New baby bison born at Fermilab

It’s that time of year again.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory welcomes the public to come see the latest additions to its herd of American bison, commonly known as buffalo. Three calves have been born in the past few days, increasing the herd size to 25, and at least eight more calves are expected by early June.

Visitors, including families with young children, can enter the Fermilab site through its Pine Street entrance in Batavia or the Batavia Road entrance in Warrenville. Admission is free, but you will need a valid photo ID to enter the site. Summer hours are from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week.

Fermilab’s first director, Robert Wilson, established the bison herd in 1969 as a symbol of the history of the Midwestern prairie and the laboratory’s pioneering research at the frontiers of particle physics. The herd remains a major attraction for families and wildlife enthusiasts. Today, the Fermilab site also boasts 1,100 acres of reconstructed tall-grass prairie as well as seven particle accelerators. The U.S. Department of Energy designated the 6,800-acre Fermilab site a National Environmental Research Park in 1989.

Visitors can learn more about nature at Fermilab by hiking the Interpretive Prairie Trail, a half-mile-long trail located near the Pine Street entrance. The Leon Lederman Science Education Center offers exhibits on the prairie and hands-on physics displays. The Lederman Center hours are Monday-Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

For up-to-date information for visitors, please visit www.fnal.gov or call (630) 840-3351.

To learn more about Fermilab’s bison herd, please visit our website at www.fnal.gov/pub/about/campus/ecology/wildlife/bison.html.

Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. Visit Fermilab’s website at http://www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter at @FermilabToday.

The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit http://science.energy.gov.

Batavia, IL – What does a scientist actually do all day? How difficult is it to be a mechanical engineer? What is the daily life of a computer technician really like? How much and what type of math is used in these types of careers?

On Wednesday, April 10, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m., the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will offer high -school students a valuable opportunity to ask those questions in person. The annual Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Career Expo, held in the atrium of Wilson Hall, will put these students face to face with people actually doing the kinds of jobs they will be applying for in the coming years.

In addition to Fermilab scientists and engineers, the STEM Career Expo will feature professionals of several local companies and research organizations, on hand to explain what they do. But this is not a college or job fair and is not about recruiting, according to organizer Susan Dahl of the Fermilab Office of Education.

Rather, she said, this is a chance for students to talk one-on-one with professionals working in their fields of interest. The expo will also include five panel discussions on STEM-related topics, with an opportunity for students to ask questions.

“We hope students come away with a new view of the possibilities of finding careers in these fascinating fields and a more realistic idea of the individuals working in these very relevant and fascinating jobs,” Dahl said.

The STEM Career Expo is free and open to all high -school students. The event is a collaborative event organized by the Fermilab Education Office and educators and career specialists from Kane and DuPage county schools. Sponsors include Fermilab Friends for Science Education, Batavia High School, Geneva Community High School and Northern Kane County Region EFE 110.

Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and is operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov, and follow Fermilab on Facebook at www.facebook.com/fermilab and on Twitter @FermilabToday.

The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

What will soon be the most powerful neutrino detector in the United States has recorded its first three-dimensional images of particles.

Using the first completed section of the NOvA neutrino detector, scientists have begun collecting data from cosmic rays—particles produced by a constant rain of atomic nuclei falling on the Earth’s atmosphere from space .

“It’s taken years of hard work and close collaboration among universities, national laboratories and private companies to get to this point,” said Pier Oddone, director of the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Fermilab manages the project to construct the detector.

The active section of the detector, under construction in Ash River, Minn., is about 12 feet long, 15 feet wide and 20 feet tall. The full detector will measure more than 200 feet long, 50 feet wide and 50 feet tall.

Scientists’ goal for the completed detector is to use it to discover properties of mysterious fundamental particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos are as abundant as cosmic rays in the atmosphere, but they have barely any mass and interact much more rarely with other matter . Many of the neutrinos around today are thought to have originated in the big bang.

