Thursday, June 9, 2011
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Thursday, June 9
2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Jean-Marie Frere, Universite Libre de Bruxelles
Title: Why Neutrinos are Different
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY

Friday, June 10
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Joint Experimental-Theoretical Physics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Joe Haley, Northeastern University
Title: To Be Announced

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Wilson Hall Cafe

Thursday, June 9

- Breakfast: Apple sticks
- Santa Fe black bean soup
- Steak tacos
- Chicken Wellington
- Chimichangas
- Baked ham & swiss on a ciabatta roll
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Smart cuisine: crispy fried chicken salad

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Chez Leon

Friday, June 10
Closed

Wednesday, June 15
- Southern-style chicken salad
- Corn muffins
- Peach pie

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Feature

Enjoy Fermilab Family Outdoor Fair on June 12

Children can learn about nature at Fermilab's Family Outdoor Fair this weekend.

Enjoy a day of bison, birds and bugs while learning about science and fun things to do outside this summer at Fermilab’s annual Family Outdoor Fair.

Families and scout troops can drop by anytime between 1 and 4 p.m. Sunday, June 12, to explore a dozen hands-on activities that highlight the plant and animal life found at the Batavia physics laboratory.

The 4-year-old program grew out of the Leave No Child Inside initiative aimed at keeping children active and learning during the summer. Children can learn about history from peering in a replica covered wagon, geology from examining a large fossil collection, ecology from taking a prairie scavenger hunt and coring soil samples and biology from examining animals and their habitats.

“Science doesn’t have to just happen in a lab,” said Sue Sheehan, Fermilab Education Office. “We want to show parents and their children that science is everywhere.”

Children can make animal print tracks, net pond critters, take a nature scavenger hunt on a trail through the prairie and dig through decaying logs for insects. They can view the laboratory’s bison herd, hear about its history and use a stop watch to see if they can run faster than these 1,500-pound beasts.

Read more

Special Announcement

LHC scientist Lyn Evans to give public lecture June 12

Lyn Evans, former LHC project manager, will give a public lecture at the TIPP 2011 conference on Sunday, June 12. Photo: Copyright 2008 CERN.

In a public lecture from 3-4:30 p.m., on Sunday, June 12, at the Sheraton Hotel & Towers in Chicago, physicist Lyn Evans will share his experience as the project manager for the LHC at CERN. The lecture, titled “Marvel of Technology: the LHC, machine and experiments,” is free and open to the public. Attendance is first come, first served.

Evans will provide an overview of the accelerator, its four gargantuan experiments and their scientific goals. The public lecture is part of the conference on Technology and Instrumentation in Particle Physics 2011 (TIPP 2011), which takes place from June 9-14 in Chicago. The conference is sponsored in part by Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.

Read the full press release.

Photos of the Day

Energy Secretary Steven Chu gets to know Fermilab

Fermilab scientist Aron Soha, front, and US CMS Project Manager Joel Butler, back, give Energy Secretary Steven Chu a tour of Fermilab's Remote Operations Center. US CMS scientists use Fermilab's ROC to monitor data coming from the CMS experiment at the LHC. Photo: Reidar Hahn.
MINERvA experiment co-spokesperson Debbie Harris gives Energy Secretary Steven Chu a tour of the MINOS underground experimental hall, where the MINERvA experiment is located. Joining Chu on the tour were Universities Research Association, Inc. Executive Chair Steven Beering, visible on the left, and Deputy Manager of the DOE Fermi Site Office Mark Bollinger, visible behind Harris. Chu visited the laboratory on June 2. Photo: Reidar Hahn.
In the News

The case of the missing proton spin

From iSGTW, June 1, 2011

It's been nearly 25 years since the European Muon Collaboration made a startling discovery: only a portion of a proton’s spin comes from the quarks that make up the proton.

The revelation was a bit of a shock for physicists who had believed that the spin of a proton could be calculated simply by adding the spin states of the three constituent quarks. This is often described as the "proton spin crisis."

