Physics lab aids bird conservation effort

January 14, 2009 | 8:28 am

While experimenters at Fermilab track the flight of subatomic particles from collisions in three-story detectors along the Tevatron accelerator ring, nature lovers hover above them tracking the health of American bird populations.

Bald eagle at Fermilab

Members of area Audubon societies, the Chicago Wilderness organization, and other bird enthusiasts migrated to the 6800-acre laboratory 40 miles outside of Chicago on Dec. 20 for the annual Christmas bird count.

Similar teams through North and South America conducted counts in December and January. About 50,000 volunteers at 2000 sites, including several in Illinois, make up the North American team. The count allows avian experts to get a record of bird migration and population trends that can help tell the health of a species and whether actions are needed to prevent a specific species from joining the endangered animals list.

The tradition started in December 1900, when Frank Chapman, an early member of the Audubon Society, challenged people to replace the bird hunting Christmas tradition with one of bird counting.

Fermilab joined the tradition in 1976.

This year, 94 participants, two feeders, and one watcher joined the count. A list of the 81 species recorded can be found here.

Great blue heron at Fermilab

Between the Christmas bird count and a separate count conducted by Fermilab physicist Peter Kasper, Fermilab has been able to recorded 277 different species of birds. You can see the annual count results and pictures of many of the birds here.

Helping with the bird count is just one of the many things Fermilab participates in as part of a goal of blending nature and science. Fermilab also is one of only six Enviormental Research Parks in the nation.

Turkey vulture at Fermilab

Tona Kunz

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SLAC and Fermilab in Google Maps

January 13, 2009 | 1:38 pm

Keen eyes noticed that Google Maps’ street view function was recently switched on for some roads within the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, as reported in SLAC Today. The Google van, which sports a roof-mounted 360°-view camera, had at some time in the past year or so driven through SLAC and snapped shots of the roads as it went, entering via the Alpine Rd gate and exiting on Sand Hill Rd. Take the tour yourself starting here.

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In November, Google Maps made news connected with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory when for some strange reason, the lab began to show up 15 miles west of its real location, as reported in the Kane Country Chronicle. After contacting Fermilab contacted Google, the location search started working correctly again.

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David Harris

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Welcome to Fermilab

January 12, 2009 | 6:18 pm

For anyone who wonders what goes on at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, this will be your weekend to find out. Fermilab will open its doors to visitors of all ages for its fifth annual Family Open House on Saturday, Jan. 17.

The Fermilab Open House gives kids a chance to explore science.

The party begins at 1 p.m. at Wilson Hall and will include hands-on science activities and science shows–including an especially cool cryogenics demonstration by the ever-popular Mr. Freeze. Visitors aged 10 and up will go behind the scenes on tours of the Linear Accelerator, the Main Control Room and some experimental areas. And future physicists and the inquisitive alike can bring their most burning physics questions to a Q & A with a view at the Ask-a-Scientist session on the 15th floor.

Those interested in attending can register free at http://ed.fnal.gov/ffse/openhouse/.

This year the open house is part of Science Chicago, the world’s largest science celebration. Over the course of the year-long program, Chicagoans will have the opportunity to learn about subjects ranging from dark matter and dark energy to organ transplants to human attraction to the chemistry of cooking.

The program aims to promote science education, highlight scientific and technological achievements, and encourage a city-wide discussion of science and technology. Hundreds of the Chicago area’s leading academic, scientific, corporate, and non-profit institutions will host thousands of Science Chicago events, many of them offered free of charge, between September 2008 and August 2009. For more information, see http://www.sciencechicago.com/.

Kathryn Grim

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Voyage of the ArgoNeuT

January 12, 2009 | 6:17 pm

The team running the ArgoNeuT detector is ready to send its vessel to sea–or at least into a stream of neutrinos at Fermilab.

ArgoNeuT prepares to embark down the tunnel.

ArgoNeuT, which stands for the Argon Neutrino Test project, is a liquid-argon detector used to study neutrino interactions. (To read an article about ArgoNeuT from symmetry magazine, click here.)

