## Posts Tagged ‘award’

### Sam Zeller receives DOE award to track neutrinos

Friday, June 8th, 2012

Sam Zeller won a DOE Early Career Research Award to support her work on liquid argon neutrino dectectors. Photo: Reidar Hahn

Neutrinos are known for escaping capture. They fly through matter and their different types continuously morph into one another. That elusive, shifting behavior challenges nearly every available tool and capability scientists have to sketch their portraits.

With better tools come more detailed portraits. Last month, Fermilab scientist Geralyn “Sam” Zeller received a 2012 DOE Early Career Research Award to advance a detector technology that will capture neutrinos’ attributes with unprecedented detail. The $2.5 million award, spread over five years, will support a proof-of-principle study towards the construction of multi-kiloton liquid-argon neutrino detectors. “There are some really important questions we want to answer about how neutrinos behave,” Zeller said. “The best chance for answering them is to study neutrinos with this exquisite detector.” Liquid-argon detectors are practically photographic in their ability to show what happens when a neutrino hits an argon nucleus. Tracks that the resultant particles leave behind are shown in high resolution, and it’s easy to distinguish the various particle types that arise from the interaction. But information on how neutrinos behave in liquid-argon detectors is sparse. Most of what is known is based on simulations rather than experiment. Also, researchers have typically gathered what they need to know from event displays – pretty pictures of events that, while useful, are relatively light on quantified information. Zeller, who has been at Fermilab since December 2009, plans to fill the gap with an abundance of new data. The DOE award will support the analysis of neutrino data recently collected by a small (less than 1 ton) liquid-argon detector prototype called ArgoNeuT. In the next few years, Zeller’s team will also generate and analyze neutrino data using Fermilab’s new MicroBooNE detector, a 170-ton liquid-argon detector. Their findings will tell them whether they can get the expected performance out of a detector of much larger scale. They’ll also characterize exactly how neutrinos behave when interacting in argon. “There’s a big gap in our knowledge of how neutrinos interact,” Zeller said. “We want better information to inform the design of future detectors.” Zeller’s project leverages the current ongoing U.S. neutrino program with the idea that the community could build, in manageable stages, a liquid-argon detector weighing tens of thousands of tons. Its prodigious size increases scientists’ chance of capturing a neutrino that has changed forms. Combined with its characteristic high precision, the detector would prove invaluable for the proposed Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment, which will allow scientists to observe neutrino oscillations, as their form-changing is called. It would also be of use for the short-baseline program in looking for a fourth neutrino to add to the family of the known three. If future neutrino experiments go well, scientists may finally have answers to basic questions surrounding the ghostly particle: which neutrino types are the lightest and heaviest, and do they behave the same as their antiparticles? The DOE award will fund two postdocs and a dedicated team for the long-baseline program, as well as supporting technical and engineering work. “There’s an opportunity here because we have these two detectors and the best neutrino beams in the world,” Zeller said. “Now we’re going to try to get as much information out of them as we can.” Leah Hesla ### Brendan Casey receives DOE award for muon research Wednesday, June 6th, 2012 This article first appeared in Fermilab Today on May 29. Brendan Casey was awarded a DOE Early Career Research Award to support his work developing detector technology for the Muon g-2 experiment. Photo: Reidar Hahn Four years ago, Fermilab physicist Brendan Casey began looking for a new research project. Should he join the thousands of physicists working on particle collider experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe? Or should he collaborate with a relatively small group of scientists who wanted to build a new physics experiment at Fermilab to search for hidden subatomic forces? This month, Casey was rewarded for his decision to work on the smaller experiment. The Department of Energy’s Office of Science named Casey a recipient of the 2012 DOE Early Career Research Award. It will support his research on the detector technology for the Muon g-2 experiment with a total of$2.5 million over five years.

“To be chosen is a great honor,” said Casey. “It also is an affirmation that the choice of pursuing the Muon g-2 experiment paid off.”

For this year’s awards, DOE selected 68 researchers from a pool of about 850 applicants based at universities and national laboratories in the United States. Three Fermilab scientists received the award this year: Casey, Tengming Shen and Geralyn “Sam” Zeller.

Casey is one of about 50 people working on the Muon g-2 experiment. The collaboration expects to add scientists from new institutions this June.

“We are recruiting collaborators,” said Casey, who worked on Fermilab’s DZero collider experiment before joining Muon g-2. “With this award, we’ll be able to expand our research efforts.”

The DOE grant will pay for part of Casey’s research efforts, fund a postdoctoral associate, support engineering and technical work and contribute to purchasing equipment for the experiment.

The Muon g-2 collaboration aims to settle a perplexing question that has haunted the particle physics community for more than a decade. Do muons behave as predicted by the highly successful theory known as the Standard Model, or are these particles subject to a mysterious force that changes the particles behavior when exposed to a magnetic field?

Results obtained by a previous muon experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory provided an unexpected but non-conclusive glimpse at the hidden force that might be tugging at the muon, a heavy relative of the electron. But the accelerator at Brookhaven cannot produce enough muons for scientists to make a more precise measurement. Hence scientists turned to Fermilab and its Main Injector accelerator.

Casey, who received a Wilson Fellowship in 2007 and became a Fermilab staff scientist in 2011, focuses on the development of the special particle detector that scientists will use to measure the behavior of the muons in a magnetic field.

“While we will reuse some of the equipment used in the Brookhaven experiment, we will build the particle detectors from scratch,” said Casey.

Casey is collaborating with scientists and students from Boston University, Northwestern University and the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute on developing the experiment’s straw tracking detector, which uses charged wires in long, narrow drift tubes to identify the trajectories of particles.

Kurt Riesselmann