Advisory panel supports extended Tevatron run if funds available

October 26, 2010 | 4:32 pm

The Tevatron is scheduled to close in 2011.

The U.S. government’s advisory panel on high-energy physics recommended today that Fermilab extend the run of its flagship particle collider if funding agencies can provide extra financial support.

“Given the strong physics case, we encourage the funding agencies to try to find the needed additional resources,” the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel said in its report.

Fermilab’s Tevatron, which had its first collisions 25 years ago, is scheduled to shut down in September 2011. The panel recommended continuing the run for an additional three years, provided funding agencies could increase annual funding for the field by about $35 million for four years.

The panel also recommended the laboratory make a strong effort to minimize the impact of an extended run on the NOvA neutrino experiment, which is under construction and scheduled to begin in 2013.

Continuing to run the Tevatron would delay an upgrade to the Fermilab accelerator complex needed to provide a more intense beam of neutrinos to the NOvA detector. This would hold the experiment back from reaching its full sensitivity for an additional two years. The panel proposed either trying to find a way to intensify the beam before the planned upgrade or increasing the size of the NOvA detector, allowing it to collect more neutrino signals.

Panel members advised against making significant alterations to the laboratory’s current scientific program, as guided by a 10-year plan they drafted in 2008. But they conceded that the hunt for the Higgs boson, which scientists theorize gives particles mass, is of such importance to the field that it would be worthwhile for the Tevatron to keep up the search.

The Large Hadron Collider, now the world’s largest particle collider, has also begun to search for the Higgs . Panel members said that scientists would benefit from running experiments at the two colliders simultaneously.

“We do not see this as a horse race between the Tevatron and the LHC,” the panel report said. “The two colliders complement each other to paint a clearer picture than either alone.”

For example, Fermilab’s Tevatron can identify the Higgs boson as it decays into b and anti-b quarks. Experiments at the higher power LHC currently have a more difficult time spotting this type of process, as the proportion of the number of signals that camouflage b quark decays over the occurrences of b quark decays increases with the energy of the collisions. Instead, LHC experiments will begin looking for the Higgs boson in a complementary decay channel, in which the Higgs decays into two photons.

Although the Higgs search is the primary justification for an extended Tevatron run, an extension would allow scientists to make considerable improvements to other important measurements as well, the advisory panel said.

Kathryn Grim

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Gifted high school student contributes to Fermilab experiment

October 25, 2010 | 10:00 am

Natalie Harrison holds a CCD in a clean room at SiDet.

This story first appeared in Fermilab Today on October 25, 2010.

Many 16-year-olds learn important life skills at their first summer jobs – the value of a dollar or how to deal with the public. Natalie Harrison learned detector modeling, particle astrophysics and C++.

Harrison, now 17 and a senior, has spent the past two summers working 40 hours a week at Fermilab. She also works during the school year.

A student who regularly enrolls in courses several years above her grade level, Harrison exhausted the available math and science classes at Naperville North High School after her freshman year. She sent letters to every local scientist she knew in search of a way to continue her education.

“I contacted tons and tons of people,” she said. “Most of them never got back to me. At times I thought, ‘I’ll never get an internship. I’ll just work at the pool.’”

Harrison was saved from a summer of scooping chlorine when a Fermilab physicist invited her to work on a poster for the display area in the CDF detector hall at the Tevatron particle collider. The poster needed to contain only basic information for the general public, but Harrison combed scientific papers to learn as much as she could.

It was a habit she picked up as a 7th grader while attending Saturday Morning Physics lectures at Fermilab.

“As nerdy as it sounds, I would go home and go to the library and read until I understood what they were talking about,” Harrison said. “I thought it was fascinating that you could apply math to physics. This was way cooler than doing math contest problems.”

Fermilab scientists noticed her enthusiasm.

“She wants to know everything,” said Ben Kilminster, now Harrison’s supervisor. “The poster wasn’t challenging enough.”

