Fermilab constructs pioneering accelerator test facility

Batavia, Ill.—Officials at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced today that the laboratory has started phase II of the construction of a pioneering facility to advance a technology that will be critical to the next generation of particle accelerators.

The new facility, which will occupy three buildings and host a 460-foot-long test accelerator, will be the first of its kind in the United States.

Fermilab is using $52.7 million in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to advance its Superconducting Radio-Frequency R&D program, which includes the construction of the SRF Accelerator Test Facility. Phase I of the construction began in March 2010 with the $2.8 million expansion of an existing building. For phase II, the laboratory has awarded a $4.2 million contract for the construction of two new buildings. Additional ARRA funds will go toward equipment and infrastructure needed for the building’s operation. Fermilab will use the facility to test superconducting radio-frequency components and validate the manufacturing capability of vendors from U.S. industry.

“Our future is going to involve accelerators that use superconducting radio-frequency technology,” said Jay Theilacker of Fermilab’s Accelerator Division. “Building this new SRF test facility is an important step forward.”

The structures operate inside containers known as cryomodules, which chill the cavities to -456 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature where they can conduct electric current without electrical resistance—hence the term “superconducting.”

Fermilab plans to use the facility to test cryomodules designed for two proposed future particle accelerators: Project X, which would be built at Fermilab, and the International Linear Collider, which could become the world’s next high-energy collider, designed and built through an international effort. The laboratory’s current flagship accelerator, the Tevatron, is scheduled to retire after 2011. It does not use SRF technology.

Michigan-based Barton Malow Inc. will do the civil construction for the SRF test facility, which will consist of three interconnected structures. One will house the SRF test accelerator; the second will accommodate the testing area for cryomodules, which are the building blocks of an SRF accelerator; and the third will house the equipment for a powerful new refrigerator that will cool the cryomodules in the test accelerator and the test area.

Scientists will also use the particle beam generated by the test accelerator to develop and design better instruments and advanced accelerator technology, which have applications in many fields, including medicine and industry.

Since March, Barton Malow subcontractors have hired about 200 Chicago-area tradespeople to work on the test facility expansion.

“There have been about 20 people here per week, all local,” said Barton Malow Project Manager Keith Wiederhold.

He expects that building the two new structures will require a similar number of workers. The company plans to finish the project by the fall of 2011.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science national laboratory dedicated to research in high-energy physics and related fields. The Fermi Research Alliance LLC operates Fermilab under a contract with DOE.

Batavia, Ill.—New constraints on the elusive Higgs particle are more stringent than ever before. Scientists of the CDF and DZero collider experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab revealed their latest Higgs search results today (July 26) at the International Conference on High Energy Physics, held in Paris from July 22-28. Their results rule out a significant fraction of the allowed mass range established by earlier experiments.

The Fermilab experiments now exclude a Higgs particle with a mass between 158 and 175 GeV/c². Searches by previous experiments and constraints due to the Standard Model of Particles and Forces indicate that the Higgs particle should have a mass between 114 and 185 GeV/c². (For comparison: 100 GeV/c² is equivalent to 107 times the mass of a proton.) The new Fermilab result rules out about a quarter of the expected Higgs mass range.

“Fermilab has pushed the productivity of the Tevatron collider to new heights,” said Dennis Kovar, DOE Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics. “Thanks to the extraordinary performance of Fermilab’s Tevatron collider, CDF and DZero collaborators from around the world are producing exciting results and are making immense progress on the search for the Higgs particle.”

At the ICHEP conference, CDF and DZero scientists are giving more than 40 talks on searches for exotic particles and dark matter candidates, discoveries of new decay channels of known particles and precision measurements of numerous particle properties. Together, the two collaborations present about 150 results.

The Higgs particle is the last not-yet-observed piece of the theoretical framework known as the Standard Model of Particles and Forces. According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson explains why some particles have mass and others do not.

“We are close to completely ruling out a Higgs boson with a large mass,” said DZero co-spokesperson Dmitri Denisov, one of 500 scientists from 19 countries working on the DZero experiment. “Three years ago, we would not have thought that this would be possible. With more data coming in, our experiments are beginning to be sensitive to a low-mass Higgs boson.”

Robert Roser, co-spokesperson for the 550 physicists from 13 countries of the CDF collaboration, also credited the great work of the CDF and DZero analysis groups for the stringent Higgs exclusion results.

