President Obama to address DOE employees at 11 a.m.

President Obama plans to address all Department of Energy employees and contractors at 11 a.m. CST today. Fermilab will have an audio broadcast of the address available in Ramsey Auditorium at that time. All employees are encouraged to attend.

From broadcast to books, Atkinson serves public

Rob Atkinson

Rob Atkinson's voice used to boom out of stereo speakers when he anchored a morning news broadcast.

While he now delivers information in a much quieter tone to a select audience of physicists and science lovers, Atkinson views his job as one of Fermilab's librarians, as just as important a public service.

He provides a window into the world of high-energy physics and the laboratory's history for science enthusiasts and nearby residents who depend on him to simplify the complex field. He also serves as a resource for physicists looking for anything from a decade-old report to the most up-to-date research paper. Fermilab allows Atkinson freedom to work in different branches of librarianship.

Most recently, Atkinson is helping to create INSPIRE, a collaborative project between Fermilab, SLAC, CERN and DESY. The system builds upon SPIRES, a heavily used high-energy physics electronic database of physicists' papers. According to a 2007 survey of 2,000 physicists by INSPIRE collaborators, 48.2 percent said SPIRES was their top source of information, compared to 8.5 percent for Google.

INSPIRE, set to launch in about six months, takes that information to a higher level of electronic sophistication. It relies on Google-like features, such as news alerts on newly archived papers. It also personalizes research. Users create an account, much like Google groups, which stores their findings.

Atkinson says INSPIRE is one of the most exciting projects he has worked on in his 17 years at the laboratory. During that time, he ushered the Library through various transformations, including the electronic one that made papers available online.

Atkinson is also proud of the Fermilab collection, a section of the Library dedicated to Fermilab's history that includes the laboratory's first design report and old newsletters. Previously, Fermilab-related publications had been scattered throughout the collection, making them difficult to find.

Outside of the Library, Atkinson still dabbles in radio as a long-standing member and vice president of Fermilab's Ham Radio Club.

--Kristine Crane

New employees

Sitting, left to right: Elena Gerchtein, CD, guest scientist; Elena Farago-Trofimuk, Finance; accounting assistant III. Front row: Anna Chastain, BSS, administrative support assistant I; Maiko Takahashi, PPD, guest scientist (International Fellowship). Back row: Joshua Grossheider, BSS, administrative support assistant I; Mark Williams, PPD, guest scientist (International Fellowship); Min Jong Kim, TD, applications developer and systems analyst I.

Looking for dark matter in all the wrong places

From Cosmic Variance, Feb. 4, 2009

David Harris at symmetrybreaking points to a paper and accompanying commentary on the search for high-energy cosmic antiprotons by the PAMELA satellite experiment. (What one defines as "high-energy" depends on one's upbringing; we're talking about energies of up to 100 times the mass of the proton.) The impression is given that this is a brand-new result casting doubt on the earlier claims that PAMELA might have detected evidence for dark matter; that's not really a correct impression, so it's worth getting it all straight.

The PAMELA satellite, an Italian/Russian/German/Swedish collaboration, looks at high-energy cosmic rays from orbit, and pays particular attention to the presence of antimatter - basically, positrons (anti-electrons) and anti-protons. Part of the idea is that a high-energy matter particle can simply be a particle that had been lying around for a while and was accelerated to large velocities by magnetic fields or other astrophysical processes, whereas you need some pretty high energies to produce antiparticles in the first place. Say, for example, from the annihilation of dark matter particles with each other. There are certainly some high-energy collisions in the ordinary non-dark-matter world, so you expect to see a certain fraction of antimatter, but that fraction should noticeably diminish as you get to higher and higher energies.

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