Thursday, Feb. 12, 2015
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Have a safe day!

Thursday, Feb. 12

2 p.m.
Neutrino Seminar - WH8XO
Speaker: Boris Kayser, Fermilab
Title: Neutrino Masses and Majorana Neutrinos

3:30 p.m.
Director's Coffee Break - WH2XO

Friday, Feb. 13

2 p.m.
Future Colliders Seminar - WH10NW
Speaker: Patrick Fox, Fermilab
Title: The Relic Neutralino Surface at a 100 TeV Collider

3:30 p.m.
Director's Coffee Break - WH2XO

4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Peter Svoisky, University of Oklahoma
Title: New QCD Measurements with Charm, Beauty and Weak Bosons at DZero

Visit the labwide calendar to view Fermilab events

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Thursday, Feb. 12

- Breakfast: Canadian bacon, egg and cheese Texas toast
- Breakfast: Mexican omelet
- Steak soft tacos
- Roasted pork loin with orange mustard glaze
- Chicken vindaloo
- Roast beef and cheddar wrap
- Mandarin orange pecan chicken salad
- Beef barley soup
- Chef's choice soup
- Assorted pizza by the slice

Wilson Hall Cafe menu

Chez Leon

Friday, Feb. 13
Dinner
- Mussels with white wine and thyme
- Spinach- and blue cheese-stuffed filet mignon
- Warm roasted vegetable salad
- White chocolate and raspberry creme brulee

Wednesday, Feb. 18
Lunch
- Ham and gruyere crepes
- Cabbage salad
- Raspberry cheesecake

Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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Special Announcement

All-hands meeting - Tuesday, Feb. 17, in auditorium

Please join Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer for an all-hands meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 17, at 10 a.m. in Ramsey Auditorium.

Lockyer will provide updates and information on the state of the laboratory. A question-and-answer session will follow the presentation.

The meeting will be streamed live.

This Day in Fermilab History

Feb. 12, 1972: The lab's experimental program begins

E-36 personnel on April 18, 1973. Back row, from left: Ryuji Yamada, Steve Olsen, Leonid Zolin, Ernie Malamud, Yuri Pilipenko, Anatole Kuznetsov, Dick Carrigan, Rod Cool, Konstantin Goulianos. Front row, from left: Dan Gross, Boris Morozov, Adrian Melissinos, Vladimir Popov, Victor Bartenev, Vladimir Nikitin. Photo: Fermilab

Forty-three years ago today, Fermilab's experimental program began when E-36, the lab's first experiment, started testing equipment in the newly achieved 100-GeV beam.

E-36, the Small Angle Proton-Proton Scattering Experiment, had been approved on Feb. 1, 1970. The experimenters came from the National Accelerator Laboratory, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna, USSR), the University of Rochester (Rochester, New York) and Rockefeller University (New York City), making it a model of cooperation between Americans and Soviets at a time when Cold War tensions still ran high.

Prior to beginning the experiment, the scientists collaborated via weekly telex conversations. NAL achieved the 100-GeV beam the experimenters needed shortly after 9 p.m. on Feb. 11, surpassing the 76-GeV accelerator at Serpukhov Laboratory in the USSR, which had been the most powerful in the world until that point. Fermilab Director Robert R. Wilson and others in the Main Control Room celebrated by sharing a bottle of vodka that A. A. Kuznetsov of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research had sent them to mark the occasion.

At 4 a.m. on Feb. 12, E-36 personnel observed the beam interacting with their equipment for the first time, kicking off the lab's experimental program.

You can read more about E-36 and NAL's achievement of a 100-GeV beam in the Feb. 10, 1972, and Feb. 24, 1972, issues of The Village Crier, the lab's employee newsletter. The event was commemorated in an article in the Feb. 7, 1992, issue of FermiNews. You can also read the original proposal for the experiment. Additionally, the Fermilab Archives contains records related to E-36, including copies of the original telexes between the NAL and JINR scientists, such as this one.

from the Fermilab History and Archives Project

Photos of the Day

Bough and bridge

The boughs around Fermilab have been heavy with snow. Photo: Kris Brandt, CCD
The pedestrian bridge connecting the parking lots of Wilson Hall and the Lederman Science Center is lovely in white. Photo: Kris Brandt, CCD
In the News

Synopsis: Two new particles enter the fold

From Physics, Feb. 10, 2015

Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have detected two never-before-seen subatomic particles. These Ξb particles were predicted by the quark model and estimated to have masses roughly six times that of the proton, but previous experiments have not run at high enough energy to produce these massive particles. The detections offer new precision measurements of the Ξb masses, which will place tighter constraints on particle physics theories.

