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Innovation at Fermilab: Liquid Argon Test Facility

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

This article first appeared in Fermilab Today on Jan. 24.

Despite the biting cold and snow, scientists and Fermilab personnel gathered outside to break ground for Fermilab’s new Liquid Argon Test Facility. The facility, expected to be completed spring 2013, will house liquid-argon based experiments.

Scientists have speculated since the 1980s that liquid argon could be used as a crash pad for high-energy neutrinos and have subsequently constructed several liquid-argon neutrino detectors; the largest and most prominent being ICARUS, the Imaging Cosmic And Rare Underground Signals, detector in Italy. The design of the new MicroBooNE experiment improves upon technology developed for ICARUS and will allow scientists to observe neutrinos with greater precision and resolution.

Regina Rameika is the project manager for the construction of the MicroBooNE detector.

“The MicroBooNE detector that will first use this facility is smaller than ICARUS, but incorporates some advanced designs,” Rameika said.

MicroBooNE will use liquid argon as a target for neutrinos generated in the Booster neutrino beam. When the neutrinos hit the argon nuclei, they generate showers of charged particles that then drift to an electrical detector. The purer the argon, the further the particles are able to drift. MicroBooNE will use ultrapure argon to maximize the distance these particles drift. This model is more efficient, cost effective, and has the potential to be scaled-up to a much larger size than previous detectors.

The MicroBooNE experiment will provide another layer of data for using the Booster neutrino beam. Not only will scientists be able to observe particles with the existing MiniBooNE detector, but now they will be able to measure neutrinos from the Booster neutrino beam with a second, higher-resolution detector.

“The MicroBooNE experiment will be focused on understanding some anomalies observed in the data from the MiniBooNE experiment,” Rameika said. This project will also provide valuable insight into different designs for liquid-argon detectors that could be located in the LArTF once MicroBooNE is complete.

—Sarah Charley

Tags: Intensity Frontier, neutrinos, R&D
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Fermilab restores savannas, helps wildlife

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

Fermilab’s iconic Wilson Hall can be seen in the background as visitors inspect savanna restoration efforts. Credit: Fermilab Natural Areas.

Editor’s note: One of the bonuses of Fermilab having much of its scientific infrastructure underground is that it allows for a wealth of open space on the 6,800-acre campus. Fermilab and volunteers from neighboring communities use that space to create havens of restored native habitats to help wildlife flourish. So far, more than 1,100 acres have been restored. Savannas are just one example of these restoration efforts.

The highly endangered oak savanna was once one of the most common vegetation types in the Midwest. Grant money from the DuPage Community Foundation is helping to save this natural gem for hikers and animals by supporting restoration efforts at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

In December, the Foundation awarded $7,500 for oak savanna restoration to Fermilab Natural Areas, a not-for-profit organization consisting of volunteers from the Chicagoland area.

The money will help protect a 35-acre savanna remnant in the center of Fermilab, which straddles the border of Kane and DuPage counties.

The restored savannah will create a tool for educating school and community groups about Illinois’ environmental past and the need for conservation. The savanna also should attract more wildlife to the area. Many infrequently seen species of insects and birds, such as the red-headed woodpecker, thrive in oak savannas.

The multi-phase restoration effort planned to start this winter will include removal of invasive species of trees and shrubs, prescribed burning, enrichment of the flora and monitoring. The project continues a long history of stewardship of environmental resources at Fermilab, which has led to the restoration of more than 1,100 acres of prairie, woodland, grassland and wetland.

“However, this restoration would not be possible without the injection of supplemental funding from organizations such as the DuPage Community Foundation to the Fermilab Natural Areas,” said Rod Walton, Fermilab ecologist.

Farming and development has taken its toll on the environment, leaving less than one-tenth of one percent of the native landscape of Illinois intact. Groups such as Fermilab Natural Areas are restoring the balance.

“The restoration of Illinois’s oak savannas allows children to see that landscape that greeted Illinois settlers,” Walton said. “It also secures a healthy future for the area by creating a diverse habitat.”

About FNA:

Fermilab Natural Areas (FNA) is a volunteer organization located in DuPage and Kane counties at Fermilab, dedicated to involving local community in restoring and conserving the natural environment at Fermilab. Established in 2006, FNA has a membership of more than 80 volunteers, whose activities are concentrated on conservation of the 10 square miles of largely open land at the facility owned by the U.S. Department of Energy and operated by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. For further information regarding Fermilab Natural Areas, visit the website: http://www.fermilabnaturalareas.org/.

Tags: environment
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Proton Accelerators for Science and Innovation

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

This column by Fermilab Director Pier Oddone appeared in Fermilab Today on Jan. 17.

Last week we hosted the US-UK Workshop on Proton Accelerators for Science and Innovation. The workshop brought together scientists from the United States and the United Kingdom who are working on high-intensity proton accelerators across a variety of fronts. The meeting included not only the developers of high-intensity accelerators but also the experimental users and those involved in the applications of such accelerators beyond particle physics.

