Thursday, May 26
2:30 p.m. Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: G. Salam, LPTHE, Paris
Title: Impact of Higher Orders in the High-Energy Limit
of QCD
3:30 p.m. DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND
TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY
Friday, May 27
3:30 p.m. DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4:00 p.m. Joint Experimental Theoretical Physics Seminar - 1 West
Speaker: A. Safonov, University of California, Davis
Title: Searches for Supersymmetry at CDF
|
Thursday, May 26
Santa Fe Black Bean Soup
Sloppy Joe $4.75
Tex-Mex Lasagna $3.75
Sauteed Liver & Onions $3.75
Baked Ham & Swiss on a Ciabatta Roll $4.75
California Pizza $2.75
Crispy Fried Chicken Ranch Salad $4.75
The Wilson Hall Cafe now accepts Visa, Master Card, Discover and
American Express at Cash Register #1.
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu
Chez Leon
is now open. Call x4512 to make your
reservation.
|
|
|
Posters on Display from Annual DOE Review
|
|
Posters from the Annual DOE Program Review will be on display
on the 15th floor until Tuesday, May 31. (Click on image for larger version.) |
|
From the Science Grid to the ILC, thirty-three Fermilab researchers
prepared posters covering a broad range of topics as part of this week's
Annual DOE Program Review. Due to time limitations during the review,
many of the posters present topics that were only briefly covered in oral
presentations to the review committee.
"The posters represent a nice summary of the various research fields performed
at Fermilab," said the Technical Division's Emanuela Barzi, who helped
organize the poster session together with
Win Baker and Fernanda Garcia. "In an ever faster paced world, spending a
couple of hours browsing through these posters might possibly be the
most efficient way to get updated on state-of-the-art research."
The posters are on display on the 15th floor of Wilson Hall. They will remain
available for viewing until Tuesday, May 31. A selection of the posters are
also available online.
--Elizabeth Clements
|
Making a Neutrino Factory One Muon at a Time
|
|
A diagram of the MICE experiment (Click on image for larger version.) |
|
Fermilab will soon be testing specially designed radio frequency cavities and
liquid hydrogen absorbers at the MUCOOL Testing Area, an earthen berm recently
constructed at end of the Linac, that are critical for the Muon Ionization
Cooling Experiment. MICE is a big step towards a full scale neutrino factory
that produces both electron and muon neutrinos. A neutrino factory could lead
to possible discoveries of CP violation that go beyond the Standard Model
of physics. "The number of steps needed before making a neutrino factory is
now limited," Geer said. "It's pretty exciting."
Research and development work for MICE has been happening for years, but it was
only in March that the United Kingdom, home of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
where MICE will be built, guaranteed funding. "It now feels like a real
|
Steve Geer |
experiment, not just a hope," MICE Executive Board Member Steve Geer said.
MICE will control the muon beam line with a series of energy absorbers and RF
cavities that slow down, position, and accelerate individual muons repeatedly.
Imagine trying to find a house with just an address. Every now and then you veer
off course and must slow down to be pointed in the right direction again.
MICE will put the particles back on course, one muon at a time, towards a future
neutrino factory.
The parts have been developed by the Neutrino Factory and Muon Collider
Collaboration, which includes nearby local universities and institutions
such as the Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Illinois Urbana,
Northern Illinois University, and Argonne National Laboratory.
-- Eric Bland
|
From the Stanford Report, May 25, 2005
Young physicists featured in NOVA documentary on Einstein's famous equation
by Kendall Madden
Huge floodlights cut across the cavernous expanse of the Stanford Linear Detector and illuminate the outer wall of the control room. Coils of artificial fog seethe from a machine hidden at the end of a makeshift plank walkway raised several feet off the floor. The mist floats along the planks and rises toward the ceiling, several stories above the heads of the bustling camera crew. The wall of the control room is a massive grid of switches and multi-colored lights that blink like goblin eyes. The entire space—which houses equipment once used in the world's largest physics collaboration—has assumed an eerie, underworld quality. It is Harry Potter meets particle physics.
Read more
|
|
|
Beauty Leads to the Top
|
|
Events with at least one b-tagged jet are classified by the number of jets. Events with one or two jets contain little signal and are used to validate the background estimation. Events with three or more jets are used to measure the top quark pair production rate.
(Click on image for larger version.) |
|
While it has been ten years since its discovery by the CDF and
DZero collaborations, we still know little about the top quark.
One of its most striking properties is the fact that it weighs as much
as a gold atom while presumably being an elementary particle. By itself,
this opens the tantalizing possibility that the top quark might be closely
related to the mechanism by which particles acquire mass and therefore
offer insight into one of mankind's most fundamental questions: "what
is the origin of mass?". This requires detailed measurements of all top
quark properties, a task fully within reach of experimenters at the Tevatron
Run II thanks to the impressive performance of the accelerator and the CDF
and DZero detectors. The DZero experiment has come a bit closer to answering
this question by performing a precise measurement of the production rate of top quark pairs.
Its extremely short lifetime does not allow to detect the top quark directly
by interaction with the detector. However, it can be recognized by one of its
decay daughters, the bottom quark (b quark), which has a very characteristic
property: it can travel several millimeters before decaying to lighter particles.
DZero's silicon microstrip tracker is used to reconstruct b-decay vertices,
allowing to identify with high efficiency top quark pair events, while rejecting most of background events, which rarely feature b quarks in the final state.
So far, the measurement of the top quark pair production cross section is found to be in agreement with the Standard Model expectation.
A plain English summary of this measurement can be found
here,
together with a link to the full article submitted for publication.
|
|
|
Ron Lipton (FNAL)(left) led the construction and
installation of the Run IIa silicon tracker, vital to the b-tagging used
in this analysis, and along with Dmitri Tsybychev (SUSB)(right) has been deeply
involved with the Layer 0 upgrade of the SMT. |
|
|
(Front Row, L-R) R. Demina (Rochester), F. Rizatdinova (Kansas)
(Back Row, L-R) C.Clement (Stockholm), A. Khanov (Fermilab),
E. Shabalina (UIC), A. Juste (Fermilab) performed this measurement.
(Click on image for larger version.) |
|
|
|
Sara Lager (FNAL) and Jonas Strandberg (Stockholm) also contributed to this result. |
|
Result of the Week Archive
|
Weekly Time Sheets Due Tomorrow
With the upcoming Memorial Day Holiday on Monday,
Weekly Time Sheets are due
in Payroll by 10:00 a.m on Friday May 27, 2005
Save the date! Witherell Symposium, Reception on Thursday, July 14
Fermilab will hold a symposium, "Fermilab Science: The Witherell Years" in
honor of Michael Witherell, who will leave his position as director on June
30. The Symposium will be held in Ramsey Auditorium on the afternoon of July
14, and will be followed by a labwide reception at 4:30 p.m. in the Wilson
Hall atrium. Fermilab Today will publish more details as soon as they are
available.
2-for-1 Tickets for World Premiere
From May 27 to July 10, Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago will show
the play Symmetry, the world premiere of David C. Field's drama
pitting big business, pure science and power politics. Set in present
time, the play portraits a brilliant young physicist determined to
escape the obscurity of his small southwestern university. Performances
on June 2 and June 9 have pre-show lectures with Jeff Harvey and Sean
Carroll, University of Chicago. To receive tickets at a 2-for-1 discount,
Fermilab employees should call 773-871-3000 and mention this announcement.
more information
Upcoming Activities
|
|