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12/01/06

Listening for whispers of dark matter

Jodi Cooley works half a mile underground, in a mine that stopped operating 40 years ago. A rattling elevator takes her to work, 27 floors beneath the surface. The ride down the mineshaft is five minutes of complete darkness. A colony of bats inhabits the mine.

12/01/06

The Tevatron brings it on

As work continues to complete the Large Hadron Collider in Europe and plans develop around the world for an International Linear Collider, one accelerator at the energy frontier is open for business right now. At Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, the Tevatron collider is making discoveries.

12/01/06

Marc Sher: The two-body opportunity

Dual-career couple placement, known to most physicists as the "two-body problem," is a major issue in both academic and industrial hiring. It has a particularly disproportionate impact on women in physics.

12/01/06

Planning complements the next big accelerators

The startup of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is imminent, and much of the particle physics community's attention has shifted to Geneva, Switzerland. Looking even further ahead, physicists plan to use the International Linear Collider to answer the next big questions in the field.

Logbook of October/November 2006
11/01/06

Cosmic microwave background

The big-bang theory of the early universe implies that the universe is immersed in a bath of microwave light, a cooled-down remnant of early high-temperature radiation, invisible to the naked eye.

11/01/06

Make your own data card

Thanks for the pictures of the pocket particle card [September issue]. I can't wait to laminate the two halves together. Yes, you will be able to tell its a reproduction, but it still looks too cool!

11/01/06

More travel stories

Reading the September issue of symmetry, I was reminded of when Larry Rosenson of MIT told me the story some years ago of being stuck on a long flight next to talkative woman.

11/01/06

Safety critters monitor lab site

The instrumentation team of Fermilab's Environment, Safety & Health Section is the caretaker of a unique menagerie: albatrosses, chipmunks, hippos, pterodactyls, scarecrows, and an aardvark to name a few.

11/01/06

Takin' care of (SLAC) business

When 20-year-old Ryan Auer set out to find his very first job, he didn't expect to wind up at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, let alone on stage in front of over 1000 people at the lab's annual Family Day.

11/01/06

It absolutely had to arrive on time

The inaugural beam for the CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso (CNGS) project took just 2.5 milliseconds to fly 732 km through the earth from Geneva, Switzerland, to its destination at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory near Rome on Monday, September 11, 2006.

11/01/06

Rainy-day rehab

From the day it was completed in the early days of Fermilab, the design of the Meson Lab roof has been an aesthetic success and a structural nightmare. It leaks. Always has.

11/01/06

Lightning strikes, Tevatron blinks

The highest-energy particle accelerator in the world, Fermilab's Tevatron, boasts four miles of particle-accelerating circumference. But during thunderstorms it can become a bull's-eye for stray lightning bolts that demonstrate the intimidating power of nature.

Illustration of surfers on a large wave
11/01/06

Acceleration of particles

Acceleration of particles (electrons, protons, and other charged particles) is achieved by propelling them with electromagnetic waves.

11/01/06

Joe Willie: The solar flare problem

How does a high school in upstate New York become a hot spot for monitoring the correlation between cosmic rays and solar flares? The story goes back to a flier from the University of Rochester about an outreach program called QuarkNet in the spring of 2000.

11/01/06

Quark Park

There's a new scientific path in Princeton, New Jersey. Out of the loam of a vacant lot, a cluster of quasicrystals winks at some pink plasma. Tectonic plates shift, and neurons connect in a hippocampus curve of bamboo.