One minute with Thomas Hein, TARGET program teaching assistant

How did you get involved with the TARGET program?

A little over a year ago, I attended a few of the Saturday Morning Physics lectures and heard about the TARGET program. I decided to apply and was accepted into the program.

What is your role in the Python programming course?

As a TARGET student last year, I worked with Ruth Pordes, my supervisor, along with Nate Knauf, another intern outside of the TARGET program, to create a Python course for other TARGET students. Nate Knauf and I created the teaching materials, and Ruth supervised the class. By the end of the program, every student had a solid understanding of the Python language.

This year, I was able to come back as an extended intern. I am now working with my new supervisor Marco Mambelli, the technical lead on the GlideinWMS project. The Python course is being given again this year, and Marco and I are leading it. It has been a lot of fun, and I look forward to each class.

Are you working on any other projects?

I am currently focused on the GlideinWMS project, updating the code base from an older version of Python to be compatible with Python version 3.6.

What are you planning on doing when you leave Fermilab?

I will be attending the University of Illinois at Chicago this fall, majoring in computer science. I hope to study machine learning and take some classes in electrical engineering as well.

What’s your favorite part of working here?

It’s a great atmosphere to work in, and the people here are amazing. This has been an incredible experience for me, and I’m glad to come into work every day.

On Wednesday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook Live from a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, future home of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.

As of the date of this post, more than 2 million people have viewed Zuckerberg’s Facebook Live video, which discusses DUNE, neutrinos and the search for dark matter. Fermilab even gets a shout-out about 4 minutes in (3:55).

Watch Zuckerberg’s video for a glimpse of the DUNE host facility and to learn a little more about our research partners at Sanford Lab.

Way back when, I was in the Materials Supply Group, I was in charge of looking through lists of equipment that laboratories and government facilities had placed in excess — things they no longer needed — and that could be transferred to another laboratory.

I had heard through my boss Norm Hill and other higher-ups that they were looking for a liquid-helium plant. They needed it to cool the magnets in the Main Ring and to do their experiments for the future Energy Doubler. So I was looking and, lo and behold, I came across an air separation plant. It was thousands and thousands of dollars. We acquired the Worthington reciprocating compressors that were used in the plant.

We worked it out with Norm Hill and Jack Jaeger, the directorate approved it, and it was all free of charge. All we had to do was pay the shipping. It was a pretty huge acquisition. It was from a facility in California.

The compressors arrived in pieces on big flatbed trucks — huge trailer-type vehicles.

People were so happy to get it free of charge. I saved the lab mega bucks.

You can read about the liquid-helium plant in the Dec. 11, 1975, issue of FermiNews, page 1.

What happens when tiny, invisible particles called neutrinos are sent hurtling through a tank of liquid argon? For most of the neutrinos, not much. They’ll pass through the argon unscathed. But other neutrinos will collide with argon molecules, leaving behind tracks — proof they were there.

These kinds of collisions take place inside Fermilab’s MicroBooNE neutrino detector. Now, with the help of VENu, a free smartphone app, users can dive into MicroBooNE’s 170-ton tank of liquid argon and see neutrino tracks for themselves.

“The primary goal of the VENu app is to get more people involved in particle physics, especially in neutrino physics,” said Marco Del Tutto, the app’s primary developer from Oxford University who works on the MicroBooNE experiment. “The app enables users to immerse themselves inside our particle detector and to see with their own eyes the particles that interact in it.”

VENu uses real data collected by the MicroBooNE neutrino detector, modeled in a 3-D environment to create an interactive neutrino-hunting experience. A game mode helps users understand what’s happening in the detector — what’s going on when a neutrino interacts with argon? — and then lets them catch the neutrino interactions themselves. VENu can also be used with any virtual-reality headset for an even more immersive experience.

The development of VENu started in 2014, as the MicroBooNE team prepared to bring the detector online.