At the end of the conference, John Womersly, CEO of the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, and I signed a letter of intent specifying the joint goals and activities of our collaboration for the next five years. We plan to have another workshop in about a year to review progress and explore additional areas of collaboration.

Our collaboration with scientists from the United Kingdom in the area of high-intensity proton accelerators is already well established. We have a common interest in muon accelerators, both in connection with neutrino factories and muon colliders. Both of these future projects require multi-megawatt beams of protons to produce the secondary muons that are accelerated. We collaborate on the International Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. MICE is the first muon cooling experiment and an essential step in the road to neutrino factories and muon colliders. We also collaborate on the International Scoping Study for neutrino factories.

In our current neutrino program we are very appreciative of this collaboration and U.K. expertise in the difficult mechanical design of high-power targets, in particular for the MINOS, NOvA and LBNE experiments. The design of these targets is quite challenging as the rapid deposition of energy creates shock waves that can destroy them.The Project X experimental program also depends on having appropriate megawatt-class targets relatively close to experimental set-ups.

One of the primary interests in applications outside of particle physics is the development of intense proton accelerators that could be used for the transmutation of waste or even the generation of electrical power in subcritical nuclear reactors. The accelerators necessary for such subcritical reactors could not have been built just a decade ago, but the advent of reliable superconducting linacs changed that. Several programs abroad are developing such accelerators coupled to reactors. While the United States has no explicit program on accelerator-driven subcritical systems, the technologies that we are developing for other applications, such as Project X, place us in a good position should the United States decide to develop such systems.

Overall, the workshop was very productive and the areas of potential collaboration seemed to multiply through the meeting. Each one of the five working groups is preparing a brief summary of the potential areas of collaboration as well as a specific and focused plan for the next year.

Tags: Intensity Frontier, muon, neutrino, R&D
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Why you should care about SDSS’s giant dark matter map

Monday, January 9th, 2012

The largest map of dark matter made with direct measurements, unveiled today by two teams of physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) removes a key hurdle for tracing the history of dark energy in the universe using ground-based telescopes.

This work done by members of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey collaboration points to greater successes for upcoming sky surveys, including the Dark Energy Survey, which will turn on the Dark Energy Camera on the Blanco Telescope later this year, and then the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and the HyperSuprimeCam survey.

To find and map the invisible dark energy and dark matter that make up about 96 percent of the universe, physicists look at their effects on the matter and radiation we can see, namely galaxies.

Surveying galaxies from Earth-based telescopes is cheaper than satellite-based experiments but had traditionally had the drawback of having to make due with a less clear view of the sky. The same atmospheric distortions that make stars twinkle blurs attempts to track invisible dark matter in the universe made by measuring the distortion of background galaxy shapes, a process called weak lensing. DES and LSST will use this technique to create the largest galaxy surveys ever, covering more than one-eighth of the sky.

Layering photos of one area of sky taken at various time periods, a process called coaddition, can increase the sensitivity of the images six fold by removing errors and enhancing faint light signals. The image on the left show a single picture of galaxies from the SDSS Stripe 82 area of sky. The image on the right shows the same area with the layered effect, increasing the number of visible, distant galaxies. Credit: SDSS.Particle physicists and astronomers from Fermilab and Berkeley Lab have demonstrated a new technique for weak lensing that lessens the blurriness and allows researchers to see fainter galaxies, providing a younger picture of the universe. The two teams essentially layered snap shots of these distorted galaxies, in a process called coaddition, to remove errors caused by equipment or atmospheric effects and to enhance very faint light signals coming from deep in the universe.

Both teams depended upon extensive databases of cosmic images collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, SDSS, which were compiled in large part with the help of Berkeley Lab and Fermilab.

“These results are very encouraging for future large sky surveys. The images produced lead to a picture of the galaxies in the universe that is about six times fainter, or further back in time, than is available from single images,” says Huan Lin, a Fermilab physicist and member of SDSS and DES.

Surveys of galaxies across large swaths of the sky track how clumps of dark matter have changed over time as dark energy exerts its repulsive push on them. Clumps of dark matter not only distort the images of galaxies behind them, but they determine how galaxies cluster around them. By combining this information with redshift data, the observed change in the color of light emitted by a star or other celestial object that is moving away from Earth, it’s possible to trace how the distribution of matter in the universe has evolved over time, offering insight into the growth of dark energy.

Researchers hope this new tool will help answer one of the largest questions for upcoming dark energy surveys and in cosmology: whether dark energy is what Einstein called a “cosmological constant”, a counterbalance to gravity’s pull on matter? Or is it something else such as gravity behaving differently at cosmic scales. The variation or lack of separation between clusters of galaxies and within the clusters across time will lead to new insight into this question.

To build one of the largest maps of dark matter and track its evolution across eras, the teams looked at two manifestations of gravitational lensing: those caused by large galaxy clusters and those caused by the overall distortion spread across the large scale structure of the universe. This second effect is called cosmic shear. Both of these distortions are caused by the gravitational fields of clumps of dark matter acting as lenses, bending the light from galaxies behind them. This distorts the shapes of these distant galaxies, making them look more elliptical. By measuring the ellipticities, or amount of distortion, physicists can infer properties of the dark matter, such as its abundance and how clumpy it is and the masses of the clusters.