Fermilab scientist Juan Estrada shows Natalie Harrison a CCD in a clean room at SiDet.

Kilminster asked Harrison if she would like to help with a new dark matter experiment called DAMIC.

Fermilab physicist Juan Estrada spun off the DAMIC experiment from his work for building imaging devices for the Dark Energy Survey. The devices, called CCDs, take detailed photographs of the shape of the universe and search for signs of dark energy. Estrada realized he could use the same sensitive apparatus to search for dark matter particles.

Since Harrison began to work on the project, she has developed tools that the scientists use for quality analysis. She helped to study which configuration would work best for the next prototype detector and determined that a beam of neutrinos in the NuMI hall was affecting the detector’s background levels.

“She doesn’t require much supervision, just someone to point her in the right direction,” he said. “She’s doing the same things we have senior physics majors in college and graduate students do.”

But she’s still a high school student. Like other high schoolers, she’s busy running cross country, tutoring other students and applying to universities. She said she hopes to find time between all of that and her job at the laboratory for another typical high school experience: earning her driver’s license. That way, her mom won’t have to drive her to work.

Kathryn Grim

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Fermilab theorist sees dark matter evidence in public data

October 22, 2010 | 3:30 pm

Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

A Fermilab theorist and his colleague at NYU might have found clues to some of the universe’s juiciest secrets at the center of the Milky Way.

In their analysis of public data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, Dan Hooper, Fermilab scientist, and Lisa Goodenough, a graduate student at New York University, report that very-high-energy gamma rays coming from the center of the Milky Way originate from dark-matter collisions.

“We went out of our way to consider all causes of backgrounds that mimic the signal, and we found no other plausible astrophysics sources or mechanics that can produce a signal like this,” Hooper said.

A recent paper, published on the pre-print server arXiv, outlines their findings.

Astrophysicists have long postulated a wide range of dark matter particles, including axions, super heavy particles and particles that fall in between: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs.

Using the gamma ray data, Hooper and Goodenough identified the mass of a WIMP with a range of 7.3-9.2 GeV, about eight times heavier than the proton. It is the same mass derived from candidate dark matter particle events in two ground-based detectors, CoGeNT, a University of Chicago dark matter experiment in the Soudan mine in Minnesota, and DAMA, an Italian experiment located under the Gran Sasso Mountains near Rome.

If Hooper is right, then physicists now know the mass of these particles to within 10 percent.

This image shows the good fit of the data with a dark matter model. The lines with bars show the spectrum of the anomalous signal, while the solid black line shows a well-fitting dark matter model.

Basically, Hooper explained, he and Goodenough identified an anomalous flux in gamma rays coming from the innermost part of the Milky Way. The signal, which is highly concentrated in an area within the inner 100 light years around the Milky Way, didn’t look like any conventional astrophysics source to the two experts.

However, when they plugged in a simple dark matter model, it fit.

Before publishing their paper, Hooper and Goodenough sent their findings around to their peers for unofficial review. No one disagreed with the fundamental results.

Fermilab’s Craig Hogan, head of the laboratory’s Center for Particle Astrophysics and a University of Chicago researcher, thinks that Hooper’s analysis is spot on.

“Dan and Lisa’s analysis is really quite straightforward,” Hogan said. “What they’ve found is just what you’d expect annihilating dark matter to look like near the Galactic center. It’s the simplest explanation of the data we have.”

Hogan believes that there is no other obvious astrophysical explanation.

“It walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, so maybe it’s a duck,” he said.

Steve Ritz is the deputy principal investigator for the Large Area Telescope, Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope’s main instrument and the co-coordinator for the collaboration’s dark matter and new physics groups.

“I think that this is a very interesting paper,” Ritz said. “They are certainly right that the galactic center is an important region and that the Large Area Telescope data should be used to look for signals for new physics.”