Read more

In the News

Photons simulate time travel in the lab

From Physics World, Feb. 5, 2015

Physicists in Australia claim to have simulated time travel using fairly standard optical equipment on a lab bench. They say they have prepared photons that behave as if they are travelling along short cuts in space-time known as "closed time-like curves" and add that their work might help in the long-sought-after unification of quantum mechanics and gravity. Others, however, argue that the research does little or nothing to establish whether time travel is possible in nature.

Read more

Frontier Science Result: CDF

Exciting the vacuum

This plot shows mass spectra of π+π- pairs at center-of-mass energies (√s) of 0.9 and 1.96 TeV and their ratio. The main peak is a spin-2 f meson; there is evidence for spin-0 f mesons at 980 MeV/c2 (not shown here) and 1,370 MeV/c2 and some structures at higher mass.

Among all the elementary and composite particles we know, there are a few that have the odd property of being much like the vacuum: They have no electric charge and no spin, and they are identical to their mirror image. They must be present in the vacuum as virtual states; they cannot become real without violating energy conservation (except for appearances of extremely short duration).

One of these vacuum-like particles is the Higgs boson, an excitation of the all-pervading Higgs field. It decays exceedingly quickly, after only a few proton diameters. Most believe it to be truly elementary — that is, without component parts. The other known vacuum-like particles are called f mesons and χ (chi) mesons. They are understood to be quark-antiquark bound states. Very unstable, they decay quickly, even faster than the Higgs boson, sometimes into a pair of particles called pions.

There is yet another type of vacuum-like particle expected in our theory of strong interactions: a pair of gluons bound together. Gluons bind the quarks together through the strong force. The lightest "glueball" should be vacuum-like and with a mass in the range 1,000 to 1,700 MeV/c2; scientists have proposed candidates, but none is well-established.

A promising search technique is to select collisions in the Tevatron in which outgoing protons and antiprotons go down the beam pipes and a glueball pops out of the vacuum. The glueball can immediately decay into a pion pair.

As detailed in a paper submitted to Physical Review Letters, CDF scientists detected pion pairs, with no other particles seen in the detector (apart from the protons going into the beam pipes), and reconstructed the combined mass of the two pions. A glueball would show up as a bump in the distribution of those measured masses (see upper figure).

The figure also shows data taken with about half the normal Tevatron energy as well as the ratio of the distributions at the two energies. The spectrum shows several structures consistent with known f mesons and some other unexpected structures, which remain to be explained. Unfortunately, the glueball remains elusive. Does it not exist, or is it just lost among the zoo of meson states? This is an unfinished chapter of strong interaction physics.

Using similar selections and more data taken at low luminosity and by looking for different decay modes (for example π+π-, K+K-, K0K0 and φφ), maybe glueballs can be found at the LHC.

Mike Albrow and Andy Beretvas

Learn more

These scientists are the primary analysts for this result. Top row from left: Mike Albrow (Fermilab) and Maria Zurek (University of Cologne, Germany). Second row, from left: Inna Makarenko (National University of Kyiv, Ukraine), Jon Wilson (Texas A&M) and Denys Lontovskyi (National University of Kyiv, Ukraine).
Announcements

Today's New Announcements

Pilates registration due Feb. 16

Glacier tax prep presentation - Feb. 18

No on-site prescription safety eyewear Feb. 18 and 25

Fermilab Natural Areas presents Hawk Talk - Feb. 21

MPS file scanning retention policy

Philosophical Society - today

Fermilab Chamber Series presents Callipygian Players - Feb. 15

Barn Dance - Feb. 15

School's Day Out - Feb. 16 and 27

Core Computing Division briefs on MS Office 2013/365 - Feb. 17

English country dancing at Kuhn Barn - March 1

NALWO Puerto Rican cooking demo - March 9

URA Thesis Award competition deadline - March 20

Managing Conflict on March 24

Requests now accepted for on-site housing for summer 2015

Getting paid the greener way - get paperless pay stubs

Microsoft Office 2013 ebooks

Windows 8.1 approved for use

Fermi Singers seek new members in New Year

Need cash for college? Abri is awarding two $1,000 scholarships

Scottish country dancing Tuesday evenings at Kuhn Barn

Open gym basketball for gym members

Indoor soccer

Vaughan Athletic Center membership rates