Fermilab Today Wednesday, March 11, 2009
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Wednesday, March 11
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - One West
Speaker: R. Sekhar Chivukula, Michigan State University
Title: The Symmetries of QCD

Thursday, March 12
THERE WILL BE NO PHYSICS AND DETECTOR SEMINAR THIS WEEK
2:30 m.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Roni Harnik, Stanford University
Title: Astrophysical Probes of Unification
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY

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a weekly calendar with links to additional information.

Weather

Weather

Sunny
29°/13°

Extended Forecast
Weather at Fermilab

Current Security Status

Secon Level 3

Wilson Hall Cafe

Wednesday, March 11
- Smart cuisine: Cajun style lentil soup
- Cajun chicken ranch
- Smart cuisine: Tilapa w/jalapeno lime sauce
- Chicken parmesan
- Smoked turkey panini pesto mayo
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Chicken Alfredo fettucine

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, March 11
Lunch
- Chicken breast stuffed w/sundried tomatoes & goat cheese with a shallot thyme sauce
- Orzo
- Carmel apple shortcake

Thursday, March 12
Dinner
- Field greens w/ cranberries, blue cheese and walnuts
- Citrus glazed mahi mahi
- Cashew basmati rice
- Sautéed pea pod & water chestnuts
- Lemon meringue ice cream pie in toasted pecan crust

Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

Archives

Fermilab Today
Result of the Week
Safety Tip of the Week
ILC NewsLine

Info

Fermilab Today
is online at:
www.fnal.gov/today/

Send comments and suggestions to:
today@fnal.gov

Special Result of the Week

Single and loving it!

Cecilia GerberRainer Wallny

Left to right: Cecilia Gerber, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, presented the DZero result and Rainer Wallny, of UCLA, showed CDF's result

Single physicist searching for single red, blue or green, top quark for fun and possible long term relationship. Must like high speeds and live life fast. I'll be waiting for you in the control room of a large Fermilab particle detector.

Fourteen years ago this month, the DZero and CDF experiments jointly announced the discovery of top quarks. In those observations, top quarks were always produced in pairs. A quark and antiquark from the proton and antiprotons in the beam annihilated into a gluon that then became a top quark and an antimatter top quark. By capturing just a couple of dozen collisions in which these quarks were made, scientists were able to definitively say top quarks existed.

Pairs of top quarks are relatively easy to see since they have a distinct signature, but it has long been assumed that it is also possible to create collisions producing a single top quark. As an example, in these types of collisions, a quark and antimatter quark from the beams combine and create the weak-force carrying W boson. This W boson then decays into a top quark and a bottom antimatter quark. Because the W boson only has half the mass of a top quark, this kind of event could not occur without the principles of quantum mechanics. The W boson in these events briefly has about double the regular mass, allowing the reaction to proceed.

Physicists have been combing the data from billions of collisions for years, looking for events in which single top quarks have been made. Even though the Tevatron produces about the same amount of top quark pairs as single tops, these events are trickier to isolate. The false positive rate is much higher. It’s much harder to mistakenly find two top quarks than just one.

However DZero and CDF jointly presented yesterday to a packed house at Fermilab their newest results: a discovery of the single top quark .A celebration in the Fermilab User’s Center followed the presentation. Yet another piece of the Standard Model puzzle has clicked neatly into place.

Single and loving it ...

-- Don Lincoln and Craig Group

The evidence for the single top quark production was shown at Fermilab at a special seminar to a standing-room only crowd.

In the News

Congress Sends $410 Billion Spending Bill to Obama for Signing

From Bloomberg, March 11, 2009

The U.S. Congress gave final approval to a $410 billion bill that will boost domestic spending, loosen the trade embargo on Cuba and fund thousands of congressional pet projects known as earmarks.

The Senate, after a delay last week that highlighted Democrats' tenuous grip on the chamber, approved the so-called omnibus bill on a voice vote yesterday. Moments earlier, the bill cleared a key procedural vote, 62 to 35. The legislation, which the House passed Feb. 25, heads to President Barack Obama for his signature into law.

Democrats said the bill would provide needed funding increases for federal agencies that saw too many lean years during former President George W. Bush's administration.

"The agencies of our government have been so under-funded and under-resourced during the Bush years that these agencies need this money so they can function properly," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat.

Read more

Special Announcement

Indian Association of Fermilab presents Dandia/Garba dance event March 27

The Indian Association of Fermilab, Drishiti, will host a celebration in honor of the Indian Holi festival with dancing done in two styles: Dandia and Garba. The open celebration takes place from 4 to 6:30 p.m. on Friday, March 28, in Kuhn Barn in the Fermilab Village.