“This image correction process should prove a valuable tool for the next generation of weak-lensing surveys,” Lin says.

– Tona Kunz

Tags: Dark Energy Camera, Dark Energy Survey, DECam, DES, Intensity Frontier, SDSS
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Fermilab planning a busy 2012

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012

This column by Fermilab Director Pier Oddone first appeared in Fermilab Today Jan. 3 .

We have a mountain of exciting work coming our way!

In accelerator operations, we need to give enough neutrinos to MINERvA to complete their low-energy run, enough anti-neutrinos to MiniBooNE to complete their run and enough neutrinos to MINOS to enable their independent neutrino velocity measurement that will follow up on last year’s OPERA results. We need to provide test beams to several technology development projects and overcome setbacks due to an aging infrastructure to deliver beam to the SeaQuest nuclear physics experiment. And we need to do all of this in the first few months of the year before a year-long shutdown starts. During the shutdown, we will modify the accelerator complex for the NOvA era and begin the campaign to double the number of protons from the Booster to deliver simultaneous beams to various experiments.

In parallel with accelerator modifications, we will push forward on many new experiments. The NOvA detector is in full construction mode, and we face challenges in the very large number of detector elements and large mechanical systems. Any project of this scale requires a huge effort to achieve the full promise of its design. We have the resources in our FY2012 budget to make a lot of progress toward MicroBooNE, Mu2e and LBNE. We will continue to work with DOE to advance Muon g-2. All these experiments are at an important stage in their development and need to be firmly established this year.

At the Cosmic Frontier, we will commission and start operation of the Dark Energy Survey at the Blanco Telescope in Chile, where the camera has arrived and is being tested. In the dark matter arena we will commission and operate the 60 kg COUPP detector at Canada’s SNOLAB and continue the run of the CDMS 15 kg detector in the Soudan Mine while carrying out R&D on future projects. We continue to have a major role in the operation of the Pierre Auger cosmic-ray observatory. In addition we should complete the first phase of the Fermilab Holometer, which will study the properties of space-time at the Planck scale.

At the Energy Frontier, we play a major role in the LHC detector operations and analysis. It should be a fabulously exciting year at the LHC as we push on the hints that we already see in the data.

Beyond construction and operation of facilities we continue our R&D efforts on the superconducting RF technology necessary for Project X and other future accelerators. We will be building the Illinois Accelerator Research Center and moving forward to connect our advanced accelerator program with industry and universities. Our rich program on theory, computation and detector technology will continue to support our laboratory and the particle physics community.

If we accomplish all that is ahead of us for 2012, it will be a year to remember and celebrate when we hit New Year’s Day 2013!

Tags: CDMS, CMS, cosmic rays, COUPP, Dark Energy Camera, Dark Energy Survey, dark matter, Energy Frontier, faster-than-light neutrinos, IARC, Intensity Frontier, Large Hadron Collider, LHC, MicroBooNe, Minerva, MINOS, Mu2e, neutrinos, NOvA, nuclear physics, Pier Auger Observatory, Project X, SeaQuest
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The Tevatron’s enduring computing legacy

Friday, December 30th, 2011

This article first appeared in ISGTW Dec. 21, 2011.

A night-time view of the Tevatron. Photo by Reidar Hahn.

This is the first part of a two-part series on the contribution Tevatron-related computing has made to the world of computing. This part begins in 1981, when the Tevatron was under construction, and brings us up to recent times. The second part will focus on the most recent years, and look ahead to future analysis.

Few laypeople think of computing innovation in connection with the Tevatron particle accelerator, which shut down earlier this year. Mention of the Tevatron inspires images of majestic machinery, or thoughts of immense energies and groundbreaking physics research, not circuit boards, hardware, networks, and software.

Yet over the course of more than three decades of planning and operation, a tremendous amount of computing innovation was necessary to keep the data flowing and physics results coming. In fact, computing continues to do its work. Although the proton and antiproton beams no longer brighten the Tevatron’s tunnel, physicists expect to be using computing to continue analyzing a vast quantity of collected data for several years to come.

When all that data is analyzed, when all the physics results are published, the Tevatron will leave behind an enduring legacy. Not just a physics legacy, but also a computing legacy.

In the beginning: The fixed-target experiments

This image of an ACP system was taken in 1988. Photo by Reidar Hahn.

1981. The first Indiana Jones movie is released. Ronald Reagan is the U.S. President. Prince Charles makes Diana a Princess. And the first personal computers are introduced by IBM, setting the stage for a burst of computing innovation.

