IQA training required for all employees

Starting this week, all Fermilab employees are required to complete a one-time training on Integrated Quality Assurance. The online course, about 30 minutes long and developed by the Fermilab Office of Quality and Best Practices, is the next step in Fermilab's goal of improving quality and quality assurance for all work done at the laboratory. All employees need to take the course and complete an online test after viewing the course. The requirement to take the course and completion of the course will become part of the ITNA record of every employee.

In September, Director Pier Oddone devoted a large part of his all-hands meeting to Integrated Quality Assurance. The Department of Energy conducted an audit on the implementation of IQA at Fermilab that month. The DOE audit team commended the laboratory for its QA assessments and corrective action plans and the work done by the quality assurance representatives of each division and section. Now is the time to make sure that every employee has a basic understanding of IQA.

The course covers the basic definition of what quality is, provides a overview of what quality assurance is supposed to do, and explains how we at Fermilab can integrate quality assurance in our daily work by taking a moment to think about the requirements of the work at hand.

To take the training, go to the TRAIN class schedule page. Enter your employee ID, select the training category "General" and click "Submit." Next, click on the course "Introduction to Integrated Quality Assurance." Click on the button "Go to Online Test" and hit "Request Test." This will generate an e-mail message with a link to both the online course and the online test. Once you have viewed the course, take the test to complete your ITNA requirement. If you have further questions about IQA, please contact your quality assurance representative.

New employees - Jan. 19

Row one from left: Bradly Verdant, AD; Lori Haseltine, WDRS; Murial Cease, WDRS; Maureen Boyer, WDRS; Mandy Rominsky, PPD; Andrea Mustain, Dir; Toni Mueller, WDRS.

Physicists investigate possibility of an 'Unhiggs'

From PhysOrg.com, Jan. 28, 2010

One of the biggest goals of the LHC is to discover the Higgs boson, the only particle in the Standard Model that has not yet been observed. In general, physicists are pretty confident that the Higgs does in fact exist, although they have spent a lot of effort searching for the particle in less powerful accelerators without success. While patiently waiting for the LHC to reach its full energy and a Higgs particle to leave a signature in a detector, some physicists are investigating alternative scenarios. One of the most recent proposals is that the Higgs is not a particle, but an unparticle called the Unhiggs.

The Unhiggs idea was first suggested in a paper published in November 2009 by physicists David Stancato and John Terning of the University of California, Davis. The Unhiggs is not all that different from the Higgs, except that it demonstrates unparticle behavior and, subsequently, does not fit in with the Standard Model. While a particle has discrete parameters, the Unhiggs' parameters are continuous. In this sense, the Unhiggs is itself a continuum, and can be thought of as a collection of many Higgs bosons, each carrying a fraction of the Unhigg's total value.

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