“The more we know about neutrinos, the more we know about the early universe and about how our world works at its most basic level,” said NOvA co-spokesperson Gary Feldman of Harvard University.

Later this year, Fermilab, outside of Chicago, will start sending a beam of neutrinos 500 miles through the earth to the NOvA detector near the Canadian border. When a neutrino interacts in the NOvA detector , the particles it produces leave trails of light in their wake. The detector records these streams of light , enabling physicists to identify the original neutrino and measure the amount of energy it had.

When cosmic rays pass through the NOvA detector, they leave straight tracks and deposit well-known amounts of energy. They are great for calibration, said Mat Muether, a Fermilab post-doctoral researcher who has been working on the detector.

“Everybody loves cosmic rays for this reason,” Muether said. “They are simple and abundant and a perfect tool for tuning up a new detector.”

The detector at its current size catches more than 1,000 cosmic rays per second. Naturally occurring neutrinos from cosmic rays, supernovae and the sun stream through the detector at the same time. But the flood of more visible cosmic -ray data makes it difficult to pick them out.

Once the upgraded Fermilab neutrino beam starts, the NOvA detector will take data every 1.3 seconds to synchronize with the Fermilab accelerator . Inside this short time window, the burst of neutrinos from Fermilab will be much easier to spot.

The NOvA detector will be operated by the University of Minnesota under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The NOvA experiment is a collaboration of 180 scientists, technicians and students from 20 universities and laboratories in the U.S and another 14 institutions around the world. The scientists are funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and funding agencies in the Czech Republic, Greece, India, Russia and the United Kingdom.

Additional resources:

• NOvA project website: http://www-nova.fnal.gov
• NOvA: Exploring Neutrino Mysteries video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe4veClYxkE

Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter at @FermilabToday.

The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has earned ISO 20000 certification for excellence in information technology service management. Fermilab is the first of the Department of Energy’s 17 national laboratories to earn this certification.

ISO 20K is a global standard for companies and organizations who provide quality IT services. The standard was developed in 2005 (and revised in 2011), and any organization can apply for ISO 20K assessment and certification.

Fermilab’s assessment was conducted over several years, and included 13 services that are fundamental to the laboratory. These included the IT service desk, the lab-wide email system, and all network services, including Internet connections. Fermilab must submit an annual audit and a plan to continually improve services to maintain this certification.

“This significant accomplishment demonstrates the continuing commitment to IT excellence at all of the Department of Energy’s national laboratories,” said Michael Weis, Fermilab site manager with the DOE’s Office of Science.

Fermilab’s Computing Sector received the official certification in December and a ceremony was held at the laboratory on Wednesday, Feb. 13.

“Since we began the ISO 20K certification process several years ago, our goal has been to deliver the best possible IT-related services,” said Victoria White, Fermilab’s associate director for computing and chief information officer. “Moving forward, we will continue to create a better computing experience for our 1,750 employees and more than 2,000 scientific users.”

Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and is operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov, and follow Fermilab on Facebook at www.facebook.com/fermilab and on Twitter @FermilabToday.

The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

The judges have spoken, and the winners have been chosen in this year’s Fermilab Photowalk competition.

On Sept. 22, the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., invited 50 amateur and professional photographers to take pictures in five high-tech areas of the lab, areas not part of the public tour. The photographers, chosen on a first-come, first-served basis, were then asked to submit their best shots to a panel of five local Photowalk judges.

Earlier this month, the judges selected their favorites from the 234 submissions. Their choices range from close-up shots of machinery to depictions of the iconic Wilson Hall, some in color and others in stark black and white. The judging process was spirited, requiring several rounds of voting to arrive at the 25 favorites.

The winning photo was taken by Stan Kirschner of Mundelein, Ill. Kirschner has been a photography enthusiast since he was 13, when his parents bought him his first camera – a Kodak Baby Brownie Special. He has taught photography at the University of Vermont and is active in two camera clubs.

