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Have a safe day!
Tuesday, April 29
8:30 a.m.-5:50 p.m.
12th Meeting of Task Force on Shielding Aspects of Accelerators, Targets and Irradiation Facilities - Curia II
Register in person
9:30 a.m.-4 p.m.
New Perspectives on Dark Matter - One West
Registration is free
10:30 a.m.
Research Techniques Seminar (NOTE LOCATION) - WH7XO
Speaker: Benjamin Mazin, University of California, Santa Barbara
Title: Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors for UVOIR Astronomy
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR AND PHYSICS TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY
Wednesday, April 30
8:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m.
12th Meeting of Task Force on Shielding Aspects of Accelerators, Targets and Irradiation Facilities - Curia II
Register in person
9:30 a.m.-5 p.m.
New Perspectives on Dark Matter - One West
Registration is free
3 p.m.
LHC Physics Center Topic of the Week Seminar - WH11NE
Speaker: David Curtin, University of Stonybrook
Title: SUSY in Standard Model Standard Candles
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - One West
Speaker: Wick Haxton, University of California, Berkeley
Title: The Nuclear Physics of Direct Dark Matter Detection
Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.
Ongoing and upcoming conferences at Fermilab
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Tuesday, April 29
- Breakfast: All-American breakfast
- Breakfast: bacon, egg and cheese bagel
- Ranch chicken breast sandwich
- Smart cuisine: pork piccata with lemon sauce
- Country fried steak
- California turkey panino
- Taco salad
- Minnesota chicken and rice soup
- Chef's choice soup
- Assorted pizza by the slice
Wilson Hall Cafe menu
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Wednesday, April 30
Lunch
- Grilled lemongrass beef
- Rice noodle salad
- Almond cake
Friday, May 2
Dinner
Menu unavailable
Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
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Introducing the Fermilab Test Beam Committee
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The newly formed Fermilab Test Beam Committee will help schedule time for experiments at the laboratory's test beam facility. Photo: Reidar Hahn |
The Fermilab Test Beam Committee held its first meeting Wednesday, April 23. Director Nigel Lockyer called for the formation of the committee to develop guidelines to help schedule time for experiments at the Fermilab Test Beam Facility and also suggest possible upgrades to the test beamlines.
In previous years, about 200 researchers used the test beam facility. This year, the facility saw a large jump in the number of requests for beam time, and the committee anticipates more users than slots.
Fermilab's two test beamlines are designed to produce a variety of particle types and a range of energies in which users can test equipment or detectors to prepare for running a full experiment.
To most fully represent the test beam community, the committee's eight members were chosen from a broad range of expertise from both national labs and universities. They come from Fermilab, Argonne, CERN, Cornell University, Iowa State University and SLAC.
"We hope to form best practices for the test beam facility through cross-pollination with other laboratories, such as CERN and SLAC, that have test beams," said Peter Wittich, associate professor at Cornell University and Fermilab Test Beam Committee chair.
Since the Fermilab Test Beam Facility began operating in 2005, it has served a total of 633 collaborators on 45 experiments in 24 countries.
—Amanda Solliday
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In memoriam: Thomas Regan
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Thomas Regan
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Fermilab retiree Thomas Regan passed away on Tuesday, April 22, at the age of 75.
Regan worked as an operations specialist at Fermilab beginning in 1982, and in 1990 he joined the Superconducting Super Collider in Waxahachie, Texas. After working at the SSC for several years, he was welcomed back to Fermilab, where he worked until his retirement in 2005.
A memorial mass for Regan will be held on Saturday, May 3, at 10 a.m. at St. Peter Catholic Church, 1891 Kaneville Road in Geneva.
In lieu of flowers, please send memorials to the Parkinson's Disease Foundation, 1359 Broadway, Suite 1509, New York, NY 10018.
Read Regan's obituary.
