 | Wednesday, August 3, 2005 |
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Wednesday, August 3 10:30-12:30 a.m. Fermilab Preparation for ILC Snowmass Workshop - 1 West Speakers: H. Edwards, S. Mishra, P. Piot, N. Mokhov, R. Kephart, V. Kuchler, J. Jackson - Fermilab Title: Preparation for ILC Snowmass Workshop 3:30 p.m. Director's Coffee Break - 2nd Flr X-Over 4:00 p.m. Fermilab Colloquium - 1 West Speaker: G. Barber, American Civil Liberties Union Title: The USA Patriot Act Controversy
Thursday, August 4 |
 Breezy 94º/74º
Extended Forecast |
Secon Level 3 |
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Wednesday, August 3 Italian Wedding Soup with Meatballs Diner Style Patty Melt $4.85 Chicken á la Mer $3.75 Beef and Broccoli $3.75 Greek Chicken Panini with Feta Cheese $4.75 Sicilian Style Pizza $3.00 Grilled Chicken Bowtie in a Tomato Cream Sauce $4.85 The Wilson Hall Cafe now accepts Visa, Master Card, Discover and American Express at Cash Register #1. |
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Wednesday, August 3 Lunch Tri-Colored Tortellini Salad Lemon Cheesecake w/Blueberry Sauce
Thursday, August 4
Chez Leon Menu |
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MIPP Measurements Aid MINOS Neutrino Research | ||
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The Main Injector Particle Production (MIPP) Experiment, located near the
Meson Lab in the Fixed-target Area, is close to achieving its goal of
recording 2 million proton interactions on a Neutrinos at the Main Injector
(NuMI) target. The data, which will be fully analyzed in a few months, will
help members of the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS)
calculate the flux of neutrinos passing through their near and far
detectors.
Although understanding particle production is an essential part of any Fermilab experiment, precise measurements of particle production cross sections have never been made. With its full particle acceptance rate and several different kinds of targets and detectors, "MIPP hopes to acquire high quality data of a caliber not yet achieved," said MIPP spokesperson Rajendran Raja. Currently, the absence of precise data about particle production is hindering MINOS' efforts to predict neutrino fluxes in their near and far detectors. MIPP is working to supply information about exactly how many pions and kaons are produced in a collision between the proton beam and the carbon NuMI target. Using that data, MINOS scientists will be able to predict the spectrum of neutrino interactions they should observe in their near and far detectors, assuming no neutrino oscillations. "The more precise data will enable them to ascribe deviations from the predictions to neutrino oscillations with greater confidence," Raja explained.
Ultimately, MINOS and MIPP hope to analyze 10 million proton interactions with the NuMI target. MIPP, which was approved in 2001 with funding from DOE and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, hopes to soon receive support for an upgrade that will make the experiment 100 times faster. "Approval of the upgrade will enable MIPP to collect much greater statistics in a large number of reactions much faster including 10 million events on the MINOS target," Raja said.
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From The Beacon News, August 2, 2005 Mining the universe By Nick Reiher SOUDAN, MINN. — Anglers of all shapes and sizes throw their lines into the well-stocked lakes, ponds and streams plunked in among the thousands of tall, green spruces guarding the Superior National Forest in northeastern Minnesota. But a group of scientists from throughout the world is fishing for tiny particles even more plentiful than the walleye here. Elements these anglers hope will yield clues to the very beginning, as well as the current content, of our universe. This fishing hole is truly a hidden treasure: part of an abandoned iron ore mine in Soudan, about 10 miles west of the increasingly popular Boundary Waters recreational town of Ely, Minn. One of the nation's richest iron ore mines, in fact, from 1882 to 1962, and now a popular tourist attraction. The equipment these scientists are using is a 6,000-ton sensor set up a half mile underground in Soudan Mine State Park. The lure? Catching newly formed neutrinos that began their 400-mile journey a few milliseconds earlier as protons shot out of the accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia. |
| SDSS Researchers Find Many, Many Quasar Pairs | ||
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When gas falls into a black hole, the gravitational energy that is liberated creates a powerful source of optical and X-ray emission. This process is very similar for stellar-mass black holes in the Milky Way, which we observe in X-ray binaries, and for supermassive black holes of a million to a billion solar masses, which we observe as quasars in distant galaxies.
The SDSS redshift (i.e., distance) surveys of galaxies and quasars were designed explicitly to study their spatial distribution. However, for technical reasons, the SDSS cannot obtain redshifts of most quasars that are close to each other. Therefore Hennawi and colleagues conducted an extensive followup program to find new quasars that are very close to other quasars, making use of the SDSS and the Anglo-Australian 2dF Quasar Redshift Survey and of a much larger sample of photometrically defined quasar candidates from the SDSS, providing an initial list of a few hundred thousand objects. After careful color selection of binary candidates, the Keck and Apache Point Observatories were used to confirm the quasar pair hypothesis. In this way, they found 218 new quasar pairs, of which 26 are within 150,000 light years of each other - doubling the known number of such objects. After applying statistical corrections, Hennawi and colleagues obtained the small-scale quasar correlation function and found that the clustering amplitude was much stronger than expected from an extrapolation of the large-scale clustering to the small scales observed here. A follow-up program is now under way to investigate whether this in fact means that quasars are triggered by interactions between galaxies. |
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Users' Executive Committee Elections The election to replace half of the members of the Users' Executive Committee is well underway. Thanks to those of you have already voted. If you have still not voted, please cast your ballot. Voting will close at midnight on Thursday, August 4th, and the results will be posted early next week.
Network Outage
International Folk Dancing
Recreation Sales Resume
Canoe Rentals Resume |