“I feel very honored to be a participant in Fermilab’s 2012 Photowalk,” Kirschner said. “What a wonderful opportunity and experience to learn about particle physics and be able to look for creative images to photograph.”

Brian Schultz of Naperville, Ill., snapped the second- and third-place photos. Matthew Swenson of Wood Dale, Ill., took the fourth-place picture, and John Williams of Mundelein, Ill., captured the fifth-place image.

The top 25 photos have been posted online at the Fermilab website, and will be featured on a new exhibit to be displayed in the Wilson Hall atrium. The top five photos will be entered into the international Photowalk competition, run by the particle physics collaboration Interactions.org. A total of 10 laboratories around the world will take part in the contest, with public voting set to begin in December.

Fermilab was one of two U.S. Department of Energy laboratories to participate in this year’s Photowalk. The other, Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, has also chosen their top five photos for the international competition. Brookhaven’s winners can be seen here.

Fermilab’s Photowalk drew participants from as far away as Atlanta, Ga. It’s the second time Fermilab has held a Photowalk, and the first since 2010.

This year’s panel of judges:

• Michael Branigan s the co-owner of Sandbox Studio, Chicago, a small communication design firm founded in 1998. Since 2004, Michael has collaborated on myriad science communication projects for Fermilab, SLAC, Argonne National Laboratory and the DOE Office of Science, to name a few, and has worked on symmetry magazine.

• Steve Buyansky started his career in photography at the Beacon-News in Aurora in 1983. He became photo editor at the Herald-News in Joliet in 2000. He is now a photo editor for Sun-Times Media, responsible for the Beacon-News, the Courier-News and the Naperville Sun.

• Marty Murphy works in the Fermilab Accelerator Operations Department and is a member of the Fermilab Photo Club. He is an avid photographer and has photographed Fermilab’s landscapes, machines, people and wildlife for the past 15 years.

• Jessica Orwig is a science writing intern for Fermilab’s Office of Communication. She is a graduate student at Texas A&M University, studying science and technology journalism.

• Georgia Schwender has been the visual arts coordinator at Fermilab since 2001 and operates the second-floor art gallery at Wilson Hall. She graduated from the Art Institute of Boston and previously worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.

Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and is operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov, and follow Fermilab on Facebook at www.facebook.com/fermilab and on Twitter @FermilabToday.

The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

Top three photos

Honorable mentions

BATAVIA, IL – Calling all nature lovers. How would you like the chance to help diversify one of the oldest prairie restorations in Illinois?

The Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is looking for volunteers to help with its annual prairie seed harvest on Saturday, Nov. 3. Fermilab’s site hosts 1,000 acres of restored native prairie land, and each year community members pitch in to help collect seeds from those native plants .

Fewer than one-tenth of one percent of native prairies in Illinois remain intact. Fermilab’s restored grassland represents one of the largest prairies in the state. The deep-rooted natural grasses of the prairie help prevent erosion and preserve the area’s aquifers.

The main collection area spans about 100 acres, and within it, volunteers will gather seeds from about 25 different types of native plants. Some of those seeds will be used to replenish the Fermilab prairies, filling in gaps where some species are more dominant than others.

“Our objective is to collect seeds from dozens of species,” said Ryan Campbell, an ecologist at Fermilab. “We have more than 1,000 acres of restored grassland, and it’s not all of the same quality. We want to spread diversity throughout the whole site.”

Once the seeds have been collected, the Fermilab roads and grounds staff will store them in a greenhouse, and process them for springtime planting, once controlled burns of the prairie have been conducted. The laboratory has also donated some of the seeds to area schools for use in their own prairies, and as educational tools.

Fermilab has been hosting the Prairie Harvest every year since 1974, and the event typically draws more than 200 volunteers. The event will last from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with lunch provided. Volunteers will be trained on different types of plants, and how to harvest seeds. If you have them, bring gloves, a pair of hand clippers and paper grocery bags.