The Milky Way's galactic center. A new paper reports that very-high-energy gamma rays coming from the center of the Milky Way originate from dark matter collisions. Image courtesy of: NASA/CXC/UMass/D. Wang et al.

However, Ritz said, this is the most complex area of the gamma ray sky and looking for signals of new physics in the galactic center is like looking at the heart of a city’s downtown and quickly discerning what is happening.

Ritz said that the collaboration has long noted the excesses, what Hooper refers to as anomalous flux, and members continue to work hard at analyzing and interpreting the data.

“The burden of proof to claim new physics is high.  One must show that the surprising features in the data are not explained by systematic uncertainties or other plausible astrophysics,” Ritz said.

It will take time for other dark matter experiments to confirm or deny Hooper and Goodenough’s findings. Experiments such as CoGeNT and DAMA are well-suited to see the low mass WIMPS.

In the meantime, Hooper explained, when experiments such as the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope look at other points of the sky, he hopes they’ll do so with this dark matter particle in mind.

Rhianna Wisniewski

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Hogan’s holometer: Testing the hypothesis of a holographic universe

October 20, 2010 | 10:00 am

MIT physicist Sam Waldman in the laser lab where the holometer is being constructed

In 2008, Fermilab particle astrophysicist Craig Hogan made waves with a mind-boggling proposition: The 3D universe in which we appear to live is no more than a hologram.

Now he is building the most precise clock of all time to directly measure whether our reality is an illusion.

The idea that spacetime may not be entirely smooth – like a digital image that becomes increasingly pixelated as you zoom in – had been previously proposed by Stephen Hawking and others. Possible evidence for this model appeared last year in the unaccountable “noise” plaguing the GEO600 experiment in Germany, which searches for gravitational waves from black holes. To Hogan, the jitteriness suggested that the experiment had stumbled upon the lower limit of the spacetime pixels’ resolution.

Black hole physics, in which space and time become compressed, provides a basis for math showing that the third dimension may not exist at all. In this two-dimensional cartoon of a universe, what we perceive as a third dimension would actually be a projection of time intertwined with depth. If this is true, the illusion can only be maintained until equipment becomes sensitive enough to find its limits.

“You can’t perceive it because nothing ever travels faster than light,” says Hogan. “This holographic view is how the universe would look if you sat on a photon.”

Not everyone agrees with this idea. Its foundation is formed with math rather than hard data, as is common in theoretical physics. And although a holographic universe would answer many questions about black hole physics and other paradoxes, it clashes with classical geometry, which demands a universe of smooth, continuous paths in space and time.

“So we want to build a machine which will be the most sensitive measurement ever made of spacetime itself,” says Hogan. “That’s the holometer.”

The holometer is named after a 17th century surveyor's instrument.

The name “holometer” was first used for a surveying device created in the 17th century, an “instrument for the taking of all measures, both on the earth and in the heavens.” Hogan felt this fit with the mission of his “holographic interferometer,” which is currently being developed at Fermilab’s largest laser lab.

In a classical interferometer, first developed in the late 1800s, a laser beam in a vacuum hits a mirror called a beamsplitter, which breaks it in two. The two beams travel at different angles down the length of two vacuum pipe arms before hitting mirrors at the end and bouncing back to the beamsplitter.

Since light in a vacuum travels at a constant speed, the two beams should arrive back to the mirror at precisely the same time, with their waves in sync to reform a single beam. Any interfering vibration would change the frequency of the waves ever so slightly over the distance they traveled. When they returned to the beamsplitter, they would no longer be in sync.

In the holometer, this loss of sync looks like a shaking or vibrations that represent jitters in spacetime itself, like the fuzziness of radio coming over too little bandwidth.

The holometer’s precision means that it doesn’t have to be large; at 40 meters in length, it is only one hundredth of the size of current interferometers, which measure gravitational waves from black holes and supernovas. Yet because the spacetime frequencies it measures are so rapid, it will be more precise over very short time intervals by seven orders of magnitude than any atomic clock in existence.

