Quest Begins to Unmask Dark Matter — and Perhaps Supersymmetry

Batavia, Ill. — Using detectors chilled to near absolute zero, from a vantage point half a mile below ground, physicists of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search today (November 12) announced the launch of a quest that could lead to solving two mysteries that may turn out to be one and the same: the identity of the dark matter that pervades the universe, and the existence of supersymmetric particles predicted by particle physics theory. Scientists of CDMS II, an experiment managed by the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory hope to discover WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles, the leading candidates for the constituents of dark matter-which may be identical to neutralinos, undiscovered particles predicted by the theory of supersymmetry.

“There’s this arrow from particle physics and this arrow from cosmology and they seem to be pointing to the same place,” said Case Western Reserve University’s Dan Akerib, deputy project manager of CDMS II. “Detection of a neutralino would be very big for cosmology and it would also be very big for particle physics.”

The CDMS II experiment, a collaboration of scientists from 12 institutions with support from DOE’s Office of Science and the National Science Foundation, uses a detector located deep underground in the historic Soudan Iron Mine in northeastern Minnesota. Experimenters seek signals of WIMPs, particles much more massive than a proton but interacting so weakly with other particles that thousands would pass through a human body each second without leaving a trace.

Remarkably, in the kind of convergence that gets physicists’ attention, the characteristics of this cosmic missing matter particle now appear to match those of the supersymmetric neutralino.

“Either that is a cosmic coincidence, or the universe is telling us something,” said Fermilab’s Dan Bauer, CDMS project manager.

By watching how galaxies spin-how gravity affects their contingent stars-astronomers have known for 70 years that the matter we see cannot constitute all the matter in the universe. If it did, galaxies would fly apart. Recent calculations indicate that ordinary matter containing atoms makes up only 4 percent of the energy-matter content of the universe. “Dark energy” makes up 73 percent, and an unknown form of dark matter makes up the last 23 percent.

“It is often said that this is the ultimate Copernican Revolution,” said David Caldwell, a physicist at the University of California at Santa Barbara and chair of the CDMS Executive Committee. “Not only are we not at the center of the universe, but we are not even made of the same stuff as most of the universe.”

Measurements of the cosmic microwave background, residual radiation left over from the Big Bang, have recently placed severe constraints on the nature and amount of dark matter. The lightweight neutrino can account for only a few percent of the missing mass. If neutrinos constituted the main component of dark matter, they would act on the cosmic microwave background of the universe in ways that the recent Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe should have observed-but did not.

Meanwhile, particle physicists have kept a lookout for particles that will extend the Standard Model, the theory of fundamental particles and forces. Supersymmetry, a theory that takes a big step toward the unification of all of the forces of nature, predicts that every matter particle has a massive supersymmetric counterpart. No one has yet seen one of these “superpartners.” Theory specifies the neutralino as the lightest neutral superpartner, and the most stable, a necessary attribute for dark matter. The neutralino’s predicted abundance and rate of interaction also make it a likely dark matter candidate, and Caldwell noted the impact that CDMS II could have.

“Discovery,” he said, “would be a great breakthrough, one of the most important of the century.”

Only occasionally would a WIMP hit the nucleus of a terrestrial atom, and the constant background “noise” from more mundane particle events-such as the common cosmic rays constantly showering the earth-would normally drown out these rare interactions. Placing the CDMS II detector beneath 740 meters of earth screens out most particle noise from cosmic rays. Chilling the detector to 50 thousandths of a degree above absolute zero reduces background thermal energy to allow detection of individual particle collisions. Fermilab’s Bauer estimates that with sufficiently low backgrounds, CDMS needs only a few interactions to make a strong claim for detection of WIMPs.

“The powerful technology we deploy allows an unambiguous identification of events in the crystals caused by any new form of matter,” said CDMS cospokesperson Bernard Sadoulet of the University of California at Berkeley.

Cospokesperson Blas Cabrera of Stanford University concurred.

“We believe we have the best apparatus in the world in terms of being able to identify WIMPs,” Cabrera said.

