Manhunt in the DESY storage halls

April 15, 2009 | 7:44 am

DESY does not only offer training in areas such as industrial mechanics, technical drawing, warehouse logistics, or particle physics–chasing criminals has recently been added to the training program on the DESY campus in Hamburg.

To be fair though, the trainees have four legs and sharp teeth. Since March, police dogs are training inside and outside the large storage halls on the southern edge of the DESY premises. “We need buildings that are full of objects that offer all kinds of hiding spots,” explains Heiko Valli, policeman and dog trainer at the police dog school. Moreover, the dogs always have to be taken to new sites to avoid routine. Since the Hamburg police is DESY’s direct neighbor, they did not have to search far for a good location.

In each training unit, twelve dogs and their dog handlers had to successively pass the “basic training”: stop a “suspect” (a policeman in protective clothing; this time Valli himself), start barking, bite in case the suspect tries to escape, and release on command. The training continued in the storage hall where the dogs had to find the hidden criminal and show their handler the hiding place by barking. This was child’s play for cold-nosed professionals like Pollo, Carlos, Bonsai, and Butch; the excursion to the DESY site was evidently a great adventure for the dogs.

Hamburg has a total of 45 police dogs specialised in many different fields, including drug and explosives detection, blood, and cadavers. Even so, each dog regularly has to pass the training for suspect search and detention.

By Barbara Warmbein

This story originally appeared in DESY inForm. (PDF)

Guest author

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Particle physics Peeps, oh my!

April 14, 2009 | 12:04 pm

Renee Basick, MLA'05; David Pickett, AB'07 Professor “Nambunny” is accompanied on stage by President “Zucker"* as he receives the Nobel Prize Medal from the “Sweet-ish” Ambassador at International House on December 10, 2008. The event is filmed and broadcast live by the University of Chicago Media Initiatives Group. *zucker is German for sugar

 Americans have many Easter traditions, none probably as odd as our hobby of doing quirky things with Peeps, colored, sugar-coated marshmallow staples of most Easter baskets.

The original candy designs of bunnies and chickens have been exploded in countless microwaves and used like dolls action figures. In the last few years, a growing segment of the population has taken to creating Peep dioramas of pop culture events, architectural icons and now particle physics notables.

 The University of Chicago Magazine’s Flickr site and its alumni have taken the lead on the marshmallowization of HEP culture.

Robert Scherrer, PhD'87; Lucy Scherrer (age 11)

Take a look at two of their photos featuring the 2008 Nobel Prize ceremony and Enrico Fermi, who worked at the University of Chicago and gave his namesake to Fermilab in the Chicago suburbs. 

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have connections to the research leading to and emerging from the work on symmetry breaking that lead to the Nobel Prize for Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa.

Tona Kunz

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Big Bang Theory comedy gets Nobel Laureate

April 14, 2009 | 6:45 am

So much for the stereotype that seriously smart people can’t have a sense of humor.

The acclaimed CBS prime-time comedy Big Bang Theory had a guest appearance by a Nobel Laureate on its March 9 show.

George Smoot (in Sheldon's seat, no less!) on the set of Big Bang Theory. Photo courtesy of George Smoot.

George Smoot, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, research physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a confessed fan of the show, agreed to appear in the episode. The two main characters, Leonard and Sheldon, meet up with Smoot at a conference in California where he is the keynote speaker.

The show features the antics of particle physicists and astrophysicists, so Smoot was a natural fit.

Smoot won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work with NASA’s John Mather on the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, which made the first measurements of temperature fluctuations in the microwave background radiation. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

The UC Berkeley News highlights Smoot’s recent accomplishments and visit to the show. You can view a behind the scenes clip of Smoot on the set here.

Science has become increasingly popular and accurate in pop culture television and movies with the help of scientists advising producers and actors.

The Wall Street Journal last year dissected the formula for the comic success of the show, which averages 9 million viewers a week, as did science writer Jennifer Ouellette, author of The Physics of the Buffyverse.