On Monday, the ArgoNeuT team lowered the detector in pieces into a kilometer-long tunnel where it will be exposed to a high-intensity neutrino beam.

The team tested the detector in August by collecting data from cosmic rays. The members have since made improvements such as replacing damaged readout cables to prepare the detector for the move.

“The detector is going to be 350 feet underground, so you’re not near a toolbox,” says Mitch Soderberg, a Yale post-doctoral assistant who works at Fermilab. “It’s crucial for us to prove it works above ground before moving it underground.”

The ArgoNeuT team plans to use the detector as a practice run for MicroBooNE, a liquid-argon neutrino detector to be about 200 times the size of ArgoNeuT.

“ArgoNeuT is a small detector, but it’s big step forward for those of us in the US as far as getting the technology to work,” Soderberg says.

Neutrinos are abundant in the universe, but they rarely interact with other particles, so physicists prefer large detectors that capture more of those interactions. No one in the United States has ever built a large-scale liquid-argon neutrino detector.

Currently, the largest neutrino detector is Super-Kamiokande in Japan, which uses a tank of about 50,000 tons of purified water to capture neutrinos and their interactions with matter.

Technicians lower ArgoNeuT into the tunnel.

When a particle produced in a neutrino interaction ionizes a particle of liquid argon, it knocks an electron free. Because liquid argon is more inert than water, the electron can drift through it without being absorbed. The ArgoNeuT detector features a set of wires that create an electric field to attract electrons. The wires register when an electron passes through.

Liquid-argon detectors can differentiate between particles better than water detectors can, Soderberg says, but they do have their drawbacks. Only ultra-clean argon allows electrons to drift without being absorbed by impurities.

“Keeping a big tank full of liquid argon and detector components completely free of tiny amounts of impurities is very hard,” Soderberg says. “It’s the big challenge we have to solve before building very large detectors.”

ArgoNeuT is too small to contain some types of particle interactions, such as muons produced when a neutrino and an argon atom interact. The team will rely on the nearby MINOS neutrino detector, located in the same tunnel as ArgoNeuT, to catch any outgoing particles and create a more complete picture.

Soderberg said he and other physicists hope to eventually build a 50,000-ton version of a liquid-argon detector to place in a proposed Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory.

Kathryn Grim

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New CERN director-general speaks to staff

January 12, 2009 | 1:35 pm

New CERN Director-General Rolf-Dieter Heuer. Photo: Maximilien Brice, CERN

New CERN director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer gave his first presentation to the CERN community this morning in Geneva, Switzerland. Heuer’s talk, well received by a standing-room-only crowd, outlined his vision for the particle physics laboratory’s next five years. A summary is below, or the full one-hour presentation can be viewed, along with powerpoint slides, online.

LHC repair, restart

No new schedule for the LHC restart has been issued; the current plan still shows the LHC being cold and ready for beams again by mid-July. Things may change by mid-February, however. Heuer hopes that a final schedule addressing the time to complete repairs, and the duration, energy, and luminosity for collisions in 2009, will be issued after a meeting in Chamonix, France, scheduled for the first week in February. The LHC repair cost, including the resupply of spare magnets, was estimated at 30-40 million Swiss Francs. Two additional external assessment groups are being set up in the wake of the incident last September: one to examine the LHC’s quench protection system and another to investigate risk analysis. Another task force will re-examine the safety of personnel in the underground areas associated with the LHC.

Open Communication

Heuer outlined a new approach to open communication between CERN management and the community. Status reports on the LHC will be published regularly in the weekly CERN Bulletin, and a policy of fast and direct information flow to the CERN community will be implemented.

Accommodating users

As the world’s particle physicists focus on the LHC, CERN will have to accommodate the needs of an ever-increasing number of users, physicists not employed by CERN who spend anywhere from several days to many years at the laboratory working on experiments at the facility. At last count CERN had 9500 registered users. Ongoing efforts to create more space for physicists include an extension to the famous Building 40 that provides office space for many scientists from the ATLAS and CMS experiments, and a temporary 300-seat auditorium. Future plans may include an extension to the lab’s main cafeteria and even a new building with a 1000-seat auditorium, although CERN would need to find outside funding for the latter.