These dances feature circular movements timed to the clapping of hands or jingling of sticks along with the sounds of various musical instruments.

Garba, a popular folk dance, is a unique group dance where people dressed in colorful dresses move gracefully in a circle. Dandia, a light-spirited dance, is performed with decorated bamboo sticks called dandies held in the hands. Drishiti will provide Dandia sticks for the dance, and will offer free lessons for newcomers.

View a demonstration of Dandia here.

A potluck dinner will follow the dance. Please bring your favorite dish to share. Tickets are $5 per person, and reservations are required. Please RSVP by March 16 to Fermilab.Drishti@gmail.com.

Director's Corner

Padova

Pier Oddone

Pier Oddone under the sculpture of the first female laureate from a public university, Elena Lucrezia Conaro Piscopia who graduated in 1678.

Yesterday I visited the University of Padova to discuss potential future collaborations with the leadership of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN). Professor Roberto Petronzio, President of INFN, and his colleagues were very welcoming. Fermilab has had a hugely valuable collaboration with Italian groups supported by INFN over many years. We both are interested now in extending our collaboration to future projects. An area where we have a commonality of interests and where we could develop an important collaboration is in the development of liquid argon time projection chambers for the study of neutrino interactions.

Italian groups under the direction of Carlo Rubbia have pioneered liquid argon TPCs and are ready to fill a 600-ton detector, ICARUS, deep underground in the Gran Sasso laboratory. Later this year they should be in a position to detect neutrinos from the CERN beam. In addition, they are proposing to build multi-kiloton liquid argon detectors for future long base line experiments. At Fermilab we have an R&D program towards the development of the technology. We are ready to use a small detector, ArgoNeut, in the NUMI hall; we are developing MicroBooNE to determine the nature of the excess events at low energies observed by MiniBooNE and at the same time learn how to scale detectors to large masses; and, we will be designing very large multi-kiloton detectors for future long-baseline neutrino experiments such as DUSEL. Clearly there is much to gain in moving forward in collaboration. Several models are possible, and we will explore them over the next several months.

Discussing science in Padova is special for physicist like myself coming from a relatively young American physics tradition. The university was founded in 1222. Galileo by his own account spent his best 18 years here from 1592 to 1610. Today some 65,000 students attend the University of Padova. Graduating ceremonies were taking place in Padova when we visited, and we saw more female than male graduates going through centuries-old graduating rituals.

This year we celebrate the Year of Astronomy, the 400th anniversary of Galileo's astronomical discoveries while in Padova. In celebration the university and the city of Padova have created a great exhibit on Galileo's achievements and subsequent developments in science up to the LHC. The exhibit includes some original texts from the XVII century and very early telescopes and microscopes. The university has many centuries of contributions to science. In one room the pictures of distinguished foreign faculty going back centuries adorns the wall — no visa problems then. In 1678 the university graduated the first woman from any public university in the world. It graduated the second woman 200 years later and appointed its first female professor to a faculty chair only in the 1960s. The latter, Professor Milla Baldo Ceolin, is our lively host at the Neutrino Telescope Conference taking place in Venice during this week.

Safety Update

ES&H weekly report, March 9

This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ES&H section, lists no injuries reported. We have now worked 6 days since the last recordable injury. Find the full report here.

Safety report archive

Announcements

Latest Announcements

Dandia/Garba dance evening on March 28

WDRS researches Transit Benefit Program

Coed softball season begins May 13

Harlem Globetrotter employee discount

Have a safe day!

Free Step Aerobics class in March

Discount tickets to "1964"...Beatles Tribute - June 6

Discount tickets to"Dora the Explorer Live"- March 26-29

Blackberry Oaks Golf League

Sustainable Energy Club

New electronic org chart

Muscle Toning classes

Kyuki Do classes March 30

Barnstromers Delta Dart night March 11

Fermilab Arts Series presents Solas March 14

Barn Dance March 15

Altium Designer Lunch and Learn Seminar March 17

Excel 2007 Pivot Tables class March 18

PowerPoint 2007: Intro class March 19

Bulgarian Dance Workshop March 19

URA visiting Scholars applications due March 20

NALWO Adler Planetarium Trip March 21

Child Care program March 24

Publisher 2007: Intro class April 1

Conflict Management & Negotiation Skills class April 1

English Country Dancing April 5

Outlook 2007 New Features class April 8

SciTech Summer Camps

Phillips Park Golf League

 
Additional Activities


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