Tona Kunz

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High-energy physics lab takes on high-energy weather

April 13, 2009 | 4:12 am

Calling all weather buffs, storm chasers, and would-be tornado spotters. It’s time for the 29th annual Tom Skilling Tornado Seminar at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. The seminar is one of the largest non-professional weather conferences in the Midwest.

Talks will start at noon and repeat at 6 p.m. on April 25.

Last year 2800 people attended the free event. The program draws weather enthusiasts from across the country, wanting to catch a glimpse of amateur storm chaser video as well as hear scientific explanations of recent weather phenomena from National Weather Service personnel stationed in hard hit states. And, of course, everyone wants to see meteorologist Tom Skilling, who has become as close to a movie icon in the Chicagoland area as a weatherman can.

Fermilab has hosted the event 27 of its 28 past years. The partnership between the high-energy physics laboratory and the meteorologist community is aptly explained in a past WGN Weather Center blog post.

This year, 10 speakers will attend the seminar to talk on topics ranging from how to protect your institution from severe weather, how National Weather Service centers decide to issue weather warnings and watches, the dangers of high winds and lightening, and recaps of the near-disaster weather of last summer that affected Chicago near the Loyola University Campus, northern Illinois, and northern Indiana.

A special highlight this year, is guest speaker Louis Uccellini, co-author of “Northeast Snowstorms”, rated one of the five best weather books by The Wall Street Journal.

Tona Kunz

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Around the world in 80 telescopes

April 10, 2009 | 6:52 am

Without leaving your living room, you can get an inside look at the South Pole Telescope, a window to the early universe, that sits within walking distance of geographic bottom of the world, as well as insider views of 79 other renowned research telescopes.

The Web site “Around the World in 80 Telescopes” provides 24-hours of video from the most advanced observatories across the globe and in our skies. The European Southern Observatory originally created the program as a live Web cast April 3-4. 

The 24-hours worth of images has been archived by telescope on the Web site 100 hours of Astronomy, a keystone project of the International Year of Astronomy celebration.Among the highlighted telescopes are The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the The Very Large Array (VLA) telescope in New Mexico and the The 10-meter South Pole Telescope/IceCube Neutrino Telescope in Antarctica.While many of the telescopes seek to take images of the stars and planets in our solar system, astrophysics often focus their telescopes radio and light waves to piece together a picture of how the universe looked 13.7 billion years ago and how it has evolved since then.

 A key investigator in this area is a team from nine institutions lead by University of Chicago professors John Carlstrom. They operate the 10-meter South Pole Telescope in a hunting for dark energy, thought to make cause the accelerating expanse of the universe, and evidence about the universe’s origins and past evolution.

The team uses the telescope to search for cosmic microwave background radiation, the afterglow of light left over from the big band and for extremely weak gravity waves, distortions in space and time that Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts cosmic inflation should produce.

Construction of a new instrument, a  polarimeter,  attached to the telescope is designed to detect the electromagnetic radiation frequency of these gravity waves, found at submillimeter wavelengths, between microwaves and the infrared on the electromagnetic spectrum.

Finding the waves would go a long way to proving the theory of cosmic inflation launching the big bang as well as discounting other theories of how the universe began.

Tona Kunz

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DAMIC's search for light mass dark matter candidates

April 9, 2009 | 12:33 pm

One hour exposures of CCD at sea level (top), at 350 feet underground (middle), and underground with lead shielding (bottom). The straight line signature of cosmic ray muons disappears underground. With shielding, the scattering from background radiation decreases, limiting the wiggly tracks and dots. A dark matter interaction would look like a white dot on these images.

Scientists believe that dark matter is five times more prevalent than the visible matter that comprises our stars and planets. Yet scientists do not know much about these mysterious particles, other than the particles’ collective effects, for instance, on galactic rotation.

Previous experiments have searched for the tiny recoil of a nucleus that scientists would observe if a high-mass dark matter particle from our own galaxy were to collide with an Earthbound detector as the Earth sails through the Milky Way.

