Fermilab Today

Thursday, Feb. 19, 2009

Calendar From symmetrybreaking Result of the Week

Thursday, Feb. 19 After 15 years, CMS crystals Standing on tiptoes 11 a.m. ready for prime time Computing Techniques Seminar - FCC2A Speaker: Douglas Thain, Title: Programming Multicore Clouds Using High Level Abstractions THERE WILL BE NO PHYSICS AND DETECTOR SEMINAR THIS WEEK 2:30 p.m. Theoretical Physics Seminar - An event in which a photon and a Z boson was Curia II A technician works on crystals for the CMS created is shown with a single (red) energy Speaker: Darren Forde, detector's electromagnetic calorimeter at CERN. Image courtesy of CERN. deposition in the electromagnetic calorimeter and University of California, Los (yellow) missing energy, which indicates Angeles/ SLAC National A year may sound like a long time to shut from the Z boson decay. Accelerator Laboratory down an experiment. Title: Automating One-Loop Recent research studies the Amplitudes for the LHC But it’s all relative to researchers working on rare and difficult to find. With the low hanging 3:30 p.m. the detector, which fruit picked clean, the time has come to stand DIRECTOR'S COFFEE will study the results of particle collisions in the on our tiptoes. BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over . 4 p.m. DZero physicists have done just that and Accelerator Physics and Physicists guided proton beams in a complete announced the results of a search for a very Technology Seminar - One loop around the LHC for the first time in rare process. They searched for events in West September 2008. But an electrical problem which a Z boson and a photon are produced Speaker: Sandor Feher, brought operations to a halt, and the LHC is without anything else observed. While events Fermilab not scheduled to start up again until like this have been observed before, these Title: Experience with the September 2009. scientists searched for a special case, Commissioning of the LHC specifically when the Z boson decayed into Superconducting Magnets That’s nothing compared to the time it took the two neutrinos. In earlier studies, the Z boson CMS collaboration to obtain the lead tungstate decayed into electrons or muons. Because Friday, Feb. 20 scintillating crystals they needed to build the neutrinos can traverse many billions of miles 3:30 p.m. detector’s electromagnetic calorimeter–15 of solid lead without interacting, they pass DIRECTOR'S COFFEE years. through the detector entirely undetected. BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over Thus, the scientists were looking for collisions They began working on the crystals just after 4 p.m. in which a single photon was observed and Joint Experimental-Theoretical the fall of the Soviet Union and finally collected nothing else. the complete set about a year ago. Physics Seminar - One West Events like these are clean and very rare. Speaker: Daniel M. Kaplan, The Soviet military began developing the They are easily mimicked by a detector Illinois Institute of Technology crystals, possibly for use in lasers, said CMS malfunction or a stray cosmic ray. It is only Title: New Experiments with Collaboration Board Chair Dan Green. But because of the amazing amount of beam Antiprotons after the fall of the Soviet Union, they shared delivered by the that scientists had their research with CMS physicists. any chance to view enough of these events to Click here for NALCAL, be certain of what they were observing. The a weekly calendar with “Only about a handful (of the crystals) certainty is 99.99997 percent. links to additional existed,” said CMS Spokesman Jim Virdee at information. a presentation at the AAAS conference in While simply seeing something never before Weather Chicago. “We needed about 75,000 of them.” observed at a hadron collider is a triumph, DZero physicists went further and used this -- Kathryn Grim information to look for even rarer types of physics: an unusually heavy “virtual” photon or file:///U|/wwwdocs/pub/v5_0/today/archive_2009/today09-02-19.html (1 of 4)2/20/2009 2:25:20 PM Fermilab Today

Read more Cloudy Z boson decaying into a Z boson and a 23°/9° photon. The Standard Model predicts that this Photo of the Day process, called trilinear gauge boson Extended Forecast couplings, is not possible. If some new Weather at Fermilab DOE Office of Science tour physical phenomena allowed for this kind of couplings, DZero physicists would have seen Current Security more events than expected. Since they Status observed the number of events predicted by Secon Level 3 the Standard Model, these scientists were able to set some of the most stringent limits on Wilson Hall Cafe this unexpected process occurring. Sometimes, standing on tiptoes is all you need Thursday, Feb. 19 to do to reach the prize. - Tomato Florentine -- Don Lincoln - *Pork BBQ sandwich - Pasta primavera - Smart cuisine: chicken marsala Last week, Dr. Laura Biven (right), science and technology advisor of the DOE Office of Science, - Smoked turkey melt visited Fermilab, with Sandra Geib, public affairs - Assorted sliced pizza specialist for the DOE Chicago Office. Kurt - SW chicken salad w/roasted Riesselmann (left), Fermilab Office of corn salsa Communication, gave the visitors a tour of the 15th floor before they met with Fermilab scientists and *Carb restricted alternative members of the DOE Fermi Site Office.