“This endeavor is a good example of cooperation between the DOE’s Office of High Energy Physics and the National Science Foundation in helping scientists address the origin of the dark matter in the universe,” said Raymond Orbach, Director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

“CDMS II is the kind of innovative and pathbreaking research NSF is proud to support,” said Michael Turner, Assistant Director for Math and Physical Sciences at the National Science Foundation. “If it detects a signal it may tell us what the dark matter is and give us an important clue as to how gravity fits together with the other forces. This type of experiment shows how the universe can be used as a laboratory for getting at the some of the most basic questions we can ask as well as how DOE and NSF are working together.”

While CDMS II watches for WIMPs, scientists at Fermilab’s Tevatron particle accelerator will try to create neutralinos by smashing protons and antiprotons together.

“CDMS can tell us the mass and interaction rate of the WIMP,” said collaborator Roger Dixon of Fermilab. “But it will take an accelerator to tell us whether it’s a neutralino.”

CDMS II collaborators include Brown University, Case Western Reserve University, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Accelerator Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Princeton University, Santa Clara University, Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Colorado at Denver, University of Minnesota.

Funding for the CDMS II experiment comes from the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy and the Astronomy and Physics Division of the National Science Foundation.

Fermilab is a national laboratory funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy and operated by Universities Research Association, Inc.

CDMS home page: http://cdms.berkeley.edu/index.html

This video (1 min.) shows a time lapse of the construction of the CDMS experiment in 2003-2004. Watch video (QuickTime movie. May not work in all browsers.)

Scientists of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment are listening for whispers of dark matter. Inspired by his brother Erik’s research, musician Karl Ramberg built a musical model of the CDMS detector, in collaboration with CDMS scientists. Erik Ramberg and Priscilla Cushman translated real CDMS data into a format that accurately converts the energy, location and type of particles striking the CDMS detectors into sound and light. Cushman created this 5-minute video.
Credit: Priscilla Cushman

 

Background for the CDMS experiment

What does “setting limits” mean in an experiment?
Experimental physicists, such as those working on CDMS, frequently are faced with the situation of quantifying what it means when they have not yet found what they are searching for. Sometimes the result is that no events have been found, but more often it is the case that events have been seen which are consistent with expected sources of backgrounds. In either case, there are mathematical formulae for calculating “90% confidence level upper limits” on the rate of the signal which hasn’t been clearly detected. Such a limit implies that if you could do the same experiment 100 times, the result would be the same (or fewer) events detected in 90 of those experiments.

What is dark matter?
Judging by the way galaxies rotate, scientists have known for 70 years that the matter we can see does not provide enough gravitational pull to hold the galaxies together. There must exist some form of matter that does not emit or reflect light. According to the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP, a survey of the microwave background radiation left over from the big bang, ordinary (“baryonic”) matter containing atoms makes up only 4% of the energy-matter contents in the Universe. “Dark energy” makes up 73%, and an unknown form of dark matter makes up the last 23%. (Most of the baryonic matter is dark matter too and resides in hydrogen and dust clouds and very dim clumps called massive compact halo objects. MACHOs include planets and cold dead stars like brown dwarfs and black holes.)

We can infer some of the properties of the nonbaryonic dark matter, such as its density, from the WMAP. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has recently confirmed these results. We know that neutrinos, very light particles left over from the big bang in massive quantities, make up a small amount. WIMPs, or weakly interactive massive particles, may make up the rest.

What’s the difference between a neutrino and a neutralino?
Neither has an electric charge, and each probably makes up some of the missing matter but otherwise they have little in common. The neutrino carries almost no mass. It moves at nearly the speed of light, which makes it “hot dark matter.” This velocity means that it could not have made galaxies congeal in the early universe. Most neutrinos remain from the beginning of the universe, but particle decay and atomic fusion in stars continue to produce them.

Supersymmetry predicts the existence of the massive neutralino. We know it carries at least 46 times the mass of a proton because otherwise experiments at the Large Electron-Positron collider (LEP) at CERN would have detected their production. If it is a WIMP, it travels through the universe at 1/1000 the speed of light, making it “cold dark matter.” Neutralinos were produced at the beginning of the universe but exist in fewer numbers than the neutrino because their great mass makes them harder to produce, and they annihilate each other. They both pass through the Earth in large quantities.

What is a WIMP?
Weakly interactive massive particles may make up most of the dark matter, if they have a mass of 10 to 10000 times the mass of the proton. They only interact via the weak force and gravity (not the strong or electromagnetic force), so they only disturb atoms when they collide with a nucleus. Atoms contain mostly empty space, so this rarely happens. Photons pass right through them. As many as 10 trillion WIMPs should pass through one kilogram of the Earth in a second but perhaps as few as one per day will interact.

