Thursday, April 10, 2014
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Thursday, April 10

11 a.m.
Academic Lecture Series - One West
Speaker: Zheng-Tian Lu, Argonne National Laboratory
Title: Searches for the EDMs of Nuclei

2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Tim Tait, University of California, Irvine
Title: Self-Interacting Dark Matter from a Non-Abelian Hidden Sector

3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over

Friday, April 11

3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over

4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Abby Vieregg, University of Chicago
Title: Detection of B-mode Polarization on Degree Angular Scales with the BICEP2 Experiment at the South Pole

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Thursday, April 11

- Breakfast: Canadian bacon, egg and cheese Texas toast
- Breakfast: Mexican omelet
- Soft steak tacos
- Smart cuisine: braised beef with vegetables
- Chicken parmesan
- Baked ham and Swiss ciabatta
- Sweet and sour cream
- Beef barley soup
- Chef's choice soup
- Assorted pizza by the slice

Wilson Hall Cafe menu

Chez Leon

Friday, April 11
Dinner
- Mixed greens with dried cranberries, walnuts and blue cheese
- Veal limone
- Escarole and Tuscan beans
- Mixed berry pie

Wednesday, April 16
Lunch
- Pork satay with peanut sauce
- Jasmine rice
- Peapods
- Pineapple upside-down cake

Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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Press Release

High school students get real-world advice at Fermilab STEM Career Expo - April 23

Scientists, engineers and research professionals will meet with students at the free Fermilab STEM Career Expo on Wednesday, April 23, from 5:30-8:30 p.m. Photo: Cindy Arnold

What does a scientist actually do all day? How difficult is it to be a mechanical engineer? What is the daily life of an economist really like? How much and what type of math is used in these types of careers?

On Wednesday, April 23, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will offer high school students a valuable opportunity to ask those questions in person. The annual Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Career Expo, held in the atrium of Wilson Hall, will put these students face-to-face with people actually doing the kinds of jobs they will be applying for in the coming years.

In addition to Fermilab scientists and engineers, the STEM Career Expo will feature professionals of several local companies and research organizations, on hand to explain what they do. But this is not about recruiting as in a college or job fair, according to organizer Susan Dahl of the Fermilab Office of Education.

Rather, she said, this is a chance for students to talk one-on-one with professionals working in their fields of interest. The expo will also include five panel discussions on STEM-related topics, with an opportunity for students to ask questions.

"We hope students come away with a new view of the possibilities of finding careers in these fascinating fields and a more realistic idea of the individuals working in these very relevant and fascinating jobs," Dahl said.

The STEM Career Expo is free and open to all high school students. The event is a collaborative event organized by the Fermilab Education Office and educators and career specialists from Kane and DuPage county schools. Sponsors include Fermilab Friends for Science Education, Batavia High School and Geneva Community High School.

Read more

Photo of the Day

Hawk in flight

Four superimposed photos of a red-tailed hawk shows the bird's flight path. Photo: Marty Murphy, AD
This Day in Fermilab History

April 10, 1969: A transfer of ownership

These individuals helped usher in a new era for Illinois in 1969. From left: Illinois Governor Richard B. Ogilvie, Atomic Energy Commission Chair Glenn Seaborg, National Accelerator Laboratory Director Robert R. Wilson and former Illinois Governor Otto Kerner Jr. Photo: Fermilab

Editor's note: This is the first in a new Fermilab Today series titled "This Day in Fermilab History." We will feature milestone events from Fermilab's past in this series of occasional articles.

Forty-five years ago today, on April 10, 1969, at a luncheon at Chicago's Palmer House, Illinois Governor Richard B. Ogilvie transferred the 6,800-acre National Accelerator Laboratory site to the United States Atomic Energy Commission. AEC Chair Glenn Seaborg accepted the land title. Speakers at the event included Seaborg, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and NAL Director Robert R. Wilson. The program from the event and Wilson's notes for his speech are available in the Fermilab Archives.

You can read more about the event at the Fermilab History and Archives Project's website or in the digitized April 1969 issue of The Village Crier (see pages 1, 7-8, and 10).

from the Fermilab History and Archives Project

In the News

Dark matter hunt: LUX experiment reaches critical phase

From BBC News, April 8, 2014

The quest to find the most mysterious particles in the Universe is entering a critical phase, scientists say.

An experiment located in the bottom of a gold mine in South Dakota, US, could offer the best chance yet of detecting dark matter.

Read more

Frontier Science Result: CDF

CDF completes the ZZ diboson production cross section measurement

Comparison of expected and observed distributions of both Z invariant masses. The region CDF looked at contained only seven events (inside the blue lines).

While the production of a single W or Z boson in particle collisions at the Tevatron happened quite often and has been a reference for precise electroweak measurements, a pair of such bosons was produced less frequently. Scientists predict that, in collisions between protons and antiprotons, a ZZ boson pair is produced only once for every 20,000 W bosons produced. This measurement is an important test of the Standard Model and has been calculated by theorists at Fermilab.

Z bosons decay predominantly into a pair of quarks in proton-antiproton collisions. However, this signature is hard to recognize among the plethora of jets produced. It is easier to detect Z bosons when they decay into a pair of charged leptons, even though the frequency of such decays is small.

In this analysis, the ZZ signature is detected when one Z decays into a charged-lepton pair and the second Z decays into either another charged-lepton pair or a pair of neutrinos.

The first case results in a very clean signature, which allows for the observation of a process with very few events. After all the cuts, background accounts for a mere 0.6 percent of the data from the detector. Our paper shows many comparison plots between data and the Monte Carlo simulation, one of which is given in the top figure.

The second case is harder because of the two neutrinos, which are not picked up by the detector, and is therefore identified with the help of a sophisticated algorithm. After cuts, in this analysis the sample of this kind of decay contained 288 events, of which 230 ± 16 were background events. By combining information from seven different variables, the sophisticated algorithm has provided us with a better separation of signal from background. The lower plot shows the data and the expected distribution of the signal and six different backgrounds. The result for the cross section is very consistent with our analysis for the lepton pair sample.

Scientists obtained the final result by combining the two states, exploiting the whole data set collected by CDF. The result is a legacy measurement. The measured ZZ cross section of 1.04 +0.32/-0.25 picobarns is in good agreement with the Standard Model value of 1.4 ± 0.1 picobarns. The result is also in good agreement with the DZero measurement of 1.32 +0.32/-0.28 picobarns.

Learn more

edited by Andy Beretvas

A sophisticated algorithm is used to separate the ZZ signal from the background when one of the Z's decays into a pair of neutrinos.
CDF physicists Matteo Bauce and Donatella Lucchesi, both from the Unviersity of Padova and INFN, contributed to this data analysis.
Announcements

Horseshoe closed this morning

LabVIEW seminars scheduled for today

Strength Training registration due April 11

Budker Seminar - April 14

Interpersonal Communication Skills course - April 16

Edward Tufte artist reception - April 16

Tour guides for Illini Alumni event - May 3

West bike rack area closed

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A Smart Cuisine purchase earns you 10 bonus points

Walk 2 Run

2014 Fermilab Golf League season is upon us

Wednesday Walkers

Scottish country dancing meets Tuesday evenings at Kuhn Barn

International folk dancing meets Thursday evenings at Kuhn Barn

Indoor soccer