“The new Higgs search results benefited from the wealth of Tevatron collision data and the smart search algorithms developed by lots of bright people, including hundreds of graduate students,” Roser said. “The CDF and DZero analysis groups have gained a better understanding of collisions that can mimic a Higgs signal; improved the sensitivity of their detectors to particle signals; and included new Higgs decay channels in the overall analysis.”

To obtain the latest Higgs search result, the CDF and DZero analysis groups separately sifted through more than 500,000 billion proton-antiproton collisions that the Tevatron has delivered to each experiment since 2001. After the two groups obtained their independent Higgs search results, they combined their results to produce the joint exclusion limits.

“Our latest result is based on about twice as much data as a year and a half ago,” said DZero co-spokesperson Stefan Söldner-Rembold, of the University of Manchester. “As we continue to collect and analyze data, the Tevatron experiments will either exclude the Standard Model Higgs boson in the entire allowed mass range or see first hints of its existence.”

The observation of the Higgs particle is also one of the goals of the Large Hadron Collider experiments at the European laboratory CERN, which record proton-proton collisions that have 3.5 times the energy of Tevatron collisions. But for rare subatomic processes such as the production of a Higgs particle with a low mass, extra energy is less important than a large number of collisions produced.

“With the Tevatron cranking out more and more collisions, we have a good chance of catching a glimpse of the Higgs boson,” said CDF co-spokesperson Giovanni Punzi, of the University of Pisa and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Italy. “It will be fascinating to see what Mother Nature has in her cards for us. We might find out that the Higgs properties are different from what we expect, revealing new insights into the origin of matter.”

Notes for editors:

Funding for the CDF and DZero experiments comes from DOE’s Office of Science, the National Science Foundation, and numerous international funding agencies.

CDF collaborating institutions are at http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/collaboration/index.html

DZero collaborating institutions are at http://www-d0.fnal.gov/ib/Institutions.html

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science national laboratory dedicated to research in high-energy physics and related fields. The Fermi Research Alliance LLC operates Fermilab under a contract with DOE.

BATAVIA, Illinois-Scientists of the MINOS experiment at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator laboratory today (June 14) announced the world’s most precise measurement to date of the parameters that govern antineutrino oscillations, the back-and-forth transformations of antineutrinos from one type to another. This result provides information about the difference in mass between different antineutrino types. The measurement showed an unexpected variance in the values for neutrinos and antineutrinos. This mass difference parameter, called Δm² (“delta m squared”), is smaller by approximately 40 percent for neutrinos than for antineutrinos.

However, there is a still a five percent probability that Δm² is actually the same for neutrinos and antineutrinos. With such a level of uncertainty, MINOS physicists need more data and analysis to know for certain if the variance is real.

Neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently in many respects, but the MINOS results, presented today at the Neutrino 2010 conference in Athens, Greece, and in a seminar at Fermilab, are the first observation of a potential fundamental difference that established physical theory could not explain.

“Everything we know up to now about neutrinos would tell you that our measured mass difference parameters should be very similar for neutrinos and antineutrinos,” said MINOS co-spokesperson Rob Plunkett. “If this result holds up, it would signal a fundamentally new property of the neutrino-antineutrino system. The implications of this difference for the physics of the universe would be profound.”

The NUMI beam is capable of producing intense beams of either antineutrinos or neutrinos. This capability allowed the experimenters to measure the unexpected mass difference parameters. The measurement also relies on the unique characteristics of the MINOS detector, particularly its magnetic field, which allows the detector to separate the positively and negatively charged muons resulting from interactions of antineutrinos and neutrinos, respectively. MINOS scientists have also updated their measurement of the standard oscillation parameters for muon neutrinos, providing an extremely precise value of Δm².

Muon antineutrinos are produced in a beam originating in Fermilab’s Main Injector. The antineutrinos’ extremely rare interactions with matter allow most of them to pass through the Earth unperturbed. A small number, however, interact in the MINOS detector, located 735 km away from Fermilab in Soudan, Minnesota. During their journey, which lasts 2.5 milliseconds, the particles oscillate in a process governed by a difference between their mass states.