What is supersymmetry?
The Standard Model describes all of the particles and forces in the universe, but it does not adequately explain the origin of mass. To solve this problem, in 1982 some theorists proposed an extension to the Standard Model where every mass particle (the quark, electron, etc) and every force-carrying particle (the photon, graviton, etc.) has an associated “superpartner” that differs only in its spin and mass. The undetected superpartners are much more massive than the particles observed so far. The lightest neutral supersymmetric particle is the neutralino. With an expected mass of 50-1000 billion electron volts (GeV)-a proton’s mass is 1 GeV-and weak interaction with the baryons (protons and neutrons) that make up everyday matter, they are considered WIMPs.

Why are the detectors underground?
Cosmic rays hit the surface of the Earth and the reactions produce neutrons. Placing the detectors deep underground shields them from most of the cosmic rays that would produce neutrons.

Why are the detectors so cold?
The cryostat uses six nested layers to cool the detectors to 50 millikelvin (thousandths of a degree above absolute zero.) This reduces the background vibrations of the detector’s atoms and makes them more sensitive to individual particle collisions.

How do the detectors work?
The experimental set-up for CDMS II contains two towers of detectors. Each tower contains a kilogram of germanium for detecting dark matter and 200 grams of silicon to distinguish WIMPs from neutrons. Supersymmetry models predict that only a few WIMPs per year, one per day at most, will interact with the detectors. The biggest challenge involves sorting them from background interactions due to electrons, neutrons, and gamma rays.

When a WIMP hits a germanium nucleus, the nucleus recoils and vibrates the whole germanium crystal. This warms the thin aluminum and tungsten outer layers, which an electrical circuit measures. Photons and electrons, however, strike the germanium’s electrons. A charge collection plate measures ionization resulting from this type of collision and uses it to separate these interactions from those of WIMPs. The ratio of charge to heat for each event tells whether a particle struck the nucleus, as WIMPs do, or simply rattled the electrons surrounding the nucleus, as most background particles do.

Incoming neutrons also strike the germanium nucleus, so they more closely resemble WIMPs. The germanium detectors sit in a stack with detectors made of silicon. A silicon atom has a smaller nucleus, and so will be hit less frequently by WIMPs. The strong nuclear force does not affect WIMPs, but it does affect neutrons and so neutrons will hit nuclei of different sizes at about the same rate. A higher collision rate in the germanium than the silicon will indicate the interaction of WIMPs.

Does CDMS have any competition?
CDMS has several competitors around the world. DAMA, a collaboration between Italian and Chinese scientists in the Gran Sasso tunnel in Italy, has collected data over the past six years and shows seasonal changes in events. They argue that this modulation results from the Earth traveling with or against the flow of cosmic dark matter particles and provides direct evidence for WIMPs. The scientists have addressed concerns that other factors–including temperature, humidity, or radon–may account for the data, but according to Bauer, “they don’t address all of the conventional explanations at the level of detail that I think an extraordinary claim like that requires.”

The closest competition comes from a French project called EDELWEISS, which also uses a germanium detector and measures heat and ionization. They have collecting data for three years, but they have fewer detectors than CDMS right now and they have less-sophisticated background rejection capability.

Pierre Auger Observatory seeks source of highest-energy extraterrestrial particles

Batavia, Ill.- With the completion of its hundredth surface detector, the Pierre Auger Observatory, under construction in Argentina, this week became the largest cosmic-ray air shower array in the world. Managed by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Pierre Auger project so far encompasses a 70-square-mile array of detectors that are tracking the most violent – and perhaps most puzzling – processes in the entire universe.

Cosmic rays are extraterrestrial particles-usually protons or heavier ions-that hit the Earth’s atmosphere and create cascades of secondary particles. While cosmic rays approach the earth at a range of energies, scientists long believed that their energy could not exceed 10²⁰ electron volts, some 100 million times the proton energy achievable in Fermilab’s Tevatron, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. But recent experiments in Japan and Utah have detected a few such ultrahigh energy cosmic rays, raising questions about what extraordinary events in the universe could have produced them.

