Shutdown begins today

AD employees wait patiently this morning to get keys for areas of the Accelerator Complex from Mary Kohler. Today is the first official day of the 2009 summer shutdown.

Although many pieces of the Accelerator Complex and associated experiments shut down last week or over the weekend, the shutdown officially begins today.

The shutdown will last 11 to 15 weeks and will allow for a series of repairs, replacements and upgrades to the accelerator and detector components in order to keep the complex performing well.

While power outages are necessary during the shutdown, no site-wide power outages will take place this week. A power outage on Saturday will affect DZero and one on Sunday will affect CDF.

More information about the shutdown and future power outages will be available in Fermilab Today.

Take Five to improve safety

Fermilab has launched the "Take Five" campaign to give you the tools to improve ES&H and promote best practices. Find useful links to help you complete your job safely and effectively at the new Take Five Web site.

Former DZero collaborator wins URA award

Mikko Voutilainen accepts the URA Thesis Award from URA president Fred Bernthal.

Mikko Voutilainen knew his graduate student work on DZero would help ease analysis of LHC data.

But he didn't know he would eventually benefit from that work himself as a member of CMS working at CERN, or that it would earn him the 2008 URA Thesis Award.

"I was jumping up and down when I got the call about the award," Voutilainen said.

He flew to Fermilab last week to receive the award for his work on jet cross section at the 42nd annual Users' Meeting. Winners are judged on the basis of originality, physics content and clarity of presentation.

Voutilainen's work was selected out of 22 nominations, the largest number since the contest's inception 12 years ago. This was the first time two nominations were for astrophysics research, said Fred Bernthal, URA president.

Voutilainen's thesis "Measurement of the Inclusive Jet Cross Section in p-pbar Collisons at square root of s=1.96 TeV" is a detailed study of the elements required to measure the inclusive jet cross section at the Tevatron. His measurement of the jet energy scale produced a result twice as precise as previous results in that scale.

"Mikko's analysis significantly constrains the Parton Distribution Functions, and will therefore be directly relevant to the study of physics processes from the LHC," said Steve Brice, award committee chair.

The analysis looked at kinematics and pinned down the distribution of constituents in protons and antiprotons. Voutilainen worked on his thesis during the 3 1/2 years he was at DZero. He also worked on Quantum Chromodynamics studies.

He enjoyed his time at Fermilab and said returning for the Users' Meeting was like coming back home.

"It is important to recognize young people like Mikko are vital to the success of Fermilab," Bernthal said.

--Tia Jones

New recipe for true muonium: take one muon

From New York Times, June 9, 2009

Just as kids fit Lego and Tinker Toy pieces into every conceivable shape, particle physicists play around with the building blocks of matter, looking for permutations that do not generally exist in nature.

Decades ago, after discovering the positron - the antimatter, positively charged counterpart of an electron - physicists found they could bind an electron and a positron together into a configuration where the two particles spin around each other like a binary star system or two dogs chasing each other's tails. They named this concoction positronium.

The unexpected discovery of the muon, a particle that possesses the same electric charge as an electron but is more than 200 times heavier, opened the door to another novelty. Mundane hydrogen consists of an electron orbiting a proton. Substituting an antimuon for the proton, the physicists created an exotic atom they called muonium (mew-OH-nee-um).

Read more