“We do know that a difference of this size in the behavior of neutrinos and antineutrinos could not be explained by current theory,” said MINOS co-spokesperson Jenny Thomas. “While the neutrinos and antineutrinos do behave differently on their journey through the Earth, the Standard Model predicts the effect is immeasurably small in the MINOS experiment. Clearly, more antineutrino running is essential to clarify whether this effect is just due to a statistical fluctuation.”

The MINOS experiment involves more than 140 scientists, engineers, technical specialists and students from 30 institutions, including universities and national laboratories, in five countries: Brazil, Greece, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Funding comes from: the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation in the U.S., the Science and Technology Facilities Council in the U.K; the University of Minnesota in the U.S.; the University of Athens in Greece; and Brazil’s Foundation for Research Support of the State of São Paulo (FAPESP) and National Council of Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).

Fermilab is a national laboratory funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy, operated under contract by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC.

Batavia, Ill.—Scientists of the DZero collaboration at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced Friday, May 14, that they have found evidence for significant violation of matter-antimatter symmetry in the behavior of particles containing bottom quarks beyond what is expected in the current theory, the Standard Model of particle physics. The new result, submitted for publication in Physical Review D by the DZero collaboration, an international team of 500 physicists, indicates a one percent difference between the production of pairs of muons and pairs of antimuons in the decay of B mesons produced in high-energy collisions at Fermilab’s Tevatron particle collider.

The dominance of matter that we observe in the universe is possible only if there are differences in the behavior of particles and antiparticles. Although physicists have observed such differences (called “CP violation”) in particle behavior for decades, these known differences are much too small to explain the observed dominance of matter over antimatter in the universe and are fully consistent with the Standard Model.  If confirmed by further observations and analysis, the effect seen by DZero physicists could represent another step towards understanding the observed matter dominance by pointing to new physics phenomena beyond what we know today.

Using unique features of their precision detector and newly developed analysis methods, the DZero scientists have shown that the probability that this measurement is consistent with any known effect is below 0.1 percent (3.2 standard deviations).

“This exciting new result provides evidence of deviations from the present theory in the decays of B mesons, in agreement with earlier hints,” said Dmitri Denisov, co-spokesperson of the DZero experiment, one of two collider experiments at the Tevatron collider. Last year, physicists at both Tevatron experiments, DZero and CDF, observed such hints in studying particles made of a bottom quark and a strange quark.

When matter and anti-matter particles collide in high-energy collisions, they turn into energy and produce new particles and antiparticles. At the Fermilab proton-antiproton collider, scientists observe hundreds of millions every day.  Similar processes occurring at the beginning of the universe should have left us with a universe with equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. But the world around is made of matter only and antiparticles can only be produced at colliders, in nuclear reactions or cosmic rays. “What happened to the antimatter?” is one of the central questions of 21st–century particle physics.

To obtain the new result, the DZero physicists performed the data analysis “blind,” to avoid any bias based on what they observe. Only after a long period of verification of the analysis tools, did the DZero physicists look at the full data set. Experimenters reversed the polarity of their detector’s magnetic field during data collection to cancel instrumental effects.

“Many of us felt goose bumps when we saw the result,” said Stefan Soldner-Rembold, co-spokesperson of DZero. “We knew we were seeing something beyond what we have seen before and beyond what current theories can explain.”

The precision of the DZero measurements is still limited by the number of collisions recorded so far by the experiment. Both CDF and DZero therefore continue to collect data and refine analyses to address this and many other fundamental questions.

“The Tevatron collider is operating extremely well, providing Fermilab scientists with unprecedented levels of data from high-energy collisions to probe nature’s deepest secrets. This interesting result underlines the importance and scientific potential of the Tevatron program,” said Dennis Kovar, Associate Director for High Energy Physics in DOE’s Office of Science.

The DZero result is based on data collected over the last eight years by the DZero experiment: over 6 inverse femtobarns in total integrated luminosity, corresponding to hundreds of trillions of collisions between protons and antiprotons in the Tevatron collider.

“Tevatron collider experiments study high-energy collisions in every detail, from searches for the Higgs boson, to precision measurement of particle properties, to searches for new and yet unknown laws of nature. I am delighted to see yet another exciting result from the Tevatron,” said Fermilab Director Pier Oddone.

DZero is an international experiment of about 500 physicists from 86 institutions in 19 countries. It is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and a number of international funding agencies.