“The shaking of spacetime occurs at a million times per second, a thousand times what your ear can hear,” said Fermilab experimental physicist Aaron Chou, whose lab is developing prototypes for the holometer. “Matter doesn’t like to shake at that speed. You could listen to gravitational frequencies with headphones.”

The whole trick, Chou says, is to prove that the vibrations don’t come from the instrument. Using technology similar to that in noise-cancelling headphones, sensors outside the instrument detect vibrations and shake the mirror at the same frequency to cancel them. Any remaining shakiness at high frequency, the researchers propose, will be evidence of blurriness in spacetime.

“With the holometer’s long arms, we’re magnifying spacetime’s uncertainty,” Chou said.

Conceptual design of the Fermilab holometer

Hogan’s team liked the holometer idea so much they decided to build two. One on top of the other, the machines can confirm one another’s measurements.

This month, having successfully built a 1-meter prototype of the 40-meter arm, they will weld the parts of the first of the vacuum arms together.

Hogan expects the holometer to begin collecting data next year.

“People trying to tie reality together don’t have any data, just a lot of beautiful math,” said Hogan. “The hope is that this gives them something to work with.”

– Sara Reardon

Symmetry Intern

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Astronomical computing

October 18, 2010 | 10:00 am

A visualization of the LSST. Image credit: Todd Mason, Mason Productions Inc./LSST Corporation

This story first appeared in iSGTW on October 13, 2010. It discusses the computing needs of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which astrophysicists hope to use in their search for dark matter and dark energy, among other things.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope to be constructed in Chile will incorporate the world’s largest digital camera, capable of recording highly detailed data more quickly than any other telescope of comparable resolution.

For the scientists working on the project, that all amounts to an exciting opportunity to learn more about moving objects (including monitoring asteroids near the Earth), transients such as the brief conflagrations of supernovae, dark energy, and the structure of the galaxy.

For computing specialists, it means more data. A lot more data.

The LSST will take between 1000 and 2000 panoramic 3.2 gigapixel images per night, covering its hemisphere of the sky twice weekly. Along with daytime calibration images, this will amount to 20 terabytes of data stored every 24 hours.

It’s a long journey from the summit of Cerro Pachon in Chile, the future site of the telescope, to the hundreds of research papers that the telescope’s data will inspire over its mandated ten-year lifespan. The journey begins with around-the-clock shifts to monitor the instruments and data for quality control. Scientists will be able to do shifts from either the summit site’s control room, or from the remote control room at the base site in La Serena, Chile; data is transmitted between the two sites via dedicated 10 gigabits per second fiber optic lines.

At the base site, approximately 3000 computing nodes with 16 cores each wait to make a rapid analysis of the data as it comes in.

“We have 60 seconds, basically, to do an initial reduction of that data and find any sort of astronomical transient events,” explained Jeff Kantor, project manager of data management for LSST. “And of course we have to distinguish those that are true transients from asteroids and other moving objects.”

As those transient objects are identified, subscribing scientists will receive alerts. This gives them a chance to orient other telescopes on the same patch of sky in order to gather additional data.

Once per day, the raw data and metadata will be transmitted nearly 8000 kilometers to the Archive Center at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where it will be re-processed and merged into the archives.

Image courtesy of LSST.

The Archive Center will require 100 teraflops of processing power and the capacity for 15 petabytes of storage — at first.

“Once a year we have to take that data and re-process all of the accumulated images since the survey started, in one year. And so our processing requirements go up each year,” Kantor said. “Ultimately, that will require in excess of 250 teraflops of computing power, which is a fairly big chunk of computing capability.”

Scientists and citizens alike will be able to access the data in a variety of ways. Members of the LSST team are researching technologies that will assist them in deploying a science gateway where researchers can access the data and perform basic analyses. Kantor expects, however, that other organizations will want to establish their own portals, which LSST plans to support with open interfaces that comply with Virtual Observatory standards. Likewise, the software, which is all open source, runs on the TeraGrid.