In case of inclement weather, call the Fermilab switchboard at 630-840-3000 to check whether the prairie harvest has been canceled. More information on Fermilab’s prairie can be found at http://www.fnal.gov/pub/about/campus/ecology/prairie. For more information on the Prairie Harvest, call the Fermilab Office of Communication at 630-840-3351.

Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. Visit Fermilab’s website at http://www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter at @FermilabToday .

The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit http://science.energy.gov.

The University of Notre Dame has received a five-year, $6.1 million award from the National Science Foundation to support the nationwide QuarkNet program, which has inspired teachers and students alike for 15 years.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory plays a leading role in managing the QuarkNet program, which receives additional funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. QuarkNet uses particle physics experiments to provide valuable research, training, and mentorship opportunities for high school teachers. More than 500 teachers across the United States participate in the program.

Through the QuarkNet program, physicists at Fermilab, Notre Dame and 50 other research institutions will continue to mentor teachers in research experiences, enabling them to teach the basic concepts of introductory physics in a context that high school students find exciting. Faculty, teachers and their students work together as a community of researchers, which not only develops scientific literacy in students, but also attracts young students to careers in science and technology.

“The Notre Dame QuarkNet Center is a great example of the mentoring and training provided by particle physicists at universities and national laboratories across the country,” said Mitchell Wayne, Notre Dame professor of physics and principal investigator of the NSF grant. “It has become a focal point for educational outreach into our community.”

Fermilab and Notre Dame were two of the initial QuarkNet centers. Marge Bardeen, head of the Fermilab Education Office, started the Fermilab center 15 years ago. Her vision was to inspire and educate high school students who would be interested and engaged in particle physics. To reach these students meant reaching out to their teachers and engaging them in research.

“Fermilab and other research institutions can provide an experience that teachers and their students cannot find in other places,” Bardeen said. “They can help develop a broader framework for science. They can show how physicists discover new knowledge and talk about their work.”

One key feature of QuarkNet is the summer research experiences that participating centers offer for teachers and their students. During its first year, each QuarkNet center provides two teachers with eight-week research appointments and develops their expertise as lead teachers. In following years, each center may choose to host a teacher-student team for a research experience. This summer, for example, two teachers and eight students worked on seven different projects with Fermilab scientists, including investigations into dark matter and dark energy.

In the past few years, the reach of QuarkNet has become international, with QuarkNet activities such as cosmic-ray studies and masterclasses now available to teachers and their students around the world. This year, students in twenty-five countries are participating in the International Masterclasses, coordinated by the International Particle Physics Outreach Group. Held at university and laboratory centers, masterclasses are institutes for teams of students who become physicists for a day, analyze real experimental data and discuss results through videoconferences with physicists and peers across the world.

“They are looking at particle events, making determinations, doing counting themselves, coming to their own conclusions,” said Notre Dame’s Kenneth Cecire, who facilitates masterclasses in the United States.

Fermilab technicians have developed a cosmic-ray detector with a data acquisition system that allows high school students to conduct cosmic-ray studies in their classrooms. An e-Lab developed through an NSF grant to Fermilab allows students to upload and analyze cosmic- ray data and publish their results as online posters. QuarkNet offers professional development workshops for teachers to effectively use the detectors and e-Lab with their students. Fermilab has provided 700 cosmic-ray data acquisition systems to schools around the world, and over 1,000 teachers and 2,239 student research groups have e-Lab accounts.

As part of the QuarkNet program, teachers and their students have helped to build elements of the major Fermilab and Large Hadron Collider experiments over the last decade and are working on new detector upgrades. They are able to look at the latest scientific data from the LHC experiments, and use their own particle detectors to conduct measurements of cosmic rays.

During the next five years, the NSF grant will allow the QuarkNet program to expand and begin some new initiatives, including outreach into the Native American community.

“We are delighted to receive this new award and we are really looking forward to the next five years of QuarkNet,” Wayne said.

Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. Visit Fermilab’s website at http://www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter at @FermilabToday.