Fermilab is a national laboratory funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy, operated under contract by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC.

Batavia, IL and Upton, NY – The Large Hadron Collider has launched a new era for particle physics. Today at 6:06 a.m. CDT (1:06 p.m. Central European Summer Time) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, the first particles collided at the record energy of seven trillion electron volts (TeV). These collisions mark the start of a decades-long LHC research program, and the beginning of the search for discoveries by thousands of scientists around the world.

“Today’s first 7 TeV collisions are a great start for LHC science,” said Dr. Dennis Kovar, Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics at the U.S. Department of Energy. “We eagerly anticipate the work of the world’s physicists as they begin their search for dark matter, extra dimensions, and the ever-elusive Higgs boson.”

Today’s proton collisions were recorded by the LHC experiments’ particle detectors, known by their acronyms: ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb. While the LHC accelerator brings the protons up to their maximum energy and steers them around the 16-mile ring into collision, the experiments use massive particle detectors to record and analyze the collision debris.

“The LHC experiments are the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments, and scientists from American universities and laboratories have made vital contributions to each of them,” said Dr. Edward Seidel, Acting Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation’s Directorate For Mathematical and Physical Sciences. “We wish all the LHC scientists success in their quest to solve some of the most profound mysteries of our universe.”

More than 1,700 scientists, engineers, students and technicians from 89 American universities, seven U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories, and one supercomputing center helped design, build and operate the LHC accelerator and its four massive particle detectors. American participation is supported by the DOE’s Office of Science and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Now, the real work begins for the LHC teams. Over the next 18 to 24 months, the LHC accelerator will deliver enough collisions at 7 TeV to enable significant advances in a number of research areas. As data begins to pour from their detectors, more than 8,000 LHC scientists around the world will sift through the flood in search of the tiny signals that could indicate discovery.

“It’s a great day to be a particle physicist,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends.”

The DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are the host laboratories for the U.S. groups participating in the ATLAS and CMS experiments, respectively. Scientists from American universities and laboratories, who comprise more than 20 percent of the ATLAS collaboration and 35 percent of CMS, have played major roles in the construction of both detectors, and join thousands of international colleagues as they operate the detector and analyze the collision data that will be collected in the coming years. In addition, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is the host laboratory for U.S. groups participating in ALICE, with American scientists contributing 10 percent of the ALICE collaboration.

The United States is also home to major national and regional computing centers that, as part of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, enable scientists in the United States and around the world to access the enormous amount of data generated by the LHC experiments. Brookhaven National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, host to major “Tier-1” computing centers, are the first stop in the U.S. for data from the ATLAS and CMS experiments, respectively. The data are further distributed to smaller NSF and DOE-funded “Tier-2” and “Tier-3” computing centers across the country, where physicists will conduct the analyses that may lead to LHC discoveries.

Notes for editors:

Photos and video from today’s events are available at:

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/lhc-first-physics/

For more information about American participation in the Large Hadron Collider, visit http://www.uslhc.us.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is operated and managed for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates and Battelle. Visit Brookhaven Lab’s electronic newsroom for links, news archives, graphics, and more: http://www.bnl.gov/newsroom.

Fermilab is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science national laboratory, operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science is the nation’s single-largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences. Visit Fermilab’s website at http://www.fnal.gov.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.

Full list of U.S. institutions participating in the Large Hadron Collider project

Arizona
University of Arizona

California
California Institute of Technology
California Polytechnic State University
California State University, Fresno
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
University of California, Davis
University of California, Irvine
University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Riverside
University of California, San Diego
University of California, Santa Barbara
University of California, Santa Cruz

Colorado 
University of Colorado

Connecticut
Fairfield University
Yale University

Florida
Florida Institute of Technology
Florida International University
Florida State University
University of Florida

Illinois
Argonne National Laboratory
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Northern Illinois University
Northwestern University
University of Chicago
University of Illinois at Chicago
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Indiana
Indiana University
Purdue University
Purdue University Calumet
University of Notre Dame

Iowa
Iowa State University
University of Iowa

Kansas
Kansas State University
University of Kansas

Kentucky
University of Louisville

Louisiana
Louisiana Tech University

Maryland
Johns Hopkins University
University of Maryland (40)

