics Center Topic of the Week Seminar - Sunrise (WH11SE)
Speaker: Marina Artuso, Syracuse University
Title: The LHCb Upgrade
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY
Wednesday, May 11
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - One West
Speaker: Jonathan Almer, Argonne National Laboratory
Title: High-Energy X-Ray Studies of Real Materials Under Real Conditions and in Real Time
Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.
Upcoming conferences
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Tuesday, May 10
- Breakfast: Bagel sandwich
- Tomato bisque soup
- Lemon pepper club
- Beef fajitas
- *Korean garlic chicken
- Grilled chicken caesar salad wrap
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Rio Grande taco salad
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu
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Wednesday, May 11
Lunch
- Lemon sole
- Green beans
- Fresh fruit plate
Friday, May 13
Booked
Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
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Tevatron smashes old luminosity records
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| During the last seven-day period, May 2-May 9, the Tevatron set several luminosity records and produced four of the top ten initial luminosity stores ever achieved. Those four stores are shown above (ribbons). The laboratory also broke the record for average integrated luminosity achieved during a single week. |
Between Monday, May 2, and Monday, May 9, Fermilab achieved several luminosity records.
Four of the top ten initial luminosity stores were achieved last week, including store 8709, which set a record of 4.31 x 1032 cm-2s-1, or 431 µb-1/s, on May 3. The unit of measurement µb-1/s is roughly equivalent to 70,000 proton-antiproton collisions per second.
During the same week, the Accelerator Division also reached a new average integrated luminosity record for a single calendar week of 76.5 inverse picobarns. The achievement replaces the previous record of 73.1 inverse picobarns, which was set during the week of April 13-20, 2009.
Fermilab also exceeded the 168-hour floating-week integrated luminosity record of more than 81 inverse picobarns.
There are two ways to express the likelihood of collisions, or luminosity, during any particular store: peak luminosity, which describes the initial (and highest) luminosity in a store, and integrated luminosity, which describes how many total collisions are produced over the lifetime of that store.
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DOE 2011 strategic plan release at noon today
At noon CST today, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu will present the 2011 Department of Energy Strategic Plan via webcast. The plan will serve as a blueprint for DOE to help address the nation’s energy, environmental and nuclear challenges through transformative science and technology solutions. View the plan here: DOE Strategic Plan. Watch the webcast (password protection will be removed before the webcast begins).
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Beware: Pop-up ads could be phishing scams
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| A pop-up ad, such as the one pictured above tricked individuals at Fermilab into clicking on the link provided. Fermilab’s antivirus software would never ask you to remove, download or install items. |
During the last week, a dozen people fell prey to virus software that was delivered by pop-up boxes when the individuals were surfing the web. When they visited the website, a new window (pop-up) appeared, stating that the computer's anti-virus software detected dangerous spyware and prompting the user to click on a button to remove the spyware. If you are greeted with pop-up anti-virus alerts, please do not click any buttons or download the executable applications provided. If you do encounter a popup anti-virus alert, close all of your browser windows.
Scams such as these are getting increasingly sophisticated, tricking users into clicking on links, downloading and installing items. Fermilab’s anti-virus system will never ask you to remove, download, or install anything. Fermilab’s Service Desk wants to remind you to be vigilant in scrutinizing the sites you visit and the links you click on. If you encounter an email or computer security situation that you are not sure how to handle, please call at x2345 to receive assistance.
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Mother duck with ducklings
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| A mother duck with her young walks through the gardens near the Neutron Therapy facility. Credit: Christine Andorf, AD/NTF |
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Particle physics can help fight cancer
From Discovery News, May 9, 2011
Particle physics can be a tough sell to those who think all science should have some life-enhancing benefit or real-world application, or else it's a waste of money. Those big accelerators don't come cheap, and our culture increasingly doesn't value curiosity-driven research. Inevitably someone who doesn't know any better will remark that it's a waste of time and resources when scientists could be off, say, curing cancer.
The irony is that past high energy machines that have outlived their usefulness to cutting-edge physics continue to give back to society in surprising and unexpected ways. Synchrotron radiation (used in archaeology, biology, and to monitor metal fatigue in bridges, among other areas) is one example; proton therapy is another. Yep, that's right: proton beam facilities once used for physics research are now helping treat (if not cure) cancer.
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CAS 101
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Fermilab Director Pier Oddone
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This is another important acronym to learn: CAS, which stands for Contractor Assurance System. The basic principle of CAS is that if Fermi Research Alliance, the contractor for Fermilab, establishes a system to assure ourselves that we are meeting the requirements and goals of our contract with the Department of Energy, then the role of oversight by DOE and the demands placed on us by that oversight can change significantly for the better.
The skeptic among you might question how adding a new system, in this case the CAS, could actually improve both our performance and the interactions with our sponsors. The skeptics would believe that the only way to improve our effectiveness today would be by subtracting requirements and systems not by adding them. To understand how CAS will in fact help us in the future you have to understand how we and the DOE currently make sure that we meet the terms of our contract and achieve the goals we have agreed upon.
We clearly need to perform according to a contract we have signed with the DOE, meeting all the many contract clauses. After all, a contract is a contract! In addition to meeting the contract terms we are judged yearly following an agreed-upon Performance Management Plan or PEMP. Beyond these two formal requirements, we strive to use best practices in all or our work. When you add up all of these requirements, we have to keep track of hundreds of items in the many functional areas of the laboratory. We do this with a lot of expert knowledge throughout the organization but without a comprehensive system description for the totality of these activities. Not having a comprehensive system description invites a host of problems for us: potential gaps in our understanding of operational risks; duplicative reviews by both us and the DOE in some areas and superficial or absent reviews in other areas; and a general lack of transparency for those trying to judge how we achieve our results. The absence of a comprehensive system description makes it impossible for the DOE to understand how we actually assure ourselves that we meet both the contract and the yearly performance goals, leading DOE to perform their own assurance audits that often duplicate what we already do. To the DOE we appear to be mostly fully transparent but occasionally like a black box.
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Nobel laureate says science investment critical to nation's economy, future
From Daily Reporter, May 9, 2011
LEAD, S.D. — The United States is falling behind in science and technology, officials say, and the slip could threaten the country's global economic primacy — unless the nation steps up investment in basic science research and in projects like the proposed national underground lab in Lead, S.D.
"Science and engineering are the drivers of a modern economy," said Dr. Jerome Friedman, a retired Nobel-laureate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "We will not be competitive in terms of our economy unless we are a leader in science."
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Mostly sunny
