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	Thursday, May 26, 2011

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Have a safe day!

Thursday, May 26
2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Kathryn Zurek, University of Michigan
Title: A Theory for Maximal Flavor Violation
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY

Friday, May 27
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: David Lopes-Pegna, Princeton University
Title: B Physics Results from CMS

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a weekly calendar with links to additional information.

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Weather

Showers likely 52°/40°

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Current Security Status

Secon Level 3

Wilson Hall Cafe

Thursday, May 26

- Breakfast: Apple sticks
- Tomato Florentine
- BBQ pork sandwich
- * Kielbasa & sauerkraut
- Chicken marsala
- Smoked turkey melt
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Southwest chicken salad w/roasted corn salsa

*Heart healthy choice

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Friday, May 27
Closed

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

TIPP 2011 to discuss new tech breaking physics barriers

The next installment of a new cross-disciplinary conference dedicated to addressing the technological needs of future physics experiments will take place June 9-14.

Technology and Instrumentation in Particle Physics 2011 (TIPP 2011) is the second in a new series of international conferences on detectors and instrumentation. Registration for the conference, which is sponsored in part by Fermilab, Argonne National Laboratory and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, remains open until May 31. Anyone wanting to attend the conference must register.

“This isn’t your typical science conference,” said Fermilab scientist and conference co-organizer Ted Liu. “This conference is not for polished beauty contest type talks. We’d like to hear about current experiment limitations and explore innovative solutions in instrumentation that will break these barriers to further our scientific exploration.”

The conference will provide a venue for scientists and engineers from scientific and industrial communities around the world to discuss detector development and instrumentation for particle physics, astrophysics and closely related fields. The conference will also offer opportunities for young scientists to engage in shaping the future of these fields.

“I really believe that the conference topics will become more and more important,” said Argonne scientist and conference co-organizer Marcel Demarteau. “We need new technologies to probe the physics questions of the coming decade and we hope the conference will stimulate the participants to challenge the barriers of current technologies.”

The conference program will feature a keynote speech at 9 a.m. on Thursday, June 9, by Bill Brinkman, the director of DOE’s Office of Science, titled “Innovation: How it happens” and a talk titled “Extremes of Electronics” by Kerry Bernstein, a research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Former Congressman Bill Foster will also give a talk on June 14.

A free public lecture by LHC Project Leader Lyn Evans titled “Marvel of Technology: the LHC, machine and experiments,” will take place from 3 – 4:30 p.m. on Sunday June 12.

All conference events will take place at the Sheraton Hotel & Towers in Chicago. For the full program or to register visit the conference website.

— Rhianna Wisniewski

Feature

Ryan Patterson receives prestigious DOE award

Ryan Patterson

The NOvA project will employ new detector technology to study neutrinos, and Ryan Patterson wants to get the most out of that technology as possible.

Patterson, assistant professor of physics at Caltech and NOvA collaborator, is a recipient of the DOE Early Career Research Award for his research proposal titled, “Developing novel techniques for readout, calibration and event selection in the NOvA long‐baseline neutrino experiment.” The financial award will provide five years of funding for Patterson to carry out this work.

View the rest of the Fermilab-affiliated recipients of the DOE Early Career Research Award here.

— Christine Herman

Correction

Correction: Pixel detector initially built for CMS

In the Wednesday, May 25 issue of Fermilab Today, an article about the success of getting pixel detector technology to work as part of a bent crystal collimation project incorrectly stated that the pixel detector technology was built by engineers for BTeV. While pixel detectors were designed for BTeV, the pixel detectors used in the Tevatron Experiment T-980 were repurposed pixel detectors initially built for the CMS Forward Pixel detector.

You can read the corrected article here.

Photo of the Day

Flowery signs of spring

TD's Alexey Naumov spotted this flowering tree on the left side of the road while driving from the east Fermilab site entrance. Credit: Alexey Naumov.

In the News

National Science Foundation press release, May 20, 2011:

Just four percent of galaxies have neighbors like the Milky Way

How unique is the Milky Way?

To find out, a group of researchers led by Stanford University astrophysicist Risa Wechsler compared the Milky Way to similar galaxies and found that just four percent are like the galaxy Earth calls home.

"We are interested in how the Milky Way fits into the broader context of the universe", said Wechsler. "This research helps us understand whether our galaxy is typical or not, and may provide clues to its formation history."

The research team compared the Milky Way to similar galaxies in terms of luminosity--a measure of how much light is emitted--and distance to other bright galaxies. They found galaxies that have two satellites that are as bright and close by as the Milky Way's two closest satellites, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, are rare.

