Thursday, June 7, 2012
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Have a safe day!

Thursday, June 7
2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Daping Du, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Title: B(s)→D(s) Semileptonic Form Factors from Lattice QCD and Their Applications
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY

Friday, June 8
2 p.m.
Joint Experiment-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Patricia Vahle, College of William And Mary
Title: New MINOS Results
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Joint Experiment-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Keith Ulmer, University of Colorado
Title: Recent Heavy Flavor Results from CMS

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Thursday, June 7
- Breakfast: Apple sticks
- Southwestern chicken tortilla
- Philly style cheese steak
- *Garlic herb roasted pork
- Smart cuisine: Mardi Gras jambalaya
- *Southwestern turkey wrap
- Assorted sliced pizza
- *Marinated grilled chicken Caesar salads

*Carb-restricted alternative

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Chez Leon

Friday, June 8
Dinner
Closed

Wednesday, June 13
Lunch
- Salad Niçoise
- Sponge cake w/ raspberry sauce

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Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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Special Announcement

Tevatron Impact Monday, Users' Meeting Tuesday - Wednesday

The Tevatron Impact symposium is online. It will take place from 1 to 6 p.m. on Monday, followed by a reception in the Wilson Hall atrium. Employees and users are invited to attend this celebration of the Tevatron program's lasting impacts on science, technology and society.

Registration is still open for the 45th annual Users' Meeting, which will cover new physics results and the laboratory's future projects. Among the highlights will be a public lecture by Nobel laureate David Gross on Tuesday evening.

Feature

LBNE builds 35-ton
prototype cryostat

Construction workers examine the concrete support for the 35-ton membrane cryostat for the LBNE project. Photo: Barry Norris

The Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment is moving ahead with its prototyping activities for a liquid-argon far detector.

The LBNE far detector will require a cryostat to hold between 5,000 and 17,000 tons of liquid argon at 89 K – a significantly larger volume than any existing liquid-argon detector. The LBNE project team is currently constructing a 35-ton-capacity prototype cryostat at PPD's PC-4 facility with the primary purpose of verifying that the high purity levels achieved last year in the Liquid Argon Purity Demonstrator, LAPD, are reproducible in a non-evacuated cryostat of the type planned for the LBNE detector.

Cryogenic engineers David Montanari and Terry Tope are coordinating the prototype’s construction. Physicist Alan Hahn will coordinate the testing program.

Given its size, the detector cryostat will need to be constructed on site by welding together modular pieces to form a single membrane. While this technique is commonly used in the construction of the enormous cryostats used in commercial storage of liquid natural gas, that industry's requirements are very different from LBNE's, said Montanari. The prototype must demonstrate that this type of construction can meet LBNE’s purity requirements without prior evacuation.

The reinforced concrete housing for the prototype was completed in May. Staff from the vendor Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries is onsite to train Fermilab welders and technicians and to supervise the cryostat construction, which is expected to span a couple of months. According to Montanari, the prototype has been designed to share many components with LAPD, enabling the two programs to run in parallel. In particular, he said, the prototype will share LAPD's liquid-argon purification system – an expensive item.

Expanding the scope of the 35-ton prototyping program to track cosmic rays and test light-collection schemes is under consideration. This would require insertion of a reduced-scale time projection chamber into the cryostat in a second phase.

"We have to wait to find out whether we will be building LAr1," Hahn said, referring to the planned 1,000-ton-capacity prototype intended to test the full installation process and operation of the detector. "If not, we'll need to test the TPC and photon-detection designs in this one."

—Anne Heavey

Photos of the Day

The last 21st-century
transit of Venus

A reflecting telescope was used to take this photo of Venus passing across the face of the sun on June 5. Photo: Vladimir Shiltsev, AD
An enthusiastic group of sky-gazers gathered near Fermilab's Geodesic Dome on Tuesday to view the transit of Venus. Photo: Adam Lyon, CD
Special Announcement

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists director meets with Fermilab staff - today

Kennette Benedict, the executive director and publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, will be at Fermilab in the Small Dining Room today from 1:30 to 3 p.m. to meet with Fermilab staff and scientists to discuss issues of interest, including physics, energy, science policy, climate change and nuclear weapons. Please join her for this opportunity to voice your concerns and express your opinions, as well as hear about the Bulletin's latest efforts and projects.