This image of an ACP system was taken in 1988. Photo by Reidar Hahn.Meanwhile, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, the Tevatron has been under development for two years. And in 1982, the Advanced Computer Program formed to confront key particle physics computing problems. ACP tried something new in high performance computing: building custom systems using commercial components, which were rapidly dropping in price thanks to the introduction of personal computers. For a fraction of the cost, the resulting 100-node system doubled the processing power of Fermilab’s contemporary mainframe-style supercomputers.

“The use of farms of parallel computers based upon commercially available processors is largely an invention of the ACP,” said Mark Fischler, a Fermilab researcher who was part of the ACP. “This is an innovation which laid the philosophical foundation for the rise of high throughput computing, which is an industry standard in our field.”

The Tevatron fixed-target program, in which protons were accelerated to record-setting speeds before striking a stationary target, launched in 1983 with five separate experiments. When ACP’s system went online in 1986, the experiments were able to rapidly work through an accumulated three years of data in a fraction of that time.

Entering the collider era: Protons and antiprotons and run one

1985. NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network), one of the precursors to the modern Internet, is launched. And the Tevatron’s CDF detector sees its first proton-antiproton collisions, although the Tevatron’s official collider run one won’t begin until 1992.

The experiment’s central computing architecture filtered incoming data by running Fortran-77 algorithms on ACP’s 32-bit processors. But for run one, they needed more powerful computing systems.

By that time, commercial workstation prices had dropped so low that networking them together was simply more cost-effective than a new ACP system. ACP had one more major contribution to make, however: the Cooperative Processes Software.

CPS divided a computational task into a set of processes and distributed them across a processor farm – a collection of networked workstations. Although the term “high throughput computing” was not coined until 1996, CPS fits the HTC mold. As with modern HTC, farms using CPS are not supercomputer replacements. They are designed to be cost-effective platforms for solving specific compute-intensive problems in which each byte of data read requires 500-2000 machine instructions.

CPS went into production-level use at Fermilab in 1989; by 1992 it was being used by nine Fermilab experiments as well as a number of other groups worldwide.

1992 was also the year that the Tevatron’s second detector experiment, DZero, saw its first collisions. DZero launched with 50 traditional compute nodes running in parallel, connected to the detector electronics; the nodes executed filtering software written in Fortran, E-Pascal, and C.

Gearing up for run two

"The Great Wall" of 8mm tape drives at the Tagged Photon Laboratory, circa 1990 - from the days before tape robots. Photo by Reidar Hahn.

1990. CERN’s Tim Berners-Lee launches the first publicly accessible World Wide Web server using his URL and HTML standards. One year later, Linus Torvalds releases Linux to several Usenet newsgroups. And both DZero and CDF begin planning for the Tevatron’s collider run two.

Between the end of collider run one in 1996 and the beginning of run two in 2001, the accelerator and detectors were scheduled for substantial upgrades. Physicists anticipated more particle collisions at higher energies, and multiple interactions that were difficult to analyze and untangle. That translated into managing and storing 20 times the data from run one, and a growing need for computing resources for data analysis.

Enter the Run Two Computing Project (R2CP), in which representatives from both experiments collaborated with Fermilab’s Computing Division to find common solutions in areas ranging from visualization and physics analysis software to data access and storage management.

R2CP officially launched in 1996. It was the early days of the dot com era. eBay had existed for a year, and Google was still under development. IBM’s Deep Blue defeated chess master Garry Kasparov. And Linux was well-established as a reliable open-source operating system. The stage is set for experiments to get wired and start transferring their irreplaceable data to storage via Ethernet.

The high-tech tape robot used today. Photo by Reidar Hahn.

“It was a big leap of faith that it could be done over the network rather than putting tapes in a car and driving them from one location to another on the site,” said Stephen Wolbers, head of the scientific computing facilities in Fermilab’s computing sector. He added ruefully, “It seems obvious now.”

The R2CP’s philosophy was to use commercial technologies wherever possible. In the realm of data storage and management, however, none of the existing commercial software met their needs. To fill the gap, teams within the R2CP created Enstore and the Sequential Access Model (SAM, which later stood for Sequential Access through Meta-data). Enstore interfaces with the data tapes stored in automated tape robots, while SAM provides distributed data access and flexible dataset history and management.

By the time the Tevatron’s run two began in 2001, DZero was using both Enstore and SAM, and by 2003, CDF was also up and running on both systems.

Linux comes into play

The R2CP’s PC Farm Project targeted the issue of computing power for data analysis. Between 1997 and 1998, the project team successfully ported CPS and CDF’s analysis software to Linux. To take the next step and deploy the system more widely for CDF, however, they needed their own version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fermi Linux was born, offering improved security and a customized installer; CDF migrated to the PC Farm model in 1998.

The early computer farms at Fermilab, when they ran a version of Red Hat Linux (circa 1999). Photo by Reidar Hahn.

Fermi Linux enjoyed limited adoption outside of Fermilab, until 2003, when Red Hat Enterprise Linux ceased to be free. The Fermi Linux team rebuilt Red Hat Enterprise Linux into the prototype of Scientific Linux, and formed partnerships with colleagues at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, as well as a number of other institutions; Scientific Linux was designed for site customizations, so that in supporting it they also supported Scientific Linux Fermi and Scientific Linux CERN.