“How does nature create the conditions to accelerate a tiny particle to such an energy?” asked Alan Watson, physics professor at the University of Leeds, UK, and spokesperson for the Pierre Auger collaboration of 250 scientists from 14 countries. “Tracking these ultrahigh-energy particles back to their sources will answer that question.”

Scientific theory can account for the sources of low- and medium-energy cosmic rays, but the origin of these rare high-energy cosmic rays remains a mystery. To identify the cosmic mechanisms that produce microscopic particles at macroscopic energy, the Pierre Auger collaboration is installing an array that will ultimately comprise 1,600 surface detectors in an area of the Argentine Pampa Amarilla the size of Rhode Island, near the town of Malargüe, about 600 miles west of Buenos Aires. The first 100 detectors are already surveying the southern sky.

“These highest-energy cosmic rays are messengers from the extreme universe,” said Nobel Prize winner Jim Cronin, of the University of Chicago, who conceived the Auger experiment together with Watson. “They represent a great opportunity for discoveries.”

The highest-energy cosmic rays are extremely rare, hitting the Earth’s atmosphere about once per year per square mile. When complete in 2005, the Pierre Auger observatory will cover approximately 1,200 square miles (3,000 square kilometers), allowing scientists to catch many of these events.

“Our experiment will pick up where the AGASA experiment has left off,” said project manager Paul Mantsch, Fermilab, referring to the Akeno Giant Air Shower Array (AGASA) experiment in Japan. “At highest energies, the astonishing results from the two largest cosmic-ray experiments appear to be in conflict. AGASA sees more events than the HiRes experiment in Utah, but the statistics of both experiments are limited.”

The Pierre Auger project, named after the pioneering French physicist who first observed extended air showers in 1938, combines the detection methods used in the Japanese and Utah experiments. Surface detectors are spaced one mile apart. Each surface unit consists of a 4-foot-high cylindrical tank filled with 3,000 gallons of pure water, a solar panel, and an antenna for wireless transmission of data. Sensors register the invisible particle avalanches, triggered at an altitude of six to twelve miles just microseconds earlier, as they reach the ground. The particle showers strike several tanks almost simultaneously.

In addition to the tanks, the new observatory will feature 24 HiRes-type fluorescence telescopes that can pick up the faint ultraviolet glow emitted by air showers in mid-air. The fluorescence telescopes, which can only be operated during dark, moonless nights, are sensitive enough to pick up the light emitted by a 4-watt lamp traveling six miles away at almost the speed of light.

“It is a really beautiful thing that we have a hybrid system,” said Watson. “We can look at air showers in two modes. We can measure their energy in two independent ways.”

The Pierre Auger collaboration is in the process of preparing a proposal for a second site of its observatory, to be located in the United States. Featuring the same design as the Argentinean site, the second detector array would scan the northern sky for the sources of the most powerful cosmic rays.

Funding for the $55 million Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina has come from 14 member nations. The U.S. contributes 20 percent of the total cost, with support provided by the Office of Science of the Department of Energy and by the National Science Foundation. A list of all participating institutions is available at http://auger.cnrs.fr/collaboration.html.

Fermilab is a national laboratory funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy, operated by Universities Research Association, Inc.

More information on the experiment is at http://www.auger.org/

Press panel at Fermilab on Friday, August 15, at 4 p.m.

BATAVIA, Ill.–The directors of nine world particle physics laboratories have come to Fermilab to discuss future research projects and the evolution of the field into a model for science without international boundaries. They are attending a meeting of the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA), which takes place in connection with the 700-scientist Lepton-Photon Symposium at Fermilab, August 11-16.

Reporters and photographers can meet the nine lab directors at a one-hour press panel on Friday, August 15, at 4 p.m. at Fermilab’s Wilson Hall, where they will present their views and answer questions on the transition from national to international research projects, including the construction and operation of future large-scale accelerators.

Participants are:

Dr. Michael Witherell, Fermilab, United States
Dr. Jonathan Dorfan, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, United States
Dr. Maury Tigner, Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory, United States
Dr. Luciano Maiani, CERN, Switzerland
Dr. Yoji Totsuka, KEK, Japan
Dr. Albrecht Wagner, DESY, Germany
Dr. Mikhail Danilov, ITEP, Russia
Dr. Sergio Bertolucci, INFN, Italy
Dr. He Sheng Chen, IHEP, China

Media representatives must call Fermilab’s Office of Public Affairs to register for a Visitor’s Pass before entering the site.