In the News

IceCube catches high-energy neutrino oscillations

From Nature, June 6, 2012

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a telescope at the South Pole that detects the subatomic particles known as neutrinos, has measured the highest-energy neutrino oscillations yet.

IceCube was designed primarily to study neutrinos streaming from astrophysical objects such as supernovae and γ-ray bursts. But the detection of neutrino oscillations — the transformation of one type of neutrino into another — represents new scientific territory for the experiment, an area that falls under the umbrella of particle physics.

Read more

Special Result of the Week

Fingerprinting the neutrino

This plot shows the likelihood of an anti-neutrino colliding with a proton to produce a muon and a neutron as a function of the square of the four-momentum (a property that is proportional to the energy) given to the neutron (Q2). The red lines show theoretical predictions that include (dashed) and exclude (solid) a model in which the anti-neutrino can collide with several particles in the nucleus rather than just one.

Neutrino scientists are currently trying to answer some exciting questions. How much do neutrinos weigh and why are they so light? How much do neutrinos change from one kind to another (called mixing) and why are their transformations so different from quark mixing? Do neutrinos mix differently from anti-neutrinos? To answer these questions, neutrino physicists must study how neutrinos and anti-neutrinos mix over time, which means using neutrino interactions to measure their energies and the distances they travel.

If neutrinos and anti-neutrinos do mix differently, it could explain why the universe seems to have so much more matter than antimatter. Answering these questions is difficult because we don't completely understand how neutrinos interact with matter in the first place. For example, if future experiments see a difference between neutrino and anti-neutrino mixing, it will be hard to determine the reason. On one hand, it could be caused by the neutrino and anti-neutrino actually mixing differently. On the other, it could be a difference between their interactions in the detector, which by definition is made only of matter (no antimatter).

The MINERvA collaboration has recently measured one of the most important interactions for mixing measurements. In this interaction, an anti-neutrino meets a proton, producing a muon and a neutron. This interaction is special because the energy of the anti-neutrino can be estimated simply by measuring the muon energy and direction. However, this isn't as straightforward as it seems, and that may hamper our ability to infer neutrino energy. For example, because of related measurements from the MiniBooNE experiment of this interaction with neutrinos at lower energies, theorists have hypothesized that interactions sometimes occur in which the neutrino or antineutrino interacts with several particles in the nucleus at once instead of interacting with only one.

The MINERvA collaboration measured this interaction rate versus the square of the four-momentum (which is proportional to the energy) transferred from the anti-neutrino to the neutron. Large contributions from multi-particle interactions, called meson-exchange currents, would change this distribution. So far, MINERvA sees no evidence of such a change, indicating that the anti-neutrino is not interacting with multiple particles. But this is only the beginning: MINERvA has more data and will look at this interaction in many different kinds of nuclei. Stay tuned!

—Laura Fields, Northwestern University

These physicists were responsible for this analysis.

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International Folk Dancing in barn - today; moves to Auditorium - June 14

Barn Dance and picnic - June 10

Deadline for swim lessons - June 11

Scottish country dancing cancelled - June 12; moves to Auditorium - June 19

Fermilab Family Outdoor Fair - June 10

Tevatron symposium - June 11

Nobel laureate David Gross gives public lecture - June 12

Fermilab Users' Meeting - June 12-13

Identity theft webinar: Don't take the bait - June 13

New Perspectives is coming - June 14

University of Chicago Tuition Remission Program deadline - June 15

Adult water aerobics - begins June 18

Video series on six different world religions - starts June 19

DreamWeaver CS5: Intro class - June 19-20

DASTOW - June 20

Intermediate/advanced Python programming class - June 20-22

Fermilab prairie quadrat study - begins June 26

After-hours shuttle trial extended through June

Fermilab Management Practices Seminar - begins Oct. 4

Interpersonal communication skills training - Nov. 14

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