Today, Scientific Linux is ranked 16th among open source operating systems; the latest version was downloaded over 3.5 million times in the first month following its release. It is used at government laboratories, universities, and even corporations all over the world.

“When we started Scientific Linux, we didn’t anticipate such widespread success,” said Connie Sieh, a Fermilab researcher and one of the leads on the Scientific Linux project. “We’re proud, though, that our work allows researchers across so many fields of study to keep on doing their science.”

Grid computing takes over

As both CDF and DZero datasets grew, so did the need for computing power. Dedicated computing farms reconstructed data, and users analyzed it using separate computing systems.

“As we moved into run two, people realized that we just couldn’t scale the system up to larger sizes,” Wolbers said. “We realized that there was really an opportunity here to use the same computer farms that we were using for reconstructing data, for user analysis.”

A wide-angle view of the modern Grid Computing Center at Fermilab. Today, the GCC provides computing to the Tevatron experiments as well as the Open Science Grid and the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid. Photo by Reidar Hahn.

Today, the concept of opportunistic computing is closely linked to grid computing. But in 1996 the term “grid computing” had yet to be coined. The Condor Project had been developing tools for opportunistic computing since 1988. In 1998, the first Globus Toolkit was released. Experimental grid infrastructures were popping up everywhere, and in 2003, Fermilab researchers, led by DZero, partnered with the US Particle Physics Data Grid, the UK’s GridPP, CDF, the Condor team, the Globus team, and others to create the Job and Information Management system, JIM. Combining JIM with SAM resulted in a grid-enabled version of SAM: SAMgrid.

“A pioneering idea of SAMGrid was to use the Condor Match-Making service as a decision making broker for routing of jobs, a concept that was later adopted by other grids,” said Fermilab-based DZero scientist Adam Lyon. “This is an example of the DZero experiment contributing to the development of the core Grid technologies.”

By April 2003, the SAMGrid prototype was running on six clusters across two continents, setting the stage for the transition to the Open Science Grid in 2006.

From the Tevatron to the LHC – and beyond

Throughout run two, researchers continued to improve the computing infrastructure for both experiments. A number of computing innovations emerged before the run ended in September 2011. Among these was CDF’s GlideCAF, a system that used the Condor glide-in system and Generic Connection Brokering to provide an avenue through which CDF could submit jobs to the Open Science Grid. GlideCAF served as the starting point for the subsequent development of a more generic glidein Work Management System. Today glideinWMS is used by a wide variety of research projects across diverse research disciplines.

Another notable contribution was the Frontier system, which was originally designed by CDF to distribute data from central databases to numerous clients around the world. Frontier is optimized for applications where there are large numbers of widely distributed clients that read the same data at about the same time. Today, Frontier is used by CMS and ATLAS at the LHC.

“By the time the Tevatron shut down, DZero was processing collision events in near real-time and CDF was not far behind,” said Patricia McBride, the head of scientific programs in Fermilab’s computing sector. “We’ve come a long way; a few decades ago the fixed-target experiments would wait months before they could conduct the most basic data analysis.”

One of the key outcomes of computing at the Tevatron was the expertise developed at Fermilab over the years. Today, the Fermilab computing sector has become a worldwide leader in scientific computing for particle physics, astrophysics, and other related fields. Some of the field’s top experts worked on computing for the Tevatron. Some of those experts have moved on to work elsewhere, while others remain at Fermilab where work continues on Tevatron data analysis, a variety of Fermilab experiments, and of course the LHC.

The accomplishments of the many contributors to Tevatron-related computing are noteworthy. But there is a larger picture here.

“Whether in the form of concepts, or software, over the years the Tevatron has exerted an undeniable influence on the field of scientific computing,” said Ruth Pordes, Fermilab’s head of grids and outreach. “We’re very proud of the computing legacy we’ve left behind for the broader world of science.”

– Miriam Boon

Tags: CDF, computing, DZero, Energy Frontier, Tevatron
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Science with ties to Fermilab top year-end ‘best of’ lists

Wednesday, December 28th, 2011

Christmas time brings not only presents and pretty cookies but an outpouring of media lists proffering the best science stories of the year and predicting those that will top the list in 2012.

While the lists varied wildly everyone seemed excited by a few of the same things: upsetting Einstein’s theory of special relativity, a hint of the ‘god particle’ and finding planets like our own.

Several of the stories that made nearly every media outlet’s list, though in various rankings, have a connection, directly or indirectly, to Fermilab. Here’s a sampling with the rankings from the publications.

Discover magazine had the largest list, picking the top 100 science stories.

1: A claim by researchers at the OPERA experiment at CERN that they had measured neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light, something disallowed by Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. Now the scientific community is looking for another experiment to cross-check OPERA’s claim.

That brought renewed interest to a 2007 measurement by the MINOS experiment based at Fermilab that found neutrinos skirting the cosmic speed limit, but only slightly. The MINOS collaboration always planned to study this further when it upgrades its detector in early 2012 but the OPERA result added new urgency.

