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Have a safe day!
Tuesday, Oct. 11
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY
Wednesday, Oct. 12
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE IS NO FERMILAB COLLOQUIUM THIS WEEK
Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.
Upcoming conferences
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Tuesday, Oct. 11
- Breakfast: Bagel sandwich
- Creamy turkey vegetable soup
- Chili dog
- Country-fried steak
- Chicken cacciatore
- Italian panini w/ provolone
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Southwestern chicken burrito
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu
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Wednesday, Oct. 12
Lunch
- Roast pork w/ apples, cabbage & turnips
- Pumpkin pie w/ spiced cream
Friday, Oct. 14
Dinner
Closed
Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
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Email, network and power outage – Saturday, Oct. 15
On Saturday, Oct. 15, the Computing Sector Facilities Management team and the Facilities Engineering Services Section will conduct a scheduled power outage necessary to complete the final steps of the Feynman Computing Center Cooling (FCC) upgrades. The outage will impact all computing and network services.
This outage will begin at approximately 3 a.m., and it will last most of the day. All systems dependent upon FCC facilities will be affected. Email services will be unavailable for the duration of the outage, as will the wireless network. Wired network and Internet access will be available in Wilson Hall. The network is scheduled to be back to full operation around 2:30 p.m., and other services should be back by approximately 5 p.m.
Facilities Management expects this outage to last no more than eight hours. You can get updates by:
- following the Service Desk Twitter feed on your smart phone, @FNALServiceDesk,
- visiting the Service Desk on the ground floor of Wilson Hall,
- or calling the Service Desk at 630-840-2345.
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Gerry Bellendir retired - Oct. 7
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 Gerry Bellinder
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Few people could imagine the digital age of today back in 1974, when Gerald Bellendir worked with paper tapes and a teletype machine in an office that was nothing more than a converted bedroom of a house on the village grounds. Bellendir retired on Oct. 7.
Working with the accelerator design theory group, Bellendir was the first programmer ever hired. Since then, he has been instrumental in keeping Fermilab at the forefront of managing some of the world’s most complex scientific data. From the earliest versions of Fortran to the rise and fall of mainframe computing, Bellendir was able to keep up with the laboratory’s ever-changing computing needs.
“It’s kind of my legacy,” said Bellendir, who was actively involved in moving the computing division out of the Wilson Hall and into the Feynman Computing Center back in the 1980s.
By 1994, he was heading the systems programming group and was witness to the official end of the mainframe era and the need to revamp the Feynman space to accommodate the changing computing technologies that came in the next decade.
Read more
—Rita Hoover
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Fermilab scientists testing faster-than-light neutrino claims
From Voice of America, Oct. 8, 2011
Scientists at the CERN physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, claimed recently to have clocked a subatomic particle, known as a neutrino, traveling faster than the speed of light. If true, the event would violate a central tenet of physics and undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity. But ascientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago, Illinois, also known as Fermilab, are not convinced.
Einstein’s special theory of relativity is basic physics to scientist Patrick Fox. “I have been studying that for years. It is something you use day-to-day," he said. “And it basically boils down to the statement that physics should be independent of how fast you are moving.”
Read more
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Particle physics? There's an app for that!
From the University of Oxford's newsroom, Oct. 8, 2011
Ever wondered what collisions at the Large Hadron Collider look like?
Scientists at the world's biggest scientific experiment - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva - are trying to answer fundamental questions about the nature of the Universe, the origin of mass, the structure of space and time, and the conditions of the early universe. For those of us not lucky enough to have the world's highest energy particle smasher in our own back gardens, we can still get close to the action using an exciting new smartphone App.
The new App, called ‘LHSee’, makes the LHC accessible to anybody with a smartphone or tablet PC running the Google Android operating system. Written by Oxford University Particle Physicists in collaboration with the ATLAS collaboration, it has been designed for experts and non-experts alike and with help from their international friends within the ATLAS collaboration, the developers offer the App with language support not just in English, but also in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish.
Read more
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International Committee on Future Accelerators seminar
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Fermilab Director Pier Oddone |
The International Committee on Future Accelerators (ICFA) organizes a seminar every three years. This year the seminar was at CERN with a focus on outlining future opportunities in our field. The seminar typically brings together some 150 leaders of our community from Europe, the Americas and Asia. The meeting includes both scientists and agency managers, who are usually absent from most other particle physics meetings. In conjunction with the ICFA seminar, I attended a meeting of ICFA (I am the chair elect) and a meeting of the Funding Agencies for Large Colliders (FALC) which has one laboratory director per region in addition to the several representatives from the funding agencies. ICFA also presented the booklet, “Beacons of Discovery,” outlining a global vision for particle physics.
Future opportunities at the energy frontier are focused on the LHC -upgrades and what will come after the LHC. At this point the Higgs particle is cornered in the range of 115-140 GeV, where we would expect it to be from the measurements of the top and W mass made at the Tevatron - if it exists at all. We have high hopes to settle this question very soon. At the moment, the best direct limits for the low-mass Higgs (115-120 GeV) come from the Tevatron. The LHC limits for a low-mass Higgs published this summer are a factor of three away from the predicted Standard Model rate. The LHC is working splendidly and combining the results of CMS and ATLAS at the end of this year’s run should, in principle, set an exclusion close to the Standard Model limit. With a bit more luminosity and improvements in resolution the LHC could discover the Standard Model Higgs decaying to two photons within the next year. Until the lay of the land is settled by further data from the LHC, all plans for future colliders are in suspended animation.
By contrast, the plans at the intensity frontier are quite robust and largely independent from the LHC results. The quark colliders are doing well in Japan and Italy (super B-factories) and in China (tau-charm factory). The most ambitious plans for future programs in neutrinos and rare muon and kaon decays are in the US and Japan with powerful facilities at Fermilab and J-PARC.
The general sense is that we have great opportunities ahead, including efforts on dark matter and dark energy; the world is moving forward with very strong support in Europe and Asia. Hopefully, we will soon have a regular budget from Congress that will eliminate the pause in any new starts, which have been blocked by 14 months of continuing resolutions. The image that struck me during the discussions at CERN comes from a saying I learned as a kid: “camarón que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente.”*
*”A river shrimp that falls asleep is carried away by the current.”
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Death: Mike Petkus - Oct. 8
Editor's note: Fermilab Today will publish a full profile on Mike Petkus and his contributions to Fermilab in the coming week.
Fermilab employee Mike Petkus,50, died on Saturday, Oct. 8. He worked in AD.
Petkus's visitation will take place on Wednesday, Oct. 12 from 3 to 9 p.m. His service will take place at 7 p.m. Both will occur at Yurs Funeral Home in Geneva.
For more information, please click here.
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Sunny
Mike Petkus
