Fermilab Today

Calendar

Tuesday, July 7
10:30 a.m.
Research Techniques Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Maurice Garcia-Sciveres, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Title: ATLAS Upgrades for High Luminosity
Noon
Summer Lecture Series - Curia II
Speaker: Juan Estrada, Fermilab
Title: Astrophysics and Dark Energy
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY

Wednesday, July 8
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - 1 West
Speaker: Joseph Dwyer, Florida Institute of Technology
Title: X-Ray Emission from Thunderstorms and Lightning

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a weekly calendar with links to additional information.

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Take Five
Tune IT Up

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WeatherSunny
75°/58°

Extended Forecast
Weather at Fermilab

Current Security Status

Secon Level 3

Wilson Hall Cafe

Tuesday, July 7
- Creamy turkey vegetable
- Chili dog
- Country fried steak
- Chicken cacciatore
- Italian panini w/provolone
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Super burrito

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, July 8
Lunch
- Almond chicken salad
- Turtle cheesecake

Thursday, July 9
Dinner
- Closed

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

Revolutionary neutral current discovery gets nod 36 years later

Former Gargamelle collaboration members and the first bubble chamber photos of neutral current interactions. Jorge Morfin holds the leptonic event and Harry Weerts holds one of the hadronic events.

In a room at a German university a physicist went through his daily routine. He walked down the line of bubble-chamber photo scanners. He leafed through the piles of particle interaction photos scanners had recorded.

One image caught his eye.

Soon another physicist was called over to look, and another. The excitement was palpable. By evening, everyone in the Aachen group — and soon thereafter everyone in the rest of the Gargamelle collaboration — knew particle physics would never be the same.

"It actually provided the experimental foundation for what we now call the Standard Model," says Harry Weerts, recounting the observation of the first neutral current event in 1972 - a single electron scattering.

Jorge Morfin, also on the team searching for this leptonic event, agrees.

"Seldom has a single interaction had such a dramatic impact on particle physics" he says.

Identity theft Webinar July 8

An hour-long Webinar on identity theft will take place at two times on Wednesday, July 8. The event, which is organized by Fermilab's Employee Assistance Program, will take place at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Anyone interested in virtually attending the live event can register through the Fermilab EAP Web site with the User ID: Fermilab and the password: eap.

Those unable to attend the Webinar live may access it later through the Webinar archives.

In Brief

Aquatic survey underway

"Turtle" traps were installed Monday and will be checked through Thursday.

Environmentalists with the Illinois Natural History Survey will be onsite through Thursday setting traps at DUSAF Pond, A.E. Sea and Lake Law. The traps are not designed for a specific species, but trappers expect to catch snapping, slider and soft-shelled turtles. The traps will be checked daily, the animal species recorded and the animals released. The trapping is part of the Canadian National Railway’s five-year environmental mitigation study.

In the News

Foundation gives Canadian physics a boost

From Physicsworld.com, June 25, 2009

Two of Canada's best known physics facilities are expanding thanks in part to separate grants from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI). The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Laboratory (SNOLAB) in Ontario has bagged C10ドル.6m, to be spent on the ongoing expansion of its underground facilities. Meanwhile, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario has received C10ドル.0m to double the size of its facility.

A new star

Fermilab Deputy Director Young-Kee Kim poses for a photo with Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) Director Shoji Nagamiya at the inauguration of the facility on July 6.

There is a new star in the particle physics firmament. With great fanfare and some thousand celebrants, the inauguration of the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) took place in Tokyo on Monday. Ministers, Diet members, mayors, politicians, Nobel Prize winners, laboratory directors, physicists, the press and many visitors from abroad were on hand to hear presentations on the physics and history of J-PARC and to congratulate Shoji Nagamiya the director of J-PARC and his colleagues on the completion of this great facility. Fermilab Deputy Director Young-Kee Kim represented our laboratory at the celebrations.

It is not often that a major particle physics facility is brought into being. The most recent are the tau-charm factory BEPCII in Beijing, China, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland and now J-PARC in Tokai, Japan. J-PARC is a joint venture between the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba and the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI) in Tokai. It is now the largest accelerator facility in Japan, representing an investment of about 2ドル billion dollars. It serves several scientific communities using intense beams of protons to drive particle physics, nuclear physics, material sciences, life sciences and nuclear waste transmutation research. Most importantly for us, it will establish new powerful proton beams that create both a competitive and complementary program to our own intensity frontier programs in neutrinos and rare processes.

We look forward to a strong collaboration with J-PARC. We have similar interests in pushing the intensity frontier in the study of neutrinos and rare processes. The experiments are very challenging and will require different modes of experimentation. At the intensity frontier we can make many complementary measurements, with different beam energies and base-lines, detector technologies, and experimental configurations. We look forward to many years in which we will work closely together with our J-PARC colleagues to optimize the world program.

Directors Pier Oddone and Shoji Nagamiya seen through a wide aperture quadrupole in the J-PARC facility on a previous visit.

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