Looking towards the future

Heuer’s most far-reaching goals address the future of CERN–making it into a global laboratory–and the future of particle physics worldwide. Noting that funding has been “not increasing” for the past several years while projects become larger and more expensive, he stated that all countries with investments in particle physics should come together to set a global agenda for the field. In his vision, particle physics expertise and long-term stability and support for the field need to be maintained in the three main regions (the Americas, Asia, and Europe). CERN must engage all countries and continue to foster developing countries in their effort to become involved in particle physics. In response to a question at the end of the talk regarding a possible increase in the number of CERN Member States, he said that, while no decisions have been made, there is no language in CERN’s founding convention that states that Member States must be European.

In the near term, a strategy workshop will take place in late spring at which the future of the CERN non-LHC accelerator-based program will be assessed. Heuer noted that the ideal time to propose new programs is directly after discoveries are made at the LHC (estimated to be in the 2010-2012 time frame), rather than 5 to 10 years later.

More concrete goals for the next few years include building a new, “green” computing facility on the CERN site, creating an Analysis Centre for LHC Physics at CERN, and becoming more proactive in knowledge and technology transfer.

New CERN organization

Every CERN Director General reorganizes the laboratory structure to their liking. Heuer’s top-level management structure is summarized in this organization chart. The Coordinator for External Relations is a new post, in keeping with Heuer’s strategy to move CERN towards a global physics laboratory.

Katie Yurkewicz

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Cyclotron Kids video of progress

January 12, 2009 | 11:40 am

A dedicated bunch of teenage science enthusiasts has been making a lot of progress on their goal to be the first teenagers to create antimatter. Peter, Heidi, and German first contacted us about a year ago and we ran a story about their call for help. That resulted in a donation of parts, but since then, they have managed to go a lot further.

The Cyclotron Kids have made great contacts at Jefferson Lab in Virginia, who are helping them with equipment and scientific expertise. The Kids have made a video about their project and progress, now available on YouTube. Watch and rate it to help them achieve a featured spot on YouTube’s home page.

You can also join the Cyclotron Kids Facebook group.

David Harris

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Everything you wanted to know about physics text books

January 9, 2009 | 1:24 pm

Lots of people collect baseball cards, comic books, or wine corks but physics text books???

Jaideep Singh has made a name for himself doing just that. The PhD candidate from the University of Virginia was featured in a New York Times article on unique collections, was named one of the country’s top college collectors by Fine Books & Collections Magazine and won first place for book collecting from the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia.

Through his blog, On Physics Books, you can take advantage of his collecting passion and glean tips on the best books to read and where to find information on physics books.

The blog includes helpful posts such as what books best prepare you for the physics GRE test and a list of good online book resources.

So when you have a few minutes, take a peek.

Tona Kunz

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What do Palin and particle physics have in common?

January 8, 2009 | 5:39 pm

Alaska and dog sledding are hot.

Former US vice presidential contender Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin brought the state, and its front-porch-like proximity to Russia, into mainstream American consciousness. The state’s first husband, aka “first dude,” and world-class snowmobile racer, Todd, gave the state a good-looking, athletic poster boy to replace former stereotypes of a land populated by long-bearded, hermitic types.

Add to that, the incursion of arguably one of the nation’s hottest new entertainment genres: tough guy TV. Ice Road Truckers, Deadliest Catch, The Alaskan Experiment, and The Toughest Race on Earth: Iditarod give viewers a vicarious look at adventure in the northern-most parts of North America.

It seems mainstream America has caught up with daredevil theoretical particle physicist Eric Rogers, who more than a decade ago fell in love with the state and its man vs. nature pastime.

I guess it fits since particle physics always has been on the cutting edge, albeit usually on the knowledge, not athletic, front. 

Recent television shows about Alaska, and arguably the state as a whole, have a blue collar bent, but that doesn’t mean that Alaskans stop PhDs at the border. And it doesn’t mean the academic crowd can’t hack it in the tundra.

Rogers has called the state home since 1992 and is a veteran racer of the Iditarod, which gives him automatic macho, alpha-male status.