Fermilab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory, operated under contract by Universities Research Association, Inc.

Batavia, Ill.-Scientists of the MINOS collaboration at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory today (August 14) announced the official start of data-taking with the 6,000-ton detector for the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search. Physicists will use the MINOS detector, located deep in an historic iron mine in northern Minnesota, to explore the phenomenon of neutrino mass.

In July, after four years of mining and construction, workers finished building the first of two detectors of the ambitious MINOS particle physics experiment. Today, after completing the hardware and testing the detector’s systems, scientists announced the official startup of data-taking with the MINOS “far” detector, ahead of the scheduled completion in April 2004. Technicians will complete the assembly of a “near” detector, smaller in size than the far detector, at Fermilab in August 2004.

“This is an important milestone in the worldwide quest to develop neutrino science,” said Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, director of DOE’s Office of Science. “The MINOS detector in Soudan, Minnesota, together with the new Fermilab neutrino beam line, will provide a detailed look at the secrets behind neutrino oscillations. It will complement the large-scale neutrino projects in Japan, Canada and Europe. Significantly, the completion of the detector comes nine months ahead of schedule.”

The looming 100-foot-long detector consists of 486 massive octagonal planes, lined up like the slices of a loaf of bread. Each plane consists of a sheet of steel about 25 feet high and one inch thick, covered on one side with a layer of scintillating plastic. To construct the detector, technicians had to transport all detector components in small sections via a narrow mine shaft in a tiny historic elevator cage that once transported miners underground.

“It was like building a ship in a bottle,” said MINOS spokesperson Stanley Wojcicki, physics professor at Stanford University. “We needed to bring all the material underground and assemble it right there. The last step was to install a magnetic coil and energize it. MINOS is the only large-scale neutrino experiment underground that can separate neutrino and antineutrino interactions, allowing us to look for differences in their behavior.”

At present, the new detector is recording cosmic ray showers penetrating the earth. The data will provide first tests of matter-antimatter symmetry in neutrino processes. In early 2005, when the construction of a neutrino beamline at Fermilab is complete, the experiment will enter its next phase. Scientists will use the far detector to “catch” neutrinos created at Fermilab’s Main Injector accelerator in Batavia, Illinois. The neutrinos will travel 450 miles straight through the earth from Fermilab to Soudan – no tunnel needed. The detector will allow scientists to directly study the oscillation of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos or tau neutrinos under laboratory conditions. More than a trillion man-made neutrinos per year will pass through the MINOS detector in Soudan. Because neutrinos rarely interact with their surroundings, only about 1,500 of them will make a collision with an atomic nucleus inside the detector. The rest will traverse the detector without leaving a track.

Scientists have discovered three different types of neutrinos: electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, and tau neutrinos. The particles play an important role in stellar processes like the creation of energy in stars as well as supernova explosions. Experimental results obtained over the last five years have confirmed that the evasive particles have mass and switch back and forth among their three different identities while traveling through space and matter. Scientists expect the MINOS experiment to provide the best measurement of neutrino properties associated with the so-called “atmospheric” oscillations.

Funding for the MINOS experiment has come from the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy, the British Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the State of Minnesota and the University of Minnesota. More than 200 scientists from Brazil, France, Greece, Russia, United Kingdom and the United States are involved in the project.

Fermilab is a national laboratory funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy, operated by Universities Research Association, Inc.

List of institutions collaborating on MINOS: http://www-numi.fnal.gov/collab/institut.html

Brazil: University of Campinas University of Sao PauloFrance: College de FranceGreece : University of AthensRussia: ITEP-Moscow Lebedev Physical Institute IHEP-Protvino United Kingdom: University of Cambridge University College London, London University of Oxford Rutherford Appleton Laboratory University of Sussex

United States: Argonne National Laboratory Brookhaven National Laboratory California Institute of Technology Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Harvard University Illinois Institute of Technology Indiana University Livermore National Laboratory Macalester College, Minnesota University of Minnesota, Minneapolis University of Minnesota, Duluth University of Pittsburgh Soudan Underground Laboratory University of South Carolina Stanford University Texas A&M University University of Texas at Austin Tufts University Western Washington University University of Wisconsin-Madison

www.interactions.org Goes Live

Batavia, Ill.-The worldwide particle physics community today (August 12) launched Interactions.org, a new global, Web-based resource developed to provide news, high-quality imagery, video and other tools for communicating the science of particle physics.