“We are doing prototype implementations of the system right now, during our ‘R&D’ phase, and each year we do a fairly substantial software project and process terabytes of pre-cursor and simulated image data,” Kantor said. “We are using the TeraGrid for that purpose.”

More recently, the LSST team has begun to explore how they could use the resources offered by Open Science Grid.

“Many of our applications are what you’d call embarrassingly parallel,” Kantor explained. “My understanding is that it [OSG] has lots of locations that are well-suited to the embarrassingly parallel type of application.”

It’s still early days for the LSST, which is scheduled to complete its design and development phase in a few years and construction and commissioning within a decade. Over twenty years of preparation will culminate in a ten-year survey. Creating the telescope and infrastructure has certainly posed a set of pretty technical problems.

Said Kantor, “Why do we think we can do it? Because we’ve got pretty much world experts in every key area on the team, from petascale database to astronomical data processing algorithms.”

Miriam Boon

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Mission accomplished for LHC’s first high-energy proton run

October 14, 2010 | 11:29 am

The scientists working the overnight shift at CERN’s Control Centre for accelerators had a reason to celebrate this morning. At 3:38 a.m. beams of protons were colliding with a luminosity of  1.01 × 10³², a milestone that the teams running the Large Hadron Collider had been working all year to achieve.

CERN Director General Rolf Heuer explained all in the message he sent today to CERN staff:

When we started running the LHC at the end of March, we set ourselves the objective of reaching a luminosity of 10³² by the end of 2010 proton running. Last night, we achieved that goal. The beams that went in at around 2:00am, were colliding with a luminosity of 1.01 × 10³² by 3:38am in both ATLAS and CMS, and had delivered an integrated luminosity of over 2 inverse picobarns to ATLAS, CMS and LHCb by midday today. It’s a great achievement by all concerned to reach this important milestone with over two weeks to spare. The remainder of this year’s proton running will be devoted to maximising the LHC 2010 data set and preparing for 2011 proton running before we switch to lead ions in November.

The significance of this milestone can’t be underestimated, since it is a necessary step on the way to the larger goal of delivering an integrated luminosity of one inverse femtobarn to the experiments by the end of 2011. That’s the amount of data we need to ensure that if nature has put new physics in our path at the LHC’s current collision energy, we’ll have a good chance of seeing it.

At the moment, we’re running the LHC with 248 bunches per beam in a configuration that allows us to go much higher. As 2011 proton running gets underway early next year we’ll continue increasing the number of bunches, since a factor of two or so more luminosity is still needed if we’re to reach our one inverse femtobarn goal. That, however, is for next year. In the meantime, the objective we set ourselves for this year was realistic, but tough, and it’s very gratifying to see it achieved in such fine style.

The LHC’s first high-energy proton run will last for about two more weeks. A technical stop of a few days will follow the end of the historic run, and the accelerator complex will then be prepared to collide the LHC’s very first beams of lead ions.

Katie Yurkewicz

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DESY and TRIUMF take home top prizes from the first Global Particle Physics Photowalk

October 14, 2010 | 9:15 am

Mikey Enriquez's photograph of the 8Pi nuclear-physics experiment won first place in the global jury competition and third place in TRIUMF's local competition.

This release was issued October 14, 2010 by the InterAction Collaboration.

A sunburst image of a particle detector at Germany’s DESY laboratory and a black-and-white photograph of a nuclear-physics experiment at TRIUMF in Canada have won the top prizes in the first-ever Global Particle Physics Photowalk.

More than 100 of the top photographs from the photowalk, including the six winners of the jury and “people’s choice” competitions, are now viewable on Flickr.

