Fermilab TodayThursday, December 22, 2005  
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Thursday, December 22
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DOE Prepares for Bidding of
Fermilab Contract in 2006
Bob Grant
Bob Grant is helping to prepare the URA bid.
Since its beginning, Fermilab has been managed and operated by Universities Research Association, Inc., a consortium that now includes 90 research universities. About a year from now, on December 31, 2006, the current contract between the Department of Energy and URA will expire.

In 2004, DOE announced that the next contract will be open for bidding. At present, DOE is soliciting Expressions of Interest (EoI) from organizations that might be interested in managing Fermilab either as a prime contractor or as a subcontractor partnering with another organization. The deadline for the submission of EoIs is Friday, December 23.

"The submission of the EoI can be done by email, just writing a few lines to put your name in there," said Bob Grant, who works on behalf of URA to prepare the URA bid. "For the actual proposal, you have to submit many volumes of paper and make an oral presentation to the Source Evaluation Board."

Submission of an EoI is not a prerequisite to participate in the bidding for the contract in 2006. Instead, the purpose of the EoI process is for DOE to gauge interest in the Fermilab contract and for interested parties to learn about potential partners and competitors.

Grant expects that the Department of Energy will issue a draft of its Request for Proposal (RFP) in the spring of 2006. Interested parties, whether they submitted an EoI or not, will be able to study the draft proposal and send comments to DOE for possible incorporation into the final RFP. The final Request for Proposal will be distributed in the late summer or early fall of 2006. Information on the members of the Source Evaluation Board, questions and answers from other interested parties, as well as other information related to the RFP process can be found on the DOE Website.
Kurt Riesselmann

Science Grid This Week
World Wide Webcast Features Grids
On Thursday, December 1, more than 13,000 people from over 100 countries tuned into a live webcast celebrating the World Year of Physics and Albert Einstein. The Beyond Einstein webcast, organized by CERN, included segments on subjects ranging from time travel to neutrinos to grid technology, transmitted from around the globe and headlined by Nobel laureates, physics visionaries and computing pioneers.
Read More

In the News
US Department of Energy Press Release, December 21, 2005: Los Alamos National Security LLC Selected to Manage Los Alamos National Laboratory

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman announced today that Los Alamos National Security LLC has been selected to be the management and operations contractor for Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Los Alamos National Security LLC is a limited liability corporation made up of Bechtel National, Inc., the University of California, BWX Technologies, Inc., and the Washington Group International, Inc.

The laboratory, one of three National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) nuclear weapons laboratories, performs sensitive national security missions, including helping to ensure that the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile is safe, secure and reliable.
Read More

Fermilab Result of the Week
Missing Energy to Hit the Top
Number of jets distribution in events with missing energy and a b-tag. The points are CDF data, the hatched histogram is the background contribution, and the red line shows the top contribution. The difference between the blue and green lines demonstrates the extra top events expected in the data. (Click on image for larger version.)
CDF has discovered a lost jewel in a new analysis which finds events with top quarks that would have otherwise never been unearthed.

The top quark is a fascinating particle that can only be produced in the highest energy proton-antiproton collisions, which the Fermilab Tevatron collider provides.

Top quark pairs have been mined for a decade from collider data by the CDF and DZero experiments mainly in events that feature the golden signature of a detected electron or muon of high energy, produced when a top quark decays to a W boson and that particle in turn produces a lepton-neutrino pair.

Since charged leptons are only detected at large angle from the beam axis, many decays are lost, as well as most W decays producing a tau lepton, which is hard to tag efficiently.

In a new analysis by the CDF-Padova group, those lost decays are recovered from events with multiple hadronic jets. The strategy is to identify the phantom neutrino from the leptonic W decay, by measuring the unobservable "missing" energy it carries away. Momentum conservation, in fact, dictates that a neutrino leaving the detector will recoil against all the other produced particles, which are measured in the calorimeter. By requiring a significant recoil, the data is automatically enriched in top quark decays that are otherwise lost for good. Using the recovered events the group has produced CDF's third-best estimate of the production cross section of top quark pairs. An article describing the measurement is in preparation.

Authors
They did it: left to right, Tommaso Dorigo, Giorgio Cortiana, Giovanni Busetto, and Julien Donini, all from Padova University. (Click image for larger version.)

 Result of the Week Archive

Accelerator Update
December 19 - 21
- During the 48 hour period operations established two stores that along with a previous store provided the experiments with 38 hours and 30 minutes of luminosity.

Read the Current Accelerator Update
Read the Early Bird Report
View the Tevatron Luminosity Charts

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