Massachusetts
Boston University
Brandeis University
Harvard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Northeastern University
Tufts University
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Michigan
Michigan State University
University of Michigan
Wayne State University

Minnesota
University of Minnesota

Mississippi
University of Mississippi

Nebraska
Creighton University
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

New Jersey
Princeton University
Rutgers University

New Mexico
University of New Mexico

New York
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Columbia University
Cornell University
New York University
Rockefeller University
State University of New York at Albany
State University of New York at Buffalo
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Syracuse University
University of Rochester

North Carolina
Duke University

Ohio
Case Western Reserve University
Ohio State University
Ohio Supercomputer Center

Oklahoma
Langston University
Oklahoma State University
University of Oklahoma

Oregon
University of Oregon

Pennsylvania
Carnegie Mellon University
University of Pennsylvania
University of Pittsburgh

Puerto Rico
University of Puerto Rico

Rhode Island
Brown University

South Carolina
University of South Carolina

Tennessee
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
University of Tennessee
Vanderbilt University

Texas
Rice University
Southern Methodist University
Texas A&M University
Texas Tech University
University of Houston
University of Texas, Arlington
University of Texas, Austin
University of Texas, Dallas

Virginia
Hampton University
University of Virginia

Washington
University of Washington

Wisconsin
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Batavia, Ill. – On Tuesday, March 30, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland will make their first attempt to achieve record-breaking particle collisions of 7 trillion electron volts, signifying the start of the research program for the world’s most powerful accelerator.

Reporters are invited to see the record-breaking collisions at the LHC Remote Operations Center at the Department of Energy’s Fermilab, in Batavia, Illinois. While scientists believe that the first 7 TeV collisions are likely to occur on March 30, this achievement could take hours or days.

On the day that the record-breaking collisions occur, live connections between CERN and Fermilab’s LHC Remote Operations Center will follow the action in Switzerland starting at 8:30 a.m. CDT . Reporters will have access to U.S. physicists involved in LHC research. Those physicists will explain the events and their significance for the field of particle physics. Fermilab will also show a live Webcast from CERN until 11:00 a.m. CDT.

If you would like to attend this event at Fermilab, please contact Elizabeth Clements (lizzie@fnal.gov) at 630-399-1777 or Rhianna Wisniewski (rhianna@fnal.gov) at 630-840-6733.

More information about U.S. participation in the LHC and its experiments is available at http://www.uslhc.us .

Read the CERN release:

http://www.interactions.org/cms/?pid=1029232

Fermilab is a Department of Energy national laboratory operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the nation and helps ensure U.S. world leadership across a broad range of scientific disciplines.

Batavia, IL, Berkeley, CA and Upton, NY – Particle beams are once again zooming around the world’s most powerful particle accelerator—the Large Hadron Collider—located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. On November 20 at 4:00 p.m. EST, a clockwise circulating beam was established in the LHC’s 17-mile ring.

After more than one year of repairs, the LHC is now back on track to create high-energy particle collisions that may yield extraordinary insights into the nature of the physical universe.

“The LHC is a machine unprecedented in size, in complexity, and in the scope of the international collaboration that has built it over the last 15 years,” said Dennis Kovar, U.S. Department of Energy Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics. “I congratulate the scientists and engineers that have worked to get the LHC back up and running, and look forward to the discoveries to come.”

American scientists have played an important role in the construction of the LHC. About 150 scientists, engineers and technicians from three DOE national laboratories—Brookhaven Lab, Fermilab and Berkeley Lab—built critical accelerator components. They are joined by colleagues from DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Texas at Austin in ongoing LHC accelerator R&D. The work has been supported by the DOE Office of Science.

Circulating beams are a major milestone on the way to the ultimate goal: data from high-energy particle collisions in each of the LHC’s four major particle detectors. Over the next few months, scientists will create collisions between two beams of protons. These very first LHC collisions will take place at the relatively low energy of 900 GeV. They will then raise the beam energy, aiming for collisions at the world-record energy of 7 TeV in early 2010. With these high-energy collisions, the hunt for discoveries at the LHC will begin.

“It’s great to see beam circulating in the LHC again,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way.”

In all, an estimated 10,000 people from 60 countries have helped design and build the LHC accelerator and its four massive particle detectors, including more than 1,700 scientists, engineers, students and technicians from 97 U.S. universities and laboratories in 32 states and Puerto Rico supported by the DOE Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.