“As scientists, we’re excited by our work and our laboratory environment. What was amazing about this event was the opportunity to share that experience with the people who support and benefit from the research we do,” said Nigel S. Lockyer, director of TRIUMF. “Bringing it full circle to see what caught their eye and got their attention was the real treat. Art and science have serious parallels; we all struggle to look at things in new ways to generate new insights about what is really going on in our world.”

On August 7, more than 200 photographers had the opportunity to present a new view of physics by going behind the scenes at five laboratories in Asia, Europe and North America as part of the Particle Physics Photowalk. Following the event, photographers submitted thousands of images to local competitions at the participating laboratories, which included DESY, TRIUMF, CERN in Switzerland, Fermilab in Illinois, and KEK in Japan. Each laboratory selected their local winners, and forwarded the top three to compete in two global competitions organized by the laboratories in the spirit of friendly competition.

Hans-Peter Hildebrandt's image of portrait of a wire chamber at DESY won first place in the people's choice global competition, second place in the global jury competition, and first place in DESY's local competition.

More than 1,300 photography enthusiasts voted online to name the people’s choice winners. Hans-Peter Hildebrandt’s photograph of a wire chamber at DESY garnered the most votes, followed closely by Tony Reynes’ image of an accelerator operator on shift at Fermilab, and Matthias Teschke’s photograph of the HERA accelerator tunnel at DESY.

“I am an amateur nature photographer and the subject—technology—was a great challenge,” said Hans-Peter Hildebrandt, a lead technician at a German manufacturer. “You don’t get to see things like accelerators in tunnels very often, and I am really glad I took part in the photowalk. I spent a long time on the winning photo, took a series of 24 shots from different angles, positions and with different camera settings.”

A panel of international judges also selected three winners. The judges—photographers Stanley Greenberg from the US and Simon Norfolk from the UK, and accelerator physics student and sculptor Meghan McAteer—gave the top prize to Mikey Enriquez’ photograph of the 8Pi experiment at TRIUMF, second prize to Hildebrandt’s wire-chamber photograph, and third prize to the “kissing lips”, a photograph of a pair of quadrupole magnets at the DESY laboratory taken by Heiko Roemisch.

“I saw a link for the Particle Physics Photowalk on someone’s Facebook wall, and the chance to walk around and see an actual particle physics lab up and close and with the sole purpose of taking photographs of it was hard not to take,” said 22-year-old Enriquez, a recent graduate of the photo-imaging program at Vancouver’s Langara College.

The winning photographs will be featured in the December issues of the particle physics publications the CERN Courier and symmetry. All five participating laboratories will also feature the global winners and their local photowalk selections in temporary exhibits in 2011.

“I think I can speak for all of DESY when I say that we are overwhelmed and proud that a total of three pictures taken during the photowalk at DESY won a total of four places,” said Prof. Dr. Helmut Dosch, Chairman of the DESY Board of Directors. “We always knew that our workplace is attractive, but it’s nice to see proof of this in both the jury and the public vote. We’re also especially proud that the world’s particle physics labs took to the suggestion of a global photowalk so enthusiastically and that all labs had such an amazing harvest of fascinating pictures.”

The Particle Physics Photowalk was organized by the InterAction collaboration, whose members represent particle physics laboratories in Asia, North America and Europe.

Press Release

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Fermilab celebrates 25th anniversary of first collisions in Tevatron

October 13, 2010 | 10:15 am

CDF co-spokesmen Alvin Tollestrop and Roy Schwitters celebrate with colleagues after the Tevatron's first proton and antiproton collisions on Oct. 13, 1985.

At around 3 a.m. on Oct. 13, 1985, Fermilab scientists broke out the bubbly.

They had just detected the first proton-antiproton collisions in the laboratory’s particle collider, the largest of its kind in the world. It was a moment of triumph they had been working toward since the 1970s, when they began constructing the Tevatron — back then called the Energy Doubler or Energy Saver.

Today the laboratory celebrates the 25th anniversary of that moment.