The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit http://science.energy.gov.

Project website:
www.darkenergysurvey.org

Fact Sheet:
http://news.fnal.gov/wp-content/uploads/understanding-dark-energy.pdf

Eight billion years ago, rays of light from distant galaxies began their long journey to Earth. That ancient starlight has now found its way to a mountaintop in Chile, where the newly constructed Dark Energy Camera, the most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created, has captured and recorded it for the first time.

That light may hold within it the answer to one of the biggest mysteries in physics – why the expansion of the universe is speeding up.

Scientists in the international Dark Energy Survey collaboration announced this week that the Dark Energy Camera, the product of eight years of planning and construction by scientists, engineers, and technicians on three continents, has achieved first light. The first pictures of the southern sky were taken by the 570-megapixel camera on Sept. 12.

“The achievement of first light through the Dark Energy Camera begins a significant new era in our exploration of the cosmic frontier,” said James Siegrist, associate director of science for high energy physics with the U.S. Department of Energy. “The results of this survey will bring us closer to understanding the mystery of dark energy, and what it means for the universe.”

The Dark Energy Camera was constructed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, and mounted on the Victor M. Blanco telescope at the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, which is the southern branch of the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). With this device, roughly the size of a phone booth, astronomers and physicists will probe the mystery of dark energy, the force they believe is causing the universe to expand faster and faster.

“The Dark Energy Survey will help us understand why the expansion of the universe is accelerating, rather than slowing due to gravity,” said Brenna Flaugher, project manager and scientist at Fermilab. “It is extremely satisfying to see the efforts of all the people involved in this project finally come together.”

The Dark Energy Camera is the most powerful survey instrument of its kind, able to see light from over 100,000 galaxies up to 8 billion light years away in each snapshot. The camera’s array of 62 charged-coupled devices has an unprecedented sensitivity to very red light, and along with the Blanco telescope’s large light-gathering mirror (which spans 13 feet across), will allow scientists from around the world to pursue investigations ranging from studies of asteroids in our own Solar System to the understanding of the origins and the fate of the universe.

“We’re very excited to bring the Dark Energy Camera online and make it available for the astronomical community through NOAO’s open access telescope allocation,” said Chris Smith, director of the Cerro-Tololo Inter-American Observatory. “With it, we provide astronomers from all over the world a powerful new tool to explore the outstanding questions of our time, perhaps the most pressing of which is the nature of dark energy.”

Scientists in the Dark Energy Survey collaboration will use the new camera to carry out the largest galaxy survey ever undertaken, and will use that data to carry out four probes of dark energy, studying galaxy clusters, supernovae, the large-scale clumping of galaxies and weak gravitational lensing. This will be the first time all four of these methods will be possible in a single experiment.

The Dark Energy Survey is expected to begin in December, after the camera is fully tested, and will take advantage of the excellent atmospheric conditions in the Chilean Andes to deliver pictures with the sharpest resolution seen in such a wide-field astronomy survey. In just its first few nights of testing, the camera has already delivered images with excellent and nearly uniform spatial resolution.

Over five years, the survey will create detailed color images of one-eighth of the sky, or 5,000 square degrees, to discover and measure 300 million galaxies, 100,000 galaxy clusters and 4,000 supernovae.

The Dark Energy Survey is supported by funding from the U.S. Department of Energy; the National Science Foundation; funding agencies in the United Kingdom, Spain, Brazil, Germany and Switzerland; and the participating DES institutions.

More information about the Dark Energy Survey, including the list of participating institutions, is available at the project website: www.darkenergysurvey.org.

For a summary of the major components contributed to the Dark Energy Camera by the participating institutions, read these symmetry articles: www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000880, http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/september-2012/the-dark-energy-camera-opens-its-eyes

Released by Fermilab and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) on behalf of the Dark Energy Survey collaboration. NOAO is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc. under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.

Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter at @FermilabToday.