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Science Next Door May newsletter now online
The May edition of "Science Next Door," Fermilab's monthly community newsletter, is now available online. View it or subscribe to get the latest about the laboratory's public events, including tours, lectures, arts events and volunteer opportunities.
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Dazzling supernova mystery solved
From BBC News, April 24, 2014
An exceptionally bright supernova that baffled scientists has been explained.
It is so luminous because a galaxy sitting in front amplifies its light — making it appear 100 billion times more dazzling than our Sun.
This cosmic magnifying glass lay hidden between Earth and the supernova — and has now been detected with a telescope in Hawaii.
The discovery, reported in the journal Science, settles an important controversy in the field of astronomy.
In 2010, a team of scientists observed the supernova, PS1-10afx, shining 30 times brighter than any other in its class.
They concluded it was a completely new type of stellar explosion.
Read more
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Time's arrow traced to quantum source
From Quanta, April 16, 2014
Coffee cools, buildings crumble, eggs break and stars fizzle out in a universe that seems destined to degrade into a state of uniform drabness known as thermal equilibrium. The astronomer-philosopher Sir Arthur Eddington in 1927 cited the gradual dispersal of energy as evidence of an irreversible "arrow of time."
But to the bafflement of generations of physicists, the arrow of time does not seem to follow from the underlying laws of physics, which work the same going forward in time as in reverse. By those laws, it seemed that if someone knew the paths of all the particles in the universe and flipped them around, energy would accumulate rather than disperse: Tepid coffee would spontaneously heat up, buildings would rise from their rubble and sunlight would slink back into the sun.
Read more
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Cultivating innovation
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Fermilab Director
Nigel Lockyer
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A new initiative has been launched at Fermilab: the DOE-sponsored Laboratory Directed Research and Development program, or LDRD.
As a participant in LDRD, Fermilab will join other national laboratories in setting aside funds each year for small-scale, proof-of-principle or innovative research projects in science and technology. These funds are open to Fermilab employees who propose to become the principal investigator of an LDRD project. LDRD projects are awarded based on a competitive review process of proposals. The projects must be relevant to the mission of DOE and Fermilab, address innovative science and technology, and must be outside the existing scope of current programmatic activities and projects.
The LDRD program aims to foster creative scientific and technological thinking at the national laboratories and enable those with such innovative ideas to try them out.
William Wester has been appointed as the LDRD coordinator. He will discuss the details of this program in a lunchtime meeting today from noon-1 p.m. in One East. William is responsible for working within the DOE framework of the program and coordinating the review panel and other activities required to make this opportunity available. Other information is available on the LDRD Web page. The first call for LDRD proposals has gone out, and preliminary proposals are due May 9. Full proposals will be due May 23. We expect to announce the next call for proposals early in FY15.
The Fermilab community boasts creative thinkers and problem solvers among its members. Your ideas could lead to the next big technological breakthrough for science and society, one that will become part of the future of Fermilab. We look forward to the discoveries and seeing the new concepts that get tested under this program.
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Nigel Lockyer on advances in particle physics and energy
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| As part of the Fermilab Lecture Series, Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer spoke to audience members about the rapid evolution of particle physics over the last century and how the advances apply to energy. Founding father and scientist Benjamin Franklin would be pleased at our progress, Lockyer said. View the video. Video: Fermilab
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Pelicans, pelicans everywhere
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| A squadron of pelicans socializes in A.E. Sea. Photo: Jesus Orduna, Rice University
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| One pelican points its long bill to the sky. Photo: Greg Vogel, AD
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Are physicists ready to give up the chase for SUSY?
From NPR, April 26, 2014
Is physics in crisis? An article in the May issue of Scientific American by physicists Joseph Lykken, from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and Maria Spiropulu, from the California Institute of Technology, lays bare an issue that is keeping a growing number of physicists up at night. Will supersymmetry — the hypothetical symmetry of nature proposed some 40 years ago — be proved out? Or should it be archived to history as just another clever idea that didn't prove true?
Read more
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Chance of showers