Roger Dixon, head of the Accelerator Division, wrote in a column for Fermilab Today, that “some of the laboratory’s venerable staff had difficulty believing that an entire ring of 1,000 superconducting magnets would ever work. It was not uncommon to overhear outrageous bets being proffered concerning the outcome of these efforts.

“Fortunately, no one ever called in any of these bets when the machine worked as planned: There would have been some very embarrassing moments involving improper behavior.”

However incredulous people were that such a large, complicated machine would work, they still had confidence in the project’s leadership, he wrote.

Fermilab scientist Helen Edwards, who headed up the design, construction and commissioning of the collider, “was key to the success of the Tevatron,” he wrote. “She drove the effort hard, and she was a meticulous taskmaster. She knew that it could be done, and she was very credible to the people in the trenches, where she spent much of her time. Everyone worked hard for her, and together they achieved an exceptional outcome.”

He went on to write, “Many people made significant contributions to this effort as well. It is impossible to list all the work that went on to make the collisions a reality.

“It took both leadership and technical talent to arrive at this point in history. May we continue to have an abundance of these attributes to take us into the future.”

Scientist Helen Edwards, who was integral to the development, installation and success of the Tevatron, signs a document signaling the installation of the last superconducting magnet in 1983. This was a necessary step before first collisions could take place in 1985.

Leon Lederman (on right), director of Fermilab from 1979-1989, celebrated with colleagues after the Tevatron's first collisions.

Kathryn Grim

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Artist completes ATLAS mural, samples surreal CERN life

October 6, 2010 | 10:00 am

The ATLAS mural is only one-third the size of the detector it represents. Image courtesy of CERN.

Over the course of three months this summer, a gray, boxy service building at CERN gradually transformed into a three-story work of art.

American artist Josef Krisotofoletti used a cherry-picker lift and a collection of vibrant paints to turn the building’s rectangular face and side into a three-dimensional mural representing ATLAS, the largest detector at the Large Hadron Collider. In the process, he experienced some of the strange and wonderful quirks of life at CERN.

The ATLAS collaboration officially unveiled the mural today.

Kristofoletti, 28, has over the past several years built up a portfolio of larger-than-life works using the interior or exterior walls of buildings as a canvas. In contrast, the ATLAS mural measures only about a third of the size of the actual machine it depicts. The 7,000-ton detector sits 100 meters, or about 330 feet, below the mural in a cavern underground, where it captures data from collisions between the highest energy proton beams humankind has ever sent spinning around a particle accelerator.

The artist said that the idea to create the mural came to him in his sleep after he saw pictures of the ATLAS detector online.

“I remember having a dream about being inside the detector as the collisions were happening,” he said. “Everything was brightly colored and geometric, like a multifaceted crystal.”

He painted his first ATLAS mural on the wall of the Redux Contemporary Art Center in South Carolina. His work attracted the attention of ATLAS communicator Claudia Marcelloni, who invited him to visit in 2009. Less than a year later, he was working on his new ATLAS mural within view of Mont Blanc and living near the French-Swiss border in a rented apartment.

“It was clean, and there was a small kitchen where I mostly ate some of the 300 types of cheeses they have in France,” he said.

Kristofoletti gets ready to add color. Image courtesy of Josef Kristofoletti.

ATLAS provided the walls, the materials and the training he needed to work at the laboratory. A private donor covered Kristofoletti’s travel and living expenses.

During his time at CERN, the artist was thrilled to see his childhood hero, Stephen Hawking, give a lecture on the origin of the universe. He also met a cast of characters that could have come straight from one of his paintings.

“There was a man who always wore a cape,” he said. “And I met a couple, man and woman, who were both way over 7 feet tall. I thought of them as the giant lovers.”

He met a man who could not remember faces, even his mother’s, but could visualize complex hardware from any angle in his mind.

“I asked him one day to come by and look at the mural,” Kristofoletti said. “After staring at it for a while, he said, ‘This means nothing to me.’”