Now, a new Fermilab experiment called DAMIC (Dark Matter In CCDs) is searching for light dark matter candidates with masses less than that of a proton [1 GeV/c²] or two. According to theorist Kathryn Zurek, “models that explain why the dark matter and baryon abundances are about the same relate the dark matter mass to the proton mass, so the dark mass is quite generically a few GeV/c² in this class of models.”

DAMIC makes use of CCDs originally developed to image a telescope for the Dark Energy Survey experiment. The CCDs are a better version of the same technology used in everyday digital cameras. They record snapshots of the charge that would be created if dark matter were to collide with the CCD volume. To reduce backgrounds for DAMIC, the tiny detectors are enclosed in 10 tons of lead shielding, maintained at minus 150 degrees Celsius and kept in a dust-free clean room in a tunnel more than 100 meters underground.

Left to right: Technician Kevin Kuk, physicist Juan Estrada, engineer Herman Cease, and physicist Ben Kilminster in their underground lair with the DAMIC detector.

DAMIC spokesperson Juan Estrada explains that with this new CCD technology, “we can set a threshold for nuclear recoils that is lower than others have been able to do, making us more sensitive to lower mass dark matter particles.” Preliminary results are shown in the above figure.

Craig Hogan, director of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics, finds the crossover of innovative technologies exciting.

“It is a delicious irony that these detectors, which are so perfectly adapted for peering to the edge of the universe that we take all the way to Chile for better skies, are now buried in underground caverns to look for invisible particles,” Hogan said.

The upper limit on the cross section allowed for weakly interacting dark matter candidates as a function of mass. Preliminary results are shown in green and significantly extend the reach in the low mass region.

In the next 10 years, physicists from all branches may stumble on the answer to dark matter simultaneously. According to DAMIC collaborator, Ben Kilminster, “A small-scale experiment like DAMIC may directly detect the same dark matter that astronomers observe to fill the galaxies, while at the same time, collider physicists may find that we can produce and detect dark matter at the Tevatron and the LHC.”

When that whole picture comes together, you might just see it in one of DAMICs snapshots.

By Ben Kilminster

This story first appeared in Fermilab Today on April 8, 2009.

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SLAC celebrity gossip: Neil Young spotted in lab-designed tee

April 9, 2009 | 6:27 am

Neil Young wears a t-shirt designed by SLAC graphic designer Terry Anderson. (Images: RollingStone.com.)

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory graphic designer Terry Anderson has seen his work grace the cover of research journals and popular science magazines, enrich presentations around the world, and adorn t-shirts worn by physics greats. But his work reached a very different audience last month when music legend Neil Young appeared in a RollingStone.com music video wearing a shirt designed by Anderson.

“The rewards from designing this shirt were unexpected,” Anderson said with a laugh. “Usually I see my shirts around SLAC or occasionally on some random dude I don’t know walking down the street. I always wonder what the story is behind how they got the shirt.”

Originally designed for the 1995 Computing in High Energy Physics (CHEP) conference in Rio de Janeiro, the shirt worn by Neil Young shows a particle collision sandwiched between the words “The 2nd Big Bang” and “World Wide Web: Born from High Energy Physics.” This conference came at a time when the Web was just taking off as a global phenomenon. Bebo White, one of the original SLAC Web Wizards and a speaker at the conference, give the shirt to Young as a gift in the late 1990s.

“I gave Neil a shirt because we had been brainstorming about the Web and I was going to his house for dinner,” said White. “He also wore it about a year ago at a Sun Computer conference. You can only imagine how large his t-shirt collection must be, so it’s pretty cool that he likes this one.”

Anderson added: “I don’t quite know why he has an attraction to it-but he sure seems to like it. Maybe it’s because it’s nerdy, goofy, and techy, all at the same time.”

Kelen Tuttle

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Physics: In the form of a question, please

April 8, 2009 | 4:05 pm

Where else can you find a national laboratory for $1200?

