Submit timecards today

Please submit your timecard using the new Fermilab Time and Labor electronic reporting system by the end of the day today.

In the new system, submit your timecard by marking it as approved. Your approver will need to approve the timecard as well.

Approvers should verify today that they can access all of the proper timecards and that the employees whose timecards they will approve have entered time and effort into the system successfully.

You can access the new FTL system here.

To read the answers to questions that the FTL team has received about the new timecard so far, check here. Please contact your local support team with any other questions or concerns. You can also contact the Service Desk by phone at x2345 or by opening a Service Desk ticket.

FTL support team members will be available at the Timecard Doctor booth during lunch hours today and on Monday, June 28.

Baylor University joins CMS

Baylor University's Kenichi Hatakeyama (left) and Jay Dittman in the CMS Centre at CERN.

The CMS collaboration welcomed Baylor University, the oldest continually operating university in the lone star state, into its ranks at last month's collaboration board meeting at CERN.

Founded in 1845, the central-Texas university has been a member of the CDF experiment at Fermilab since 2005 and members of its physics department feel honored to add another Energy Frontier experiment to their roster.

"CMS was a natural choice for our group," said Kenichi Hatakeyama, a physicist at Baylor University.

Even though Baylor University just became an official member of the collaboration, Hatakeyama had already been involved in CMS as a research associate at Rockefeller University in New York. When he joined Baylor University last summer, the department expressed interest in expanding their collider physics program. They made it Hatakeyama's personal mission to join CMS, while continuing his work at Baylor.

"This is very important to us because it is going to be a long-term research project," said Jay Dittmann, a physicist at Baylor who presented the proposal with Hatakeyama to CMS. "Joining the CMS collaboration at CERN is the future of our high-energy physics research program here at Baylor."

In addition to Dittmann and Hatakeyama, the Baylor group has two postdocs and expects to gain some graduate students soon. They plan to focus on the hadron calorimeter with an emphasis on data validation and calibration.

They are also making contributions to the JetMET physics object group, especially in Data Quality Monitoring.

"We wanted to start by contributing to the fundamental foundation of the experiment," Hatakeyama said.

The U.S. CMS collaboration now has a total of 49-member institutions.

"I would like to congratulate Baylor University on joining CMS," said Nick Hadley, the U.S. CMS Collaboration Board chair. "They are already making significant contributions, and I am glad that they have joined us in this crucial and exciting time."

- Elizabeth Clements

Desktop cosmos: Small is beautiful for big physics

From New Scientist, June 23, 2010

In the control centre on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, banks of plasma screens await a signal that might never come. Hope springs from two concrete tubes that stretch out at right angles from the control centre and extend 4 kilometres towards the horizon. Inside them, laser beams ping relentlessly back and forth. The site is one of two that make up the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, LIGO, the largest experiment so far for spying the ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves.

Off the coast of west Africa, perched on the highest point of the Canary Islands, a gamma-ray telescope called MAGIC - the name stands for the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov telescope - scans the heavens for bursts of high-energy photons from far corners of the universe. Every now and again it catches a fleeting glimpse of something. Seconds, perhaps, of activity are followed by silence again.

Back in the US, meanwhile, teams work flat out on plans for a $650 million space probe called the Joint Dark Energy Mission. It is just the latest and most ambitious bid to study how the universe is expanding and tell us what the vast bulk of the cosmos is made of.

Read more