But Kristofoletti received plenty of encouragement. He said that as he was working hoisted on the lift, passers-by would shout, “Good work!” or give him a thumbs up.

Perhaps most energizing were his more in-depth talks with the scientists.

“I had some great, actually some pretty unforgettable conversations in the cafeteria with some of the physicists,” he said. “It was great to see the excitement of people who have been working on this experiment for years, and now they are perhaps on the verge of some huge payoff.”

Kristofoletti said he thinks the ATLAS mural is just the beginning of his work translating particle acceleration into art. “I am already working on a few new techniques and ways that events could be shown for other physics-related murals,” he said.

His other current project involves acceleration in a different form. He is designing a mural for Formula 1 racing that is meant to be viewed at 200 miles per hour.

Kathryn Grim

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Diverse group to go deep for science

October 4, 2010 | 10:00 am

Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation

Physicists may soon be burying their dark matter detectors and other fun toys far beneath the South Dakota hills, but they won’t be the only ones who get to play in the dirt.

Scientists involved in the proposed Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory recently convened to showcase various experiments that could take advantage of great depths in a mine that extends more than 8,000 feet below the earth’s surface. Though particle physics research is the driving force behind the DUSEL initiative, biologists, geoscientists and engineers would also get to experiment in the colossal caverns of the closed Homestake Mine near Lead, South Dakota.

Derek Elsworth, professor of energy and geoenvironmental engineering at Pennsylvania State University, and William Roggenthen, DUSEL project director and scientist at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, recently presented the scope of possible biology, geosciences and engineering research at DUSEL at the first meeting of the DUSEL Research Association users’ group, which convened Fermilab in September.

If completed, DUSEL would be the world’s deepest dedicated science laboratory underground. It would provide research space for 30 to 50 years, longer than other underground laboratories located in active mines could provide. These extensive time and space scales would provide biologists, geoscientists and engineers with an unprecedented research playground.

“DUSEL is different from other underground labs,” says Derek Elsworth. “It has the status of being deep, big and long-term.”

Nearly as deep as the height of Mount St. Helens, the lab would provide scientists with miles of rock in which to observe large-scale fracture formation. Drilling beneath the bottom of the lab, where temperatures are higher, microbiologists could investigate whether life can exist above 250 degrees Fahrenheit. And because the mine is closed, scientists have the luxury of uninterrupted decades to test mechanisms for carbon sequestration without interruption from mining crews.

Architectural plans show tailored, expansive layers of large caverns and vast networks of tunnels that will accommodate numerous experiments. Those extensive networks also give scientists looking for a specific geological or biological feature a better chance of locating it in the numerous excavated tiers.

“The more area you have opened up and looked at, the better you can find the feature you’re looking for,” Roggenthen says. “It’s unusual to have this much space available.”

Should federal funding agencies give DUSEL the go-ahead, the underground lab would also provide scientists the opportunity to tackle problems of the day, such as global warming and natural disaster prediction.

Scientists could look for ways to safely dispose of carbon dioxide through experiments using a sealed chamber, acting as an artificial reservoir that exceeds the height of the Empire State building. Research into large-scale rock stress and deformation could bring greater precision to the science of seismology, aiding our understanding of earthquakes. Researchers could also examine new approaches to aquifer decontamination, petroleum recovery and geothermal energy extraction.

“Those are things that don’t typically exist in a single underground research lab, but do naturally co-locate in DUSEL,” Elsworth says.

The prospect of constructing this lab, an 8-cubic-mile maw of possibility, is creating small tremors throughout the biology, geosciences and engineering communities. Though the lab is not yet built, scientists in those fields have already published several papers about DUSEL, says Roggenthen.

“DUSEL presents a rare opportunity for a dedicated facility, one that will live beyond the project’s prescribed lifetime, and likely beyond ours,” says Elsworth.

Leah Hesla

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