The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

To download the first images captured by the Dark Energy Camera, go to http://www.noao.edu/news/2012/pr1204.php

 

Live webcast of installation available here:

http://fnal.gov/pub/webcams/nova_webcam/

 

Today, technicians in Minnesota will begin to position the first block of a detector that will be part of the largest, most advanced neutrino experiment in North America.

The NuMI Off-Axis Neutrino Appearance experiment – NOvA for short – will study the properties of neutrinos, such as their masses, and investigate whether they helped give matter an edge over antimatter after both were created in equal amounts in the big bang. The experiment is on track to begin taking data in 2013.

“This is a significant step toward a greater understanding of neutrinos,” said Marvin Marshak, NOvA laboratory director and director of undergraduate research at the University of Minnesota. “It represents many months of hard work on the part of the whole NOvA collaboration.”

Neutrinos are elementary particles, basic building blocks of matter in the Standard Model of particle physics. They are almost massless, and they interact so rarely with other matter that they can move straight through hundreds of miles of solid rock.

The NOvA experiment will study a beam of neutrinos streaming about 500 miles through the Earth from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago to a large detector in Ash River, Minnesota. The particles, generated in what will be the most powerful neutrino beam in the world, will make the trip in less than three milliseconds.

Today, crews will use a 750,000-pound pivoter machine to lift the first 417,000-pound block – one of 28 that will make up the detector – and put it in place at the end of the 300-foot-long detector hall. The delicate process may take multiple days.

Each block of the detector measures 51 by 51 by 7 feet and is made up of 384 plastic PVC modules. About 170 students from the University of Minnesota built the modules, stringing them with optical fibers and attaching their endcaps.

Scientists and engineers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory developed the machine that glues modules into blocks. Scientists and engineers at Fermilab developed the pivoter machine and assembly table.

“About a dozen scientists, engineers and technicians from Fermilab and Argonne have been up to Ash River multiple times in the past year to make this thing happen,” said Rick Tesarek, Fermilab physicist and NOvA deputy project leader. “They’re part of a team of over a hundred collaborators who have been actively working on the experiment.”

Once the block is installed, crews will fill it with liquid scintillator. When neutrinos interact with the liquid, they will produce charged particles that will release light, which the optical fiber will detect. The fiber will carry the signal to electronics, which will record the neutrino event.

Neutrinos come in three flavors, each associated with a different elementary particle: electron, muon and tau. Three different types of neutrinos oscillate between these flavors, spending a different fraction of their lives as each flavor.

“Everyone’s been watching to see which experiment will make the next big step in uncovering the properties of neutrinos,” said Mark Messier, Indiana University physicist and co-spokesperson of the NOvA experiment. “The NOvA experiment should be it. It is uniquely positioned to be the first experiment to determine the ordering of the masses of the three neutrinos.”

Officials first broke ground on the NOvA detector facility, a laboratory of the University of Minnesota’s School of Physics and Astronomy, in May 2009. Crews completed the building this spring.

The experiment will use two detectors, a 330-metric-ton near detector at Fermilab and the 14-kiloton far detector at the detector facility close to the U.S.-Canadian border, to look for changes in the neutrino beam as it travels. The far detector is scheduled to begin taking data in 2013 and to be completed in early 2014.

An upgrade of the Fermilab neutrino beam, now in progress during a yearlong accelerator shutdown, will be crucial to the experiment. Fermilab will increase the power of the beam by a factor of two from 320 kilowatts to 700 kilowatts. NOvA experimenters expect eventually to study a sample of about 100 neutrino events collected during six years of operation.

The NOvA experiment is a collaboration of 169 scientists from 19 universities and laboratories in the U.S and another 15 institutions around the world.

Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. Visit Fermilab’s website at http://www.fnal.gov   and follow us on Twitter at @FermilabToday.

The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit   http://science.energy.gov.

Additional information:

• NOvA website: http://www-nova.fnal.gov/
• NOvA: Exploring Neutrino Mysteries:https://youtu.be/Fe4veClYxkE