“The Web site, found at www.interactions.org, provides a newswire with the latest developments in particle physics and related fields, as well as links to current particle physics news from the world’s press,” said Communications Director Petra Folkerts of the DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany. “It offers high-resolution photos and graphics from the world’s particle physics laboratories and links to education and outreach programs.”

The site also presents timely information about science policy and funding; links to universities; a glossary and a conference calendar.

“Interactions.org was developed and is jointly maintained by the InterAction collaboration,” said deputy Communications director Youhei Morita, of KEK laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan. “Our collaboration represents the communication staffs of all the world’s particle physics laboratories. The new site responds to the growing demand for information and images from particle physics laboratories in Europe, North America and Asia.”

The group pooled experience and resources to create a centralized Web site.

“Already we have hundreds of journalists, researchers and policy-makers using Interactions.org on a daily basis,” said James Gillies, head of the Education and Communication Group at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. “This outstanding collection of materials represents the combined efforts of communications professionals from around the world.”

InterAction collaborators said the current Web site is only the beginning.

“Interactions.org will give the media, the science community, policy makers, funding agencies, students, and teachers the tools to better understand and communicate the nature and value of particle physics research and its connections to other fields of science,” said Judy Jackson, Public Affairs director at Fermilab near Chicago.

Physicist and communicator Stefano Bianco of INFN Frascati Laboratory, near Rome, said that users of interactions.org will find current information about the status of initiatives, people and facilities involved not only in particle physics but also in other related fields, and not only in one country but across the globe.

“Global collaboration is the foundation of success in this era of particle physics research,” Neil Calder, Director of Communications for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Palo Alto, California. “Interactions.org will help facilitate that teamwork.”

Interactions.org Contributing Members include:
The American Physical Society (APS)
Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL)
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)
Deutsche Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY)
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL)
High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK)
INFN: Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS)
INFN: Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati (LNF)
Institut National de Physique Nucleaire et de Physique des Particules (IN2P3)
Institute for High-Energy Physics, Protvino (IHEP)
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN)
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF)
Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna (JINR)
Laboratory for Elementary -Particle Physics at Cornell University (LEPP)
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL)
Saclay Physics Institute
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC)

Free Public Lecture, Thursday, August 14, 7:30 p.m., Ramsey Auditorium, Fermilab

Reservations required: Call 630-840-8720 to reserve free tickets

Batavia, Ill.-“Before we had the Web,” said Fermilab physicist Irwin Gaines, “we didn’t know we needed it. I don’t think we can even dream of what we’ll be able to do with the Grid.”

There is a revolution ahead in the way people everywhere use computer technology to solve the most complex computational problems. The vision for the rapidly developing international Data Grid is to put the power of the world’s computing capacity at the fingertips of everyone with a laptop computer.

On Thursday, August 14, at 7:30 p.m., the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, will sponsor a free public lecture, “Extreme Computing: The Data Grid and the Future of Distributed Computing,” by six internationally known pioneers of emerging Grid technology:

• Dr. Ian Foster, co-author of “The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure,” Associate Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago
• Dr. Ian Bird, of CERN, Project Manager for LHC Computing Grid, at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics
• Robert J. Aiken, Director of Academic Research and Technology Initiatives, Cisco Systems, Inc.
• Dr. Stephen Perrenod, Group Manager, High Performance Computer Marketing, Sun Microsystems
• Dr. David Martin, Program Director, Internet Standards and Technology, IBM
• Dr. Daniel Reed, Director, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Speakers will present the state of the art and the outlook for the future of Grid computing from their own very different perspectives.

In the 1990s, the Web made the Internet a huge system for finding and retrieving all kinds of information. Grid technology takes the next step, pooling computing power over the Internet, linking and managing global computing resources for solving the fantastically challenging computer problems of particle physics and astrophysics, climate modeling, genetics, earthquake simulation, brain research and other fields of science. Supported by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, U.S. scientists are collaborating with colleagues around the world to develop the open-source software, the infrastructure and the standards to make the Grid a reality. Fermilab has achieved the first working Data Grids for physics in the United States.

Note to Reporters: Speakers will be available to meet with the members of the press at a pre-lecture buffet at 6:30 p.m. in the One North Conference Room of Fermilab’s Wilson Hall.