"At that time people realized protons are not just a sum of three quarks stuck together like Lego-blocks," said Jan Balewski, an MIT-based member of the Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC (STAR) experiment. "Protons are dynamic systems of interacting constituent quarks, gluons, and sea quarks."

Read more

Miriam Boon

Result of the Week

Lighting up the Higgs sector with photons at CDF

The outer figure shows the diphoton mass distribution from the CDF data as well as the fit to the data that is used to estimate the background in the search window. The inner figure shows the shape of the Higgs boson signal that physicists expect to see. The main idea is that if the Higgs boson was produced at a large enough rate in the detector, it would be visible as a narrow bump in this distribution.

In order to explain how elementary particles acquire mass, the Standard Model of particle physics predicts the existence of the Higgs boson - the only particle in the theory that physicists have not yet observed experimentally.

Physicists detect the Higgs indirectly because they expect it to decay into other particles in a tiny fraction of a second. For this result, CDF scientists considered a case where the Higgs decays into two photons, the particle version of light. A major challenge of such a search is that the probability of this occurring is very low – physicists expect only about two out of every 1,000 Higgs particles produced decay to photons.

Searching for the Higgs by identifying two photons is an appealing approach, however, because two photons produce a cleaner signature in the detector than typical Higgs boson decays, which produce sprays of particles in the detector like water from a hose. In contrast, photons leave compact and isolated clusters of energy. The clean signal in the detector makes it easier to reconstruct properties of the potential Higgs particle, such as its mass.

CDF scientists searched for a narrow mass bump in the diphoton data and shared their findings at a recent May 20, 2011 Fermilab seminar. They found no evidence for Higgs particles in the data.

These results prove that the Higgs boson isn't produced more often than a certain value in the Tevatron collisions, or the scientists would have seen it. These limits on the Higgs production rate are not as sensitive as the ones stemming from searches using the more probable Higgs decays, but they contribute to the overall Higgs search at the Tevatron. Additionally, the LHC is betting on this channel for a low-mass Higgs observation, so techniques developed at the Tevatron will likely be useful there (more information).

Some theories predict a much higher rate for the Higgs boson decay into photons. CDF scientists also interpreted their data for one such model.

In light of this model they again found no sign of the Higgs boson, but exclude Higgs masses below 114 GeV/c2. This is a nice improvement from the previous CDF result discussed in a 2008 ROW article and is currently the world's best limit on this type of Higgs particle.

Edited by Andy Beretvas

These physicists were responsible for this analysis: From left: Ray Culbertson, Fermilab; Karen Bland, Baylor University; Craig Group, University of Virginia and Fermilab; Azeddine Kasmi, Baylor University; Jay Dittmann, Baylor University; and Jamie Ray, not shown, Stanford University.
Accelerator Update

June 6-8

- Three stores provided ~44.65 hours of luminosity
- Mechanical support personnel installed a portable air compressor in the Main Injector
- Booster personnel removed NorthStar experimental equipment from MI-8
- 123E10 of antiprotons lost due to MI vacuum burst
- Store 8797 aborted due to power cable fault at Tevatron sector A0
- NuMI to take beam by June 11

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

Announcements

Latest Announcements

How to write an abstract - June 13

Heartland blood drive - June 20 & 21

Indian Creek Road closed - June 10

The ES&H and Computing Division websites will be down today

International Folk dancing in Ramsey Auditorium beginning today

Barn dance - June 12

Fermilab Family Outdoor Fair - June 12

10,000 Steps-A-Day personal fitness kit winner

Planned SharePoint infrastructure upgrade - June 12

Two high school seniors awarded ACU college scholarships

Introduction to LabVIEW class - June 16

Deadline for the UChicago tuition remission program - June 28

DASTOW 2011 - June 22

Fermilab management practices courses presented this summer

SciTech summer camps June 20 - Aug. 12

Fermilab Arts Series presents Chicago Afrobeat Project - June 18

Change in cashier's office hours

Beginner swim lessons at the pool

Learn to scuba dive at Fermi beginning June 15

Jazzercise employee discount

Water aerobics at the pool - June 13

Adult swim lessons at Fermi pool - June 13

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