Look in 2012 for MINOS to update the time of flight of neutrinos debate in three stages. First, MINOS is analyzing the data collected since its 2007 result to look for this phenomena. Results should be ready in early 2012. This likely will improve the MINOS precision in this area by a factor of three from its 2007 result. Second, MINOS is in the process of upgrading its timing system within the next few months using a system of atomic clocks to detect when the neutrinos arrive at the detector. The atomic clock system will progressively improve resolution, which is needed to make the MINOS analysis comparable to the OPERA result and improve precision from the 2007 MINOS result by as much as a factor of 10. That will tell us if OPERA was on the right track or not, but may not be the definitive answer. That answer will come with the upgrades to the MINOS experiment and a more powerful neutrino beam, producing a larger quantity of neutrino events to study. The upgraded MINOS experiment will be in many ways a more precise system than OPERA’s and could produce a result comparable with OPERA’s precision likely by January 2014.

4: Kepler’s search for Earth-like planets that could sustain life produces a bounty of cosmic surprises, fueled, in part, by the computing skills of a Fermilab astrophysicist.
32: The on-again, off-again rumor of finding the Higgs boson particle. Physicists working with experiments at Fermilab’s Tevatron experiments and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider expect to answer the question of whether a Standard Model version of the Higgs exists in 2012.
65: The shutdown of the Tevatron at Fermilab after 28 years and numerous scientific and technological achievements.
82: Fermilab physicist Jason Steffen’s frustration with slow airplane boarding drives him to figure out a formula to speed up the aisle crawl.

Nature’s year in review didn’t rank stories but started off by mentioning the Tevatron’s shutdown after 28 years and following up shortly with the puzzling particle news of potentially FTL neutrinos and a Higgs sighting.

For science — as for politics and economics — 2011 was a year of upheaval, the effects of which will reverberate for decades. The United States lost three venerable symbols of its scientific might: the space-shuttle programme, the Tevatron particle collider and blockbuster profits from the world’s best-selling drug all came to an end.

Cosmos magazine rankings:

The MINOS far detector in the Soudan Mine in Minnesota. Credit: Fermilab

1: Kepler’s exoplanet findings
2: FTL neutrinos
3: Higgs

Scientific American‘s choices:

3: FTL neutrinos
5: Higgs

ABC News asked science radio and TV host physicist Michio Kaku for his top 10 picks. They include:

3: Hint of Higgs
5: Kepler’s exoplanet findings
10: Nobel Prize for the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, which laid the groundwork for the today’s search for dark energy. Fermilab has several connections to to this work. The latest tool in dark energy survey experiments, the Dark Energy Camera, was constructed at Fermilab in 2011. One of the three prize winners, Saul Perlmutter, is a member of the group that will use the camera, the Dark Energy Survey collaboration. Adam Riess, another of the winners, is a member of the SDSS-II experiment, a predecessor to DES that Fermilab was key in building and later operating its computing system.

Live Science

5: FTL neutrinos
4: Kepler’s exoplanet findings
2: Higgs

If the Higgs boson’s mass is high, it is expected to decay predominantly into two W bosons. Plushies images from the Particle Zoo.

To make the Ars Technica list stories had to be awe inspiring in 2011 AND have a chance of making the 2012 list as well.

1: FTL neutrinos
2: Kepler’s exoplanet findings
6: Higgs hunt

Science magazine chose the best scientific breakthrough of the year. Kepler’s exoplanet hunt made it into the runner up list.

Tell us who you agree with or, better, yet give us your own top 10 science stories of the year.

— Tona Kunz

Tags: ATLAS, CDF, CMS, Cosmic Frontier, DZero, Energy Frontier, Higgs boson, Intensity Frontier, MINOS, neutrinos
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For all you Grinches, physics shows Santa CAN deliver toys in one night

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011

Editor’s note: I like this so much that I think it is worth reprinting. This is from the now defunct FermiNews publication in 1998. If you celebrate Christmas, this is the perfect proof to keep Christmas magical for children at that age where they are teetering between believing or not. If you celeberate the season in another way, then this is just a fun physics lesson. Whatever your traditions are, have a greet weekend with friends and family.

Santa at Nearly the Speed of Light
by Arnold Pompos, Purdue University, and Sharon Butler, Office of Public Affairs. Illustrations by Tracy Jurinek

About this time of year, inquisitive children of a certain age begin to question whether Santa is real. After all, Santa has a major delivery problem. There are some 2 billion children in the world expecting Christmas presents. Assuming an average of 2.5 children per household, then, Santa has to visit about 800 million homes scattered about the globe.

The distance Santa has to travel can be estimated from the following. First, while the surface area of Earth is about 10¹⁴ square meters, only about 30 percent of that is land mass, or about 0.3 x 10¹⁴ square meters. Second, we’ll assume, for simplicity’s sake, that the 800 million homes are equally distributed on this land mass. Dividing 0.3 x 10¹⁴ by 800 million gives 4 x 10⁴ square meters occupied by every household (about six football fields); the square root of that is the distance between households, about 200 meters. Multiply this by the 800 million households to get the distance Santa must travel on Christmas Eve to deliver all the children’s gifts: 160 million kilometers, farther than the distance from here to the sun.