He’s endured frostbite over more than 1000 miles of rugged terrain, and can also help uncover the mystery of how the universe evolved, whether extra dimensions exist, and what makes up the building blocks of matter that permit the existence of the race course, his dog team, and Palin’s beloved moose. 

How many other mushers can say that?

Rogers worked on high-energy hadron deuteron collisions using double scattering events where both the proton and neutron were involved as a probe of the hadron structure. He later moved to Shell Oil, one of several industries that favor employees with physics backgrounds, to help find and tap oil reserves.

Today, Rogers is registered as one of 73 mushers in the upcoming 2009 Iditarod, which kicks off March 7.

He sees correlations between the personality traits needed to work in particle physics and racing the Iditarod.

“First you have to really love it–there are easier ways to make money,” he says. “Then, persistence and perserverance work wonders in both cases. Finally, there is the thrill htat comes from living at the edge of the bell curve. All good stuff.”

You can follow Rogers at his Web site, his blog, and the official Iditarod Web site, which will allow you to track a racer’s progress.  

Rogers says that as a child, his passions were Mr. Wizard and Sgt. Preston, who explored the Yukon in a 1950s TV series.

“I’m fortunate enough to have done both,” he says.

Tona Kunz

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Finding the first patent for a superconducting magnet

January 7, 2009 | 3:09 pm

First superconducting magnet patent

When we decided to feature the first patent for a superconducting magnet in this issue’s logbook, we had no idea how difficult it would be to find it. The earliest weak superconducting magnets weren’t patented, since no one saw any practical application for them. It was only as superconducting materials matured that companies began to seek patents for superconducting magnet configurations, in a competitive boom of invention in the early 1960s. Recognition of the first patent seems to have gotten lost in the scuffle.

Read the full story of the pursuit of superconducting magnets, which came to a head at a 1961 MIT conference.

David Harris

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Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope discovers slew of new pulsars

January 6, 2009 | 5:48 pm

 

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has found 12 previously unknown pulsars (orange). Fermi also detected gamma-ray emissions from known radio pulsars (magenta, cyan) and from known or suspected gamma-ray pulsars identified by NASA's now-defunct Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (green). Credit: NASA/Fermi/LAT Collaboration

Four months into its mission, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered 12 never-before-seen pulsars and observed gamma-ray pulses from 18 others.

“I am very happy to welcome you all to a new era in pulsar physics,” Roger Romani said at a press conference held today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, California. Romani is a researcher in the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University. “We know of 1800 pulsars, but until Fermi we saw only little wisps of energy from all but a handful of them. Now, for dozens of pulsars, we’re seeing the actual power of these machines.”

In the past, most pulsars-rapidly spinning neutron stars that emit energy in narrow beams-were observed only in radio waves. Yet, as the FGST data reveals, this radio-wave emission is extremely weak compared with the pulsars’ flashes of gamma-rays.

The 12 newly discovered pulsars offer insight into the mechanism behind the gamma-ray emissions. The data show that the classic understanding of emission, whereby gamma rays are created in the same location as radio waves, is mistaken. Researchers now theorize that the radio beams form near the neutron star’s surface, while the gamma rays form far above.

FGST is also shedding light on pulsars as they near the end of their lifecycles. Over the past few months, the telescope found seven very old and relatively rare pulsars that are thought to have gravitationally attracted additional stellar matter from companion stars, causing them to increase in mass and spin much faster. These “millisecond” pulsars spin hundreds of times faster than their younger siblings, with their surfaces moving at up to a tenth of the speed of light. They also have magnetic fields 10,000 times lower and are thought to be 10,000 times older than previously discovered pulsars.

With the observation of these millisecond pulsars, Romani said, “we’re really seeing the history of pulsars.” Alice Harding of the NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center added: “This is the tip-of-the-iceberg. We’ll probably be discovering a lot more.”

Researchers announced these findings at the American Astronomical Society meeting this week in Long Beach, California, and at the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics last December in Vancouver, Canada. More information can be found in a NASA press release issued today and in an excellent Science News article by Ron Cowen.

Kelen Tuttle

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