The recently aired Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions took contestants on a video tour of Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York while quizzing them on particle physics. As reported in the December issue of symmetry magazine, the producers of the show also visited SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California to film video questions.

Test yourself with this collection of clips Brookhaven posted on its YouTube channel:

Kathryn Grim

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Call for US-Italy student exchange shows international nature of physics

April 8, 2009 | 1:04 pm

Especially during the northern hemisphere summer, students and postdocs commonly spend periods of weeks or months on exchange at foreign institutions. It’s a fundamental part of how particle physics operates, with the science knowing few national boundaries and most modern experiments involving international collaboration. Students typically learn new skills that are transferable to their home experiments, gain a better understanding of how international collaboration works, and are able to share their specialized knowledge with other students and working scientists.

One example is the upcoming exchange program between the US Department of Energy and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics-Italy (INFN). In it, US students will spend 10 weeks at one of the INFN laboratories or sites, and a companion program will bring Italian students to DOE national laboratories.

If you are a US student interested in spending the summer in Italy (stipend provided), or know somebody who would, more details are at the DOE/INFN Summer Exchange Program for 2009 Web site.

There are many other similar programs that exist between countries, institutions, or laboratories, and if you know of any, feel free to add links to them in the comments below.

David Harris

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Updates: Devastating quake jolts Gran Sasso region

April 6, 2009 | 4:24 pm

Tuesday morning update, from an e-mail sent out by Gran Sasso National Laboratory Director Eugenio Coccia:

Dear friends and colleagues,
As you already know, an earthquake has devastated the area around the town of L’Aquila, Italy, causing hundreds of deaths and making thousands of people homeless. The government is deploying all the possible resources for the rescue operations, but the situation is still extremely severe.
The epicenter of the shocks lays only a few km from the site of the Gran Sasso underground laboratory.
However, fortunately, the people and the equipment of the Laboratory did not suffer damage. All the running experiments are working smoothly, and the external buildings have been essentially untouched.
I thank you for the messages of solidarity and sympathy.

  Nature’s The Great Beyond blog has more here;

“Gran Sasso labs and experiments have not suffered consequences of the earthquake,” says Eugenio Coccia, the centre’s director. “But of course many staff have had their houses destroyed, like so many others who live in the region.” No scientist has been recorded among the dead.

Scientific experiments are being monitored, but no major experimental work will take place until after the Easter holiday, says Coccia. Normal scientific work will begin Tuesday 14 April.

The main highway to the laboratories has been closed for safety reasons, as small quakes are still occurring. The centre has offered to shelter those left homeless by the quake in its surface facilities.

News outlets are reporting at least 207 dead, 1,500 injured — 100 of them seriously — and 17 still missing.   Some villages in the area have been virtually flattened.

Monday’s post:

The area of central Italy struck by a magnitude 6.3 earthquake this morning is home to Gran Sasso National Laboratory.  The INFN particle physics lab is located in the heart of a mountain about half an hour’s drive from the hard-hit medieval city of L’Aquila. 

The preliminary word this morning from laboratory spokeswoman Roberta Antolini was that the laboratory appeared to be undamaged and most laboratory workers safe.  The laboratory was shut down for today, at least. There is so far little detailed information on the safety of Gran Sasso staff and visiting scientists, most of whom would have been asleep in surrounding towns and villages when the quake struck at 3:32 a.m.

As of this writing, news outlets were reporting 150 people dead, thousands injured and tens of thousands homeless.  Rescue workers with specially trained dogs continue to search the ruins for survivors. Many centuries-old buildings and churches in the historic center of L’Aquila were heavily damaged or destroyed, along with modern buildings, a student dormitory and the university hospital, and some streets are impassable due to fallen rubble. See a Times Online report and slide show here, just one of many wrenching media accounts.

We’ll keep you updated as we hear more about the condition of the laboratory and the well-being of its people.  Our hearts are with them today.

Glennda Chui

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