In the News

Ars photo essay: standing in the beam line of a neutrino detector

Although I was lucky enough to tour Brookhaven's RHIC accelerator during a period of scheduled downtime, my trips to the LHC and Fermilab both took place while the particle accelerators were in operation. Given the tremendous energies involved, it meant that it was simply not safe to go anywhere near the active hardware, since that's a sure way to pick up a healthy dose of ionizing radiation. But Fermilab had an exception to that, a place where it wasn't just acceptable to look at working hardware, but it was actually possible to walk right through a particle beamline. The secret? The particles were neutrinos.

Neutrinos are uncharged particles and are so light that, for decades, most physicists assumed they were actually massless. As if that weren't enough, they only interact with other matter via the weak force, which is only significant at short distances.

Result of the Week

Gluon spin

The points are the measured angular coefficients, A0 and A2, as a function of Z boson transverse momentum. The black curve is the Standard Model prediction which is approximately 70 percent quark-anti-quark (q-qbar in green) and 30 percent quark-gluon (q-G in brown).

Z bosons are produced at the Tevatron through collisions of the particles (quarks and gluons) inside the proton and antiproton beams. Once Z bosons are produced they decay into lepton–anti-lepton pairs (e.g. electron-positron or muon–anti-muon). These leptons are correlated because they are produced from the same Z boson. There is also a connection between the lepton and the Z boson polarization, the particle's internal spin. Scientists can infer information about the particle’s polarization by looking at the properties of the lepton.

When CDF detects the decay products of the Z boson, experimenters use the location of the particles in the detector to learn more about the mechanisms by which they are produced.

The Standard Model provides a mathematical framework that allows scientists to make extremely precise predictions of how Z bosons decay and how the decaying leptons and the Z boson polarization are related. The shape of this distribution depends on the particles involved in the collision. Quark–anti-quark collisions have a differently shaped distribution than a quark-gluon collision. By looking at the shape of the collision and comparing it to the shapes that we expect to see, experimenters can test the Standard Model to very fine precision.

For this analysis, CDF physicists have measured the angle of electrons departing from a collision using a sample of 140,000 Z bosons. The physicists then converted the result into angular coefficients, numbers that one can relate directly to the Standard Model calculations. The most significant coefficients, labeled A0 and A2 in the figure above, are equal. This consistency is called the Lam-Tung relation. It implies that the gluon has an intrinsic angular momentum spin of one. The analysis of the measured distribution and the number predicted by the Standard Model agree, which means that the Standard Model calculations accurately predict the observed fraction of quark–anti-quark vs. quark-gluon scatterings. The Standard Model holds up to this stringent test. The results will soon be published in Physical Review Letters.

Learn more

— Edited by Andrew Beretvas

These physicists are responsible for this analysis. First row from left: Jiyeon Han, Willis Sakumoto and Arie Bodek. Second row from left: Yeon Sei Chung, Howard Budd and Kevin McFarland, all from the U. of Rochester.

In Brief

Civil union partner benefit coverage

On June 1, the Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act will take effect, allowing same gender and heterosexual couples to enter into civil unions.

Under this new law, Fermilab employees will be able to add coverage for their civil union partners through the laboratory’s medical and dental plans.

Although the Illinois legislation provides certain benefits and protections, it will not have an impact on the federal tax rules. When coverage is added for a civil union partner and the partner does not meet the federal tax definition of a dependent the value of the coverage will be taxed. Healthcare expenses for civil union partners will not be eligible for reimbursement under the Flexible Spending Account as this feature provides reimbursement for expenses in accordance with IRS regulations.

Under Fermilab’s current benefit plans, entering into a civil union partnership is considered a status change. Status changes provide an opportunity to review and change your benefit elections and beneficiary designations. You may review the plan rules for status changes on the Benefits Web site.

Civil union partners can also be covered under Fermilab’s life insurance coverage. You can obtain information on life insurance coverage from the Benefits Office.

Enrollment materials, imputed income cost sheets and additional information on how the Illinois legislation affects your benefits can be found on the Benefits Web site.

— Mary Todd, Benefits Office

Accelerator Update

May 23-25

- Four stores provided ~23.5 hours of luminosity
- Tevatron personnel conducted crystal collimator studies
- Recycler's electron cooling communications restored

Read the Current Accelerator Update
Read the Early Bird Report
View the Tevatron Luminosity Charts

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