What's New
UVa NOvA group is featured in the Fall issue of the Virginia Arts
& Sciences Magazine
here.
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The NOvA Near Detector in its surface building (NDOS) has observed its first event: a cosmic ray muon. From the NOvA spokespersons:
It has taken a tremendous amount of work both at and away from Fermilab to get us to this point. After years of planning and preparations this experiment is about to become very real. This is a very hectic time -- there is still much work to do -- but we hope everyone can take a moment to reflect on what has been accomplished so far. Congratulations to all!!
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The Power Distribution System has been installed in the Integrated Prototype Near Detector (IPND). Congratualtions to all! The left figure shows the UVa group in front of the test stand designed by Stephen Goadhouse and Jason Gran. The right figure shows Jason Gran, Zukai Wang, Stephen Goadhouse, and Ralf Ehrlich in front of a relay rack containing two of the lower power supplies.
Craig Group of Fermilab and CDF is coming to Virginia as an assistant professor working in the High Energy Physics group. He will be working on both CDF (Higgs search) and Mu2e. Craig will have a joint Fermilab/Virginia position for five years. back to top
Andrew Norman was offered a position by Fermilab as an Associate Scientist
in the Computing Division, a position equivalent to a tenure track position
at a University. The competition for the job was fierce, with
excellent candidates applying from all over the country. Andrew will be
missed, but we are happy to see that his talents have been recognized with
a permanent lab position at Fermilab.
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The NOvA prototype block was assembled at Argonne National Laboratory and shipped to Fermilab, where it sits in the MINOS surface building. The photo below shows the protoblock with NOvA collaborators, taken at the April 2010 collaboration meeting. Six of these are needed for the Near Detector. The Far Detector will be 4 times the height, 6 times the width, and 30 times the lenght of the protoblock.
Craig Dukes has been appointed head of the Mu2e Cosmic Ray Veto system
(Leve 2 manager in DOE parlance).
Cosmic ray muons can produce background electrons that mimic
muon-to-electron conversions. Hence all such search experiments have
a cosmic ray shield, consisting of passive absorbers (iron, concrete, and
dirt) and active detectors.
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Click here to see the first test bast.
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Andrew Norman gave two talks at the annual meeting of the Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) for the American Physical Society (APS): one on Mu2e and one on NOvA. You can find links to his talks below.
NOvA: .ppt .pdfMu2e: .pptx .pdf
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Our own Andrew Norman was selected to give the talk on Fermilab muon physics in the future program, The Mu2e and g-2 Experiments, at the Fermilab User's Meeting. You can find links to his talk below.
Fermilab User's Meeting talk: .pdfFermilab User's Meeting talk: .pptx
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Construction begins this month on a cutting-edge physics laboratory in northern
Minnesota, supported by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Congressman
James Oberstar of Minnesota and Congressman Bill Foster of Illinois today (May 1)
are joining officials from the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory and the University of Minnesota to break ground for NOvA, the world's
most advanced neutrino experiment.
Click
here for the Fermilab official press release.
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NOvA was informed on March 3, 2009 that it will receive $55 million in
Recovery Act (stimulus) funds this year, and $78 million overall.
This is allowing the project to proceed full speed ahead on all fronts,
and it particular with the construction of the Far Detector building.
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Emmanuel Munyangabe can be seen in the D-zero control room explaining
things to Michael Kirby in a YouTube segment on the search for the Higgs
particle. Click
here.
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Andrew Norman was appointed head of the Rare B Decay group for
the D0 experiment. Those decays will include searches for
lepton flavor violation.
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In the latest
U.S. News and World Report
rankings of top public colleges and
universities, UVa ranked second (to Berkeley).
(My graduate school, Michigan, was ranked fourth, and
my undergraduate school, William & Mary, was renked sixth.)
The last few years UVa and Berkeley have repeatedly
swapped places between first and second.
The city of Charlottesville also does well in national rankings.
It is #2 on Kiplinger's Personal Finance list of
Healthiest Places to live in America,
rated by Reader's Digest as on of the top ten places in the
country to raise children, and by
Outside magazine as "One of seven dream towns that have it all."
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Mu2e was given Stage 1 approval by Fermilab in a letter to the
collaboration from Pier Oddone. It is expected to be one of the
flagship experiments of the new Fermilab high intensity physics program.
The next major step will be to come up with a detailed design and
cost estimate.
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Craig Dukes was elected to a two-year term as chair of the Mu2e Institutional
Board. The Institutional Board has representatives from each of the
collaborating institutions on Mu2e and serves to advise the spokespesons
on matters related to the experiment.
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HyperCP has observed the decay Sigma-plus -> proton + mu-plus +
mu-minus, in what is the rarest baryon decay ever observed.
What is more interesting is the fact that the dimuon masses
of the three observed events are all the same, at 214.3 MeV,
implying that the decay proceeds via a hitherto unknown itermediate
state, one consistent with the sgoldstino.
See the Fermilab Today article.
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Frommer's ranked
Charlottesvile the #1 Best City to live in the USA & Canada.
Charlottesville has been ranked highly in other surveys as well.
Some other rankings of Charlottesville:
- Money Magazine ranked it as one of their Best Places to Live in 1999 & 200.
- Outside Magazine ranked it as One of the Best Places to be