# # #Notes for editors:

Photos and videos from today’s event are available at: http://press.web.cern.ch/press/lhc-first-physics/

Information about the US participation in the LHC is available at http://www.uslhc.us. Follow US LHC on Twitter at twitter.com/uslhc.

Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California. Visit our News center at http://newscenter.lbl.gov.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates and Battelle. Visit Brookhaven Lab’s electronic newsroom for links, news archives, graphics, and more: http://www.bnl.gov/newsroom.

Fermilab is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science national laboratory, operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science is the nation’s single-largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences. Visit our website at http://www.fnal.gov.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.

Funds are part of more than $327 million in new Recovery Act funding to be disbursed by Department of Energy’s Office of Science

Batavia, Ill. – In the latest installment of funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will receive an additional $60.2 million to support research toward next generation particle accelerators and preliminary design for a future neutrino experiment.

The new funds are part of more than $327 million announced by Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Tuesday from funding allocated under the Recovery Act to DOE’s Office of Science. Of these funds, $220 million will go toward scientific research, instrumentation and laboratory infrastructure projects at DOE national laboratories.

“The new initiatives will help the U.S. maintain its scientific leadership and economic competitiveness while creating new jobs,” said Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “The projects provide vital funding and new tools for research aimed at strengthening America’s energy security and tackling some of science’s toughest challenges.”

Taking the stimulus funds announced earlier this year into account, the Recovery Act provides more than $100 million in funding to Fermilab.

Fermilab is investing the funds in critical scientific infrastructure to strengthen the nation’s global scientific leadership as well as to provide immediate economic relief to local communities. Out of the additional $60.2 million, the laboratory will devote $52.7 million to research on next-generation accelerators using superconducting radio frequency technology. This technology provides a highly efficient way to accelerate beams of particles with potential applications in medicine, energy and material science. Fermilab will use the remaining $7.5 million for preliminary design for a future neutrino experiment.

With this final round of projects, the Obama Administration has now approved projects covering the full $1.6 billion that the DOE Office of Science received from Congress under the Recovery Act.

“The Recovery Act funding will put our neighbors and fellow Americans to work,” said Fermilab Director Pier Oddone. “We are investing the funds in local firms and other U.S. companies who will be our partners in strengthening the nation’s scientific leadership.”

More information about Fermilab and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is available at http://www.fnal.gov/recovery/

DOE’s news release is available at http://www.energy.gov/news2009/7737.htm

 

Congressman Bill Foster will announce today that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will provide Fermilab with an additional $60.2 million to support research toward next-generation particle accelerators and preliminary design for a future neutrino experiment. Foster will make the announcement in Fermilab’s Industrial Center Building. All media are invited to attend.

Media representatives wishing to attend should contact Elizabeth Clements at 630-840-3351, lizzie@fnal.gov or Kurt Riesselmann at 630-840-3351, kurtr@fnal.gov. To allow for a prompt start for the press conference, media are asked to arrive at the Industrial Center Building no later than 11:45 a.m.

Directions to the Industrial Center Building:

From the west, enter Fermilab on Pine Street and continue going straight on the road, driving past Wilson Hall. The Industrial Center Building will be on the left in a complex of five buildings about a quarter mile past Wilson Hall. A sign will be in front of the building, and security guards will provide directions and parking information .

From the east, enter Fermilab on Batavia Road. Drive past Eola Road and the buffalo barn. The Industrial Center Building will be on the right in a complex of five buildings. A sign will be in front of the building, and security guards will provide directions and parking information .

More information about Fermilab and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is available at http://www.fnal.gov/recovery/

BATAVIA, IL and UPTON, NY – The world’s largest computing grid has passed its most comprehensive tests to date in anticipation of the restart of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The successful dress rehearsal proves that the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) is ready to analyze and manage real data from the massive machine. The United States is a vital partner in the development and operation of the WLCG, with 15 universities and three U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories from 11 states contributing to the project.

The full-scale test, collectively called the Scale Test of the Experimental Program 2009 (STEP09), demonstrates the ability of the WLCG to efficiently navigate data collected from the LHC’s intense collisions at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, all the way through a multi-layered management process that culminates at laboratories and universities around the world. When the LHC resumes operations this fall, the WLCG will handle more than 15 million gigabytes of data every year.