For more information: http://conferences.fnal.gov/lp2003/bulletins/grid_new.html
How to get to Fermilab: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/visiting/hours/index.html

BATAVIA, Ill.-Helen Edwards, whose work in the early days of the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is a foundation of past, present and future scientific achievements, and whose current work is helping shape the next generation of particle accelerators, has been awarded the 2003 Robert R. Wilson Prize by the American Physical Society.

The award is named for Fermilab’s founding director, Robert Rathbun Wilson (1914-2000), and was established in 1986 by friends of Wilson, and by the Division of Particles and Fields and the Division of Physics of Beams of the American Physical Society. Previous winners include Cornell University’s Maury Tigner (2000) and Fermilab’s Alvin Tollestrup (1989).

“It is a great honor to receive the Wilson Prize,” said Edwards, who with her husband, Don, worked with Wilson first at Cornell University and then at the National Accelerator Laboratory, later renamed Fermilab.

The 2003 award cites Edwards “for her pivotal achievement and critical contribution as the leader in the design, construction, commissioning and operation of the Tevatron, and for her continued contributions to the development of high gradient superconducting linear accelerators as well as bright and intense electron sources.”

“I was delighted to learn that Helen Edwards had been awarded the Wilson Prize,” said Fermilab Director Michael Witherell. “Bob Wilson brought Helen to work at Fermilab, and both of them made essential contributions to the remarkable success of Fermilab and its accelerators. I’m very pleased that Helen’s work has been recognized in this way.”

In a distinguished and much-heralded career, Edwards has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Medal of Technology, and the Department of Energy’s E. O. Lawrence Award. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Engineering, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

“My husband and I worked under Bob Wilson’s direction for over 20 years and we benefited greatly from his example,” Edwards said. “I believe this award is for my husband as much as for myself, as we have worked effectively as a team over the years. I have grown to appreciate Wilson’s leadership and convictions more and more over the years. Not only was he a great technical leader but he communicated his beliefs with great clarity. He lauded international collaboration and decried ‘creeping bureaucracy.’ I can do no better than to excerpt some of his thoughts from his 1969 testimony before Congress, on building the Fermilab accelerator: ‘…(T)his new knowledge has all to do with honor and country but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.'”

The Tevatron, cited in the Wilson Award, accelerated its first beam in 1983 and recorded its first proton-antiproton collisions in 1985. With the Tevatron collider, scientists discovered the top quark in 1995. Still the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator, the Tevatron is poised for major breakthroughs in the understanding of elementary particles and forces during the current Collider Run II, at even higher energy and at a new record rate of proton-antiproton collisions.

Currently, Edwards is engaged in research in superconducting technology for one of the possible designs of an electron-positron linear collider, which has been proposed as the next machine for the field of high-energy physics, to be built as an international laboratory. She has been the leader of the Photoinjector Project, which used a superconducting radiofrequency cavity for the first time at Fermilab to accelerate an electron beam. She spends time at Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, Germany on research and development for the TESLA superconducting linear collider.

For more information on the Robert R. Wilson Prize, and a list of previous winners since 1987, go to the American Physical Society Web page for prizes and awards at http://www.aps.org/praw/03winners.html.

Fermilab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory, operated under contract by Universities Research Association, Inc.

Batavia, Ill.-Astrophysicist Edward W. “Rocky” Kolb, of the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Chicago, will join United States senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), NPR News senior analyst Daniel Schorr, novelist Chinua Achebe, and other luminaries in addressing the 2002 incoming class of Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on Saturday, Oct. 5 at 3:30 p.m. at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“I am honored and pleased to have been chosen as a member of this group,” Kolb said of the double honor of being inducted into the Academy and being chosen to address his new colleagues. He said his speech will focus on the unification of science with the humanities.

Kolb, 51, currently lives in Warrenville, Ill., and also has a home in Chicago. The New Orleans native received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas and now serves as head of the NASA/Fermilab Theoretical Astrophysics Group. Kolb, along with fellow Fermilab scientists and Academy Fellows Leon Lederman and Michael Turner, founded the group in 1983 to explore the connections between cosmology and particle physics.