Thanks to the rotation of the earth, Santa has more time than children might initially think. Standing on the International Date Line, moving from east to west and crossing different time zones, Santa has not just 10 hours to deliver his presents (from 8 p.m., when children go to bed, until 6 a.m., when they wake up), but an extra 24 hours— 34 hours in all.

Even so, Santa’s task is daunting.

Now, some have guessed that Santa accomplishes his task by traveling at a speed close to that of light—let’s say, 99.999999 percent of the speed of light. By traveling that fast, in fact, Santa can deliver all his presents in just 500 seconds or so, with plenty of time left over (the remainder of the 34 hours) to polish off the cookies the children have left him on their kitchen tables.

There are certain consequences, however, of Santa’s traveling at this frantic pace. For example:

First, children may not be able to see Santa racing across the dark night sky, but they may be able to see a trail of light caused by Cerenkov radiation, a phenomenon created when charged objects travel faster than the speed of light (which they can do in transparent media, but not in a vacuum). Since the basic component of our atmosphere is nitrogen, light is slowed to 99.97 percent of its usual speed of 300,000 kilometers per second. Santa travels faster than this and undoubtedly is charged; as a consequence, then, he will emit visible photons. (Unfortunately, that light will be obscured by the light caused by the friction created when Santa rushes through the atmosphere. Also, Santa might roast in all this heat, but we’ll presume that Santa’s sleigh, like space capsules, has special protective shielding.)

Second, children will notice that as Rudolph, Santa’s lead reindeer, is rushing toward their homes, his nose is no longer red. The color depends on just how fast Rudolph is moving, turning yellow, then green, then blue, then violet, and finally turning invisible in the ultraviolet range as he accelerates to higher and higher speeds. This change in color is a well-known phenomenon, called the Doppler shift, which astronomers take advantage of to figure out the speeds with which the stars and galaxies in our expanding universe are moving with respect to us; from that information, the distances to these celestial objects can be deduced. Using the accompanying table, children can determine how fast Rudolph is traveling by noting the color of his nose.

One worry Santa has is whether, with his irremediable girth, he’ll be able to squeeze into all those chimneys. Traveling at nearly the speed of light makes the problem worse, because Santa gains mass (his kinetic energy adds to his mass, as Einstein’s famous E = mc2 attests). Children believe that Santa will easily fit in the chimney, because from their frame of reference, even though Santa is heavier, he has contracted. From Santa’s frame of reference, though, the chimney is narrower than Santa is.

But children need not fear. The theory of relativity assures us that Santa will fit (see figure 4), and their packages will be delivered on time.

Children might also wonder why Santa never seems to age. From year to year, he retains his cherub face and merry laugh, his long white beard and his round belly that jiggles like a bowlfull of jelly. The fact is that for objects traveling at close to the speed of light, time slows down. So, the more packages Santa delivers, the more he’ll travel, and the more he’ll remain the same, carrying on the Christmas tradition for generations of children to come.

Color of Rudolph’s nose:

Red

Yellow

Green

Blue

Violet

Corresponding wavelength

(in nanometers):

650

580

550

480

400

Santa’s speed as a percentage

of the speed of light (v/c)*:

Can Santa fit in the chimney if he’s traveling at nearly the speed of light?
To answer that question, we need to talk about two frames of reference: Santa’s and ours. We also need to place two periodically blinking lights, A and B, on the sides of the chimney. These lights will help us and Santa find the edges of the chimney in the darkness and therefore will determine when Santa is right above the chimney, ready to slide in. For Santa to fit into the chimney, his right and left sides need to be between lights A and B when they blink.

Figure 1: If Santa is traveling at normal earthbound speeds, say, 100 km per hour, he sees lights A and B blink at the same time. Just as his left arm touches A, his right arm also touches B; therefore Santa fits in (since Santa is not bigger than the chimney).

Figure 2: If Santa is moving at close to the speed of light, the situation changes. From our frame of reference, according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, Santa’s width contracts and he is narrower than the chimney. Therefore Santa has plenty of space to slide in.

Figure 3: From Santa’s frame of reference, however, the chimney is moving backward and is, in fact, narrower than he is. If Santa were to see A and B blinking at the same time, the chimney would be too narrow for him.

Figure 4: Not to worry. From Santa’s frame of reference, the two lights are not blinking at the same time. As light A blinks, Santa’s left side slips into the chimney. The chimney keeps moving backward as Santa’s body squeezes in, until finally, when light B blinks, Santa’s right side is perfectly aligned with the side of the chimney. Now all of Santa is in.