Although there have been several large-scale WLCG data-processing tests in the past, STEP09, which was completed on June 15, was the first to simultaneously test all of the key elements of the process.

“Unlike previous challenges, which were dedicated testing periods, STEP09 was a production activity that closely matches the types of workload that we can expect during LHC data taking. It was a demonstration not only of the readiness of experiments, sites and services but also the operations and support procedures and infrastructures,” said CERN’s Ian Bird, leader of the WLCG project.

Once LHC data have been collected at CERN, dedicated optical fiber networks distribute the data to 11 major “Tier-1” computer centers in Europe, North America and Asia, including those at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. From these, data are dispatched to more than 140 “Tier-2” centers around the world, including 12 in the United States. It will be at the Tier-2 and Tier-3 centers that physicists will analyze data from the LHC experiments – ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb – leading to new discoveries. Support for the Tier-2 and Tier-3 centers is provided by the DOE Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.

“In order to really prove our readiness at close-to-real-life circumstances, we have to carry out data replication, data reprocessing, data analysis, and event simulation all at the same time and all at the expected scale for data taking,” said Michael Ernst, director of Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Tier-1 Computing Center. “That’s what made STEP09 unique.”

The result was “wildly successful,” Ernst said, adding that the U.S. distributed computing facility for the ATLAS experiment completed 150,000 analysis jobs at an efficiency of 94 percent.

A key goal of the test was gauging the analysis capabilities of the Tier 2 and Tier 3 computing centers. During STEP09’s 13-day run, seven U.S. Tier 2 centers for the CMS experiment, and four U.S. CMS Tier 3 centers, performed around 225,000 successful analysis jobs.

“We knew from past tests that we wanted to improve certain areas,” said Oliver Gutsche, the Fermilab physicist who led the effort for the CMS experiment. “This test was especially useful because we learned how the infrastructure behaves under heavy load from all four LHC experiments. We now know that we are ready for collisions.”

U.S. contributions to the WLCG are coordinated through the Open Science Grid (OSG), a national computing infrastructure for science. OSG not only contributes computing power for LHC data needs, but also for projects in many other scientific fields including biology, nanotechnology, medicine and climate science.

“This is another significant step to demonstrating that shared infrastructures can be used by multiple high-throughput science communities simultaneously,” said Ruth Pordes, executive director of the Open Science Grid Consortium. “ATLAS and CMS are not only proving the usability of OSG, but contributing to maturing national distributed facilities in the U.S. for other sciences.”

Physicists in the U.S. and around the world will sift through the LHC data in search of tiny signals that will lead to discoveries about the nature of the physical universe. Through their distributed computing infrastructures, these physicists also help other scientific researchers increase their use of computing and storage for broader discovery.

-30-Notes for editors:

Grid computing and Large Hadron Collider images are available at http://www.uslhc.us/Images. More information about U.S. computing for the LHC, including a list of U.S. institutions involved in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, is available at http://www.uslhc.us/The_US_and_the_LHC/Computing.

U.S. support for LHC participation
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science and the National Science Foundation (NSF) invested a total of $531 million in the construction of the Large Hadron Collider and the ATLAS and CMS detectors. DOE provided $200 million for the construction of critical LHC accelerator components, $250 million for the design and construction of the ATLAS and CMS detectors, and continues to support U.S. scientists’ work on the detectors and accelerator R&D. NSF has focused its support on funding university scientists who have contributed to the design and construction of CMS and ATLAS ($81 million). In addition, both agencies promote the development of advanced computing innovations to meet the enormous LHC data challenge. More than 1,700 scientists, engineers, students and technicians from 94 U.S. universities and laboratories participate in the LHC and its experiments. (A full list is available here.)

LHC Computing Grid participants
Signatories to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, India, Israel, Japan, Republic of Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, the Russian Federation, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taipei, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and the United States of America.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates. Visit Brookhaven Laboratory’s electronic newsroom for links, news archives, graphics, and more.

Fermilab is a DOE Office of Science national laboratory, operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. The Department of Energy Office of Science is the nation’s single-largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences.

The Open Science Grid is a national distributed computing grid for data-intensive research, supported by the Offices of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, High Energy Physics, and Nuclear Physics within the DOE Office of Science, and the National Science Foundation. Visit www.opensciencegrid.org.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.