Wilson Hall Cafe menu Special Announcement Chez Leon These physicists played a leading role in this URA Thesis competition analysis. Thursday, Feb. 19 Dinner accepting admissions DZero Trigger Board: A good trigger is crucial to - Closed Fermilab and the Universities Research any particle physics Association invite submissions for the 12th experiment. It decides Wednesday, Feb. 25 annual URA Thesis award competition. what data is recorded and Lunch what is discarded. This - Lemon & Herb Tilapia The award recognizes the most outstanding board studies and sets - Spinach Risotto thesis related to work conducted at Fermilab the parameters that - Blueberry Pecan Crumb Cake or in collaboration with Fermilab scientists. govern the current DZero The thesis must be completed in the 2008 suite of triggers. Chez Leon menu calendar year. Nominations must be submitted Call x3524 to make your to Steve Brice ([email protected]) by March 1 reservation. and should include at least two letters Accelerator Update Archives supporting the merits of the thesis you are nominating. At least one letter should be from Feb. 16-18 a member of the thesis committee of the Ph.D.- - Three stores provided ~42.75 hours of Fermilab Today granting institution. luminosity - MI suffered vacuum burst The Thesis Awards Committee will select the Result of the Week - One transfer of antiprotons lost due to timing winning thesis. Each thesis will be judged on problem clarity of presentation, originality and physics - On Thursday Pbar will install new target Safety Tip of the Week content. To qualify, the thesis must have been submitted as partial fulfillment of the Ph.D. Read the Current Accelerator Update requirements in the 2008 calendar year, be Read the Early Bird Report ILC NewsLine written in English, and submitted in the View the Tevatron Luminosity Charts electronic form to the Fermilab Publications Office in accordance with Fermilab policy. Announcements Info For more details, consult the URA Thesis Award web site.

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Fermilab Today In the News Latest Announcements is online at: URA visiting Scholars applications www.fnal.gov/today/ Particle physicists set to invade due March 20 Send comments and the dark side suggestions to: From Ivan Semeniuk’s Embedded Have a safe day! [email protected] Universe, (a science blog) Feb. 13, 2009 Monthly leave sheets due

Tom Diehl stretches his arms out and says, Online Oxford English Dictionary now with relish: “It’s the biggest phenomenon in the available site wide universe and we don’t have a clue what it is!” Daycamp information and That pretty much sums up our situation with registration respect to dark energy, that mysterious thingamajig* that is thought to be causing the Muscle Toning Classes universe to expand at an ever-faster rate (as opposed to an ever-slower rate, like Outlook 2007 New Features classes cosmologists once expected). When dark scheduled Feb. 26 energy was first reported in 1998, it was soon recognized as the biggest discovery in a Special Seminar: Programming generation. But, as Diehl suggests, no one Multicore Clouds - Feb. 19 really knows very much about it.

This is not news. What is new is that some NALWO - Mardi Gras Potluck Dinner - astronomical hardware tailor-made to study Feb. 20 dark energy is now jumping off the drawing board and into reality. And it’s happening at Discount Tickets: World's Toughest Fermilab, a place that is better known for Rodeo Presents Toughest Cowboy - looking at the smallest phenomena in the Feb. 21 universe instead of the biggest. NALWO - Brown Bag Lunch Program - Diehl himself is a living example of this shift. "Australia: Travels in the Land Down He’s a high energy physicist associated with Under" - Feb. 24 “DZero”, one of the two main experiments at Fermilab that discovered the in the English Country Dancing, March 1 early ‘90’s. He’s always liked astronomy (ever since he helped run a planetarium at his Introduction to LabVIEW class undergraduate college in Maine) but he didn’t offered March 5 expect astronomy to reach out and grab him at Fermilab. Now, with the leading edge of On-Site Housing - Summer 2009 collider physics shifting to the Large Hadron Collier in Europe, researchers at Fermilab are NALWO - Adler Planetarium Trip - searching for new ways to stay in business, March 21 and dark energy certainly fits the bill. Child Care program offered - March 24 Read more Kyuki Do Classes - March 30

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