“We had been thinking about new ways to show off the MicroBooNE experiment. MicroBooNE is an innovative technology, and we wanted an innovative way to show it off,” said Sam Zeller, co-spokesperson of the MicroBooNE experiment.

Alistair McLean, a student from New Mexico State University, was the first to create a virtual model of the MicroBooNE detector, forming an important platform for a new way to visualize particle physics.

Del Tutto took VENu’s design a step further to make it more accessible for everyone.

“Many people hear ‘particle physics’ and think it’s too secretive and too hard for them to understand,” Del Tutto said. “An app looked like the perfect product, as it shares what we are doing, who we are, and shows real data, all in a simple and intuitive way.”

MicroBooNE isn’t the only particle physics experiment to have an app — Del Tutto is also a part of the team that made Collider, an app for the ATLAS experiment at CERN laboratory in Switzerland — but VENu is uniquely engaging.

“There aren’t many apps out there that combine real particle events and visualizations, learning sections and games to engage the public,” Del Tutto said.

In the future, Del Tutto plans to add visualizations of more detectors to the app, including ICARUS, a much larger neutrino detector than MicroBooNE. ICARUS is currently on its way to Fermilab from CERN. But for now, VENu will continue to showcase the MicroBooNE detector.

Zeller said, “We are very proud of where VENu started, what it has become and the possibility to show off MicroBooNE in a completely new way.”

If you have ever tried to watch a movie or listen to music on a plane, then you know the problem well: The roar of the engines makes it difficult to hear what’s being piped through the speakers — even when those speakers are situated in or on your ear. It’s great that we have noise-canceling headphones that can provide a more enjoyable listening experience. High-frequency sound waves are filtered because of the very structure of the headphone. Low-frequency sound waves are filtered by a process called destructive interference: The headphone’s sound waves are created 180 degrees out of phase with the intruding waves — those of the airplane engines — and the two waves cancel each other out. As a result, the listener can focus on the sounds he or she wants to hear.

In a similar manner, at the MicroBooNE detector we identify and filter out several excess noise sources at both high and lower frequencies. The primary component of the MicroBooNE detector is the liquid-argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) — a large, horizontal-silo-like vessel filled with liquid argon. Scientists make measurements of the particles that result from the collision of a neutrino with an argon nucleus. These particles leave in the argon a trail of electrons, which drift toward two planes of wires —8,256 of them — in the LArTPC. That information travels as current through the wires, and researchers use the information to learn more about the neutrino that triggered it.

The current on each wire is amplified and shaped by custom low-power, low-noise circuits immersed in the liquid argon. The low-noise operation of readout electronics in a LArTPC is critical to properly extract the distribution of charge deposited on the wire planes of the TPC. Using data from the first year of MicroBooNE operations, researchers identified several distinct types of TPC noise, which exceeded expectations for the types of noise inherent to the electronics.

With the support from the entire collaboration, the analysis team developed an offline noise filter that eliminates most of the excess noise while achieving excellent signal preservation. The resulting two-dimensional event display for a signal from one data event is shown in the figure both before (panel (a)) and after (panel (b)) offline noise filtering. The team recovered clean event signatures after subtracting all identified noise sources. The residual electronics noise is consistent with the cold electronics design expectations and is stable with time and uniform over the functioning channels. This noise level is significantly lower than previous experiments that used warm front-end electronics.

In summer of 2016, the collaboration additionally performed several hardware upgrades, with new components from Brookhaven National Laboratory and technical support from Fermilab, to mitigate the two largest sources of excess noise. After the successful upgrade, the residual excess noise was largely removed. This result has been submitted to the Journal of Instrumentation and can be found on arXiv.

In a talk on the topic, Jyoti Joshi of Brookhaven, one of the papers co-authors, noted that the experience accumulated during the first year of data taking proved to be critical in the optimization and operation of the MicroBooNE TPC and is already proving useful in informing the design of future LArTPC detectors. There will be a wine and cheese seminar at Fermilab covering the first year of MicroBooNE operations on July 28, so come learn all about it.