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Fermilab hot on trail of Higgs boson with LHC, Tevatron

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

Real CMS proton-proton collision events in which 4 high energy electrons (green lines and red towers) are observed. The event shows characteristics expected from the decay of a Higgs boson but is also consistent with background Standard Model physics processes. Courtesy: CMS

Today physicists at CERN on the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider announced an update on their search for the Higgs boson. That may make you wonder ( I hope) what is Fermilab’s role in this. Well, glad you asked.

Fermilab supports the 1,000 US LHC scientists and engineers by providing office and meeting space as well as the Remote Operation Center. Fermilab helped design the CMS detector, a portion of the LHC accelerator and is working on upgrades for both. About one-third of the members of each of the Tevatron’s experiments, CDF and DZero, are also members of the LHC experiments.

That means that a good portion of the LHC researchers are also looking for the Higgs boson with the Tevatron. Because the Tevatron and LHC accelerators collide different pairs of particles, the dominant way in which the experiments search for the Higgs at the two accelerators is different. Thus the two machines offer a complimentary search strategy.

If the Higgs exists and acts the way theorists expect, it is crucial to observe it in both types of decay patterns. Watch this video to learn how physicists search for the Higgs boson. These types of investigations might lead to the identification of new and unexpected physics.

Scientists from the CDF and DZero collaborations at Fermilab continue to analyze data collected before the September shutdown of the Tevatron in the search for the Higgs boson.

The two collaborations will announce their latest results for the Higgs boson search at an international particle physics conference in March 2012. This new updated analysis will have 20 to 40 percent more data than the July 2011 results as well as further improvements in analysis methods.

The Higgs particle is the last not-yet-observed piece of the theoretical framework known as the Standard Model of particles and forces. Watch this video to learn The nature of the Higgs boson and how it works. According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson explains why some particles have mass and others do not. Higgs most likely has a mass between 114-137 GeV/c2, about 100 times the mass of a proton. This predicted mass range is based on stringent constraints established by earlier measurements made by Tevatron and other accelerators around the world, and confirmed by the searches of LHC experiments presented so far in 2011. This mass range is well within reach of the Tevatron Collider.

The Tevatron experiments already have demonstrated that they have the ability to ferret out the Higgs-decay pattern by applying well-established techniques used to search for the Higgs boson to observing extremely rare but firmly expected physics signature. This signature consists of pairs of heavy bosons (WW or WZ) that decay into a pair of b quarks, a process that closely mimics the main signature that the Tevatron experiments use to search for the Higgs particle, i.e. Higgs decaying to a pair of b quarks, which has by far the largest probability to happen in this mass range. Thus, if a Standard Model Higgs exists, the Tevatron experiments will see it.

If the Standard Model Higgs particle does not exist, Fermilab’s Tevatron experiments are on track to rule it out this winter. CDF and DZero experiments have excluded the existence of a Higgs particle in the 100-108 and the 156-177 GeV/c2 mass ranges and will have sufficient analysis sensitivity to rule out this winter the mass region between.

While today’s announcement shows the progress that the LHC experiments have made in the last few months, all eyes will be on the Tevatron and on the LHC in March 2012 to see what they have to say about the elusive Higgs Boson.

– Tona Kunz

Tags: ATLAS, CDF, CMS, DZero, Energy Frontier, Higgs, Higgs boson, Tevatron
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U.S. ships world’s largest digital camera to Chile

Monday, December 12th, 2011

A four-ton digital camera landed safely in Chile last week on its way to making history by enabling the world’s largest galaxy survey, starting next year. Getting the camera there was a worldwide feat of technlogy and transportation prowess.

Doing big science, such as building the Dark Energy Camera, takes big effort and big cooperation. Building and installing one of the world’s largest digital cameras to conduct the most extensive galaxy survey to date as part of the Dark Energy Survey experiment required scientists and manufacturers from across the globe. Researchers from more than 26 institutions enlisted the help of 129 companies in the United States and about half a dozen in foreign countries to fabricate the often one-of-a-kind components for the camera.

Most components for the camera migrated to the Department of Energy’s Fermilab for testing and assembly, as seen in this timelapse video , before being shipped to the four-meter Blanco telescope in the remote Chilean mountains. The journey required help from planes, trains, trucks and boats to traverse continents and oceans, and ended with an 11-hour drive to a mountaintop.

The DES’s combination of survey area and depth will far surpass what has come before and provide researchers for the first time with four search techniques in one powerful instrument. To find clues to the characteristics of dark energy and why the expansion of the universe is accelerating, DES will trace the history of the expanding universe roughly three-quarters of the way back to the time of the big bang.

During five years of operation, starting in 2012, the 570-megapixel camera will create in-depth color images of one-eighth of the sky, or 5000 square degrees, to measure 100,000 galaxy clusters, 4,000 supernovae, and an estimated 300 million distant galaxies, about 10 million times fainter than the dimmest star you can see from Earth with the naked eye. It will yield the largest 3-D map of the cosmic web of large-scale structures in the universe.

–Tona Kunz

Tags: Cosmic Frontier, Dark Energy Camera, Dark Energy Survey, DECam, DES
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