In addition to more than 200 scientific papers, Kolb is the author of the standard textbook on particle physics and cosmology, “The Early Universe,” and a cosmology book for the general public, “Blind Watchers of the Sky,” winner of the 1996 Emme award from the American Astronomical Society. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has served on the editorial boards of several international scientific journals, as well as “Astronomy” magazine.

The Academy, which was founded in 1790, inducts approximately 150 new Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members each year, honoring intellectual achievement, leadership and creativity in all fields. The inductees, who are nominated and elected by current members, are divided into five classes: mathematics and physics; biological sciences; social sciences; humanities and arts; and public affairs and business. The Academy conducts non-partisan, interdisciplinary studies in areas such as international security, social policy, education and the humanities. Previous Fellows include the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Webster, Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill.

Fermilab is a Department of Energy national laboratory, operated under contract by Universities Research Association, Inc.

BATAVIA, Ill. and MENLO PARK, Calif.-The U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, Calif., today jointly announce the launching of an email news wire, HEP Interactions, for communicating news from high-energy physics and related fields.

The free service will function as a source of timely information on high-energy physics, including press releases and news items from the world’s high-energy physics laboratories. A related web site will archive press releases and newsworthy stories.

For more information, or to receive this new electronic subscriber news service, visit the Web site at:http://www.interactions.org

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a national laboratory in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, is operated by Stanford University in Menlo Park, California. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is operated under contract by Universities Research Association, Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Batavia, Ill. – Scientists of the Booster Neutrino Experiment collaboration announced this week that a new detector at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has observed its first neutrino events. The BooNE scientists identified neutrinos that created ring-shaped flashes of light inside a 250,000-gallon detector filled with mineral oil.

The major goal of the MiniBooNE experiment, the first phase of the BooNE project, is either to confirm or refute startling experimental results reported by a group of scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 1995, the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector collaboration stunned the particle physics community when it reported a few incidences in which the antiparticle of a neutrino had presumably transformed into a different type of antineutrino, a process called neutrino oscillation.

“Today, there exist three very different independent experimental results that indicate neutrino oscillations,” said Janet Conrad, a physics professor at Columbia University and cospokesperson of the BooNE collaboration. “Confirming the LSND result would suggest the existence of an additional kind of neutrino beyond the three known types. It would require physicists to rewrite a large part of the theoretical framework called the Standard Model.”

Over the next two years, the BooNE collaboration will collect and analyze approximately one million particle events to study the quantum behavior of neutrinos. Although these ghost-like particles are among the most abundant particles in the entire universe, little is known about their role in nature.

“It is an exciting time for neutrino physics,” said Department of Energy Office of Science Director Raymond Orbach. “In the past few years experiments around the world have made extraordinary neutrino observations, shattering the long-standing view that neutrinos have no mass. The MiniBooNE experiment has the potential for advancing the revolution of our understanding of the building blocks of matter.”

The MiniBooNE experiment, under construction from October 1999 to May 2002, relies on an intense beam of muon neutrinos created by the Booster accelerator at Fermilab. About 1,500 feet from its production point, the neutrino beam traverses a 40-foot-diameter tank filled with ultraclean mineral oil. The tank’s interior is lined with 1,520 light-sensitive devices, called photomultiplier tubes, that record tiny flashes of light produced by neutrinos colliding with carbon nuclei inside the oil.

“We will operate the experiment 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” said Bill Louis, a Los Alamos scientist and cospokesperson of the BooNE collaboration. “We will be looking for oscillations of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos. If nature behaves as LSND suggests, our detector will collect about one thousand electron neutrino events over the next two years. If not, we won’t see any electron neutrinos. Either way, we’ll get a definite answer.”

The BooNE collaboration comprises 66 scientists from 13 institutions from across the United States. The 19-million-dollar MiniBooNE experiment has received funding both from DOE’s Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.

“In addition to the importance of the science, MiniBooNE is an example of a successful partnership among federal agencies, universities and national laboratories,” said Marvin Goldberg of the National Science Foundation. “The project has also set new standards for education and public outreach in the field of high-energy physics. The small scale of the project allows undergraduate and graduate students to participate fully in all of the experimental components.”

Fermilab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory, operated under contract by Universities Research Association, Inc.

The BooNE website

The MiniBooNE virtual tour

Why is the MiniBooNE detector filled with baby oil?

Signs of a fourth neutrino?

Neutrino physics at Fermilab

Milestones in neutrino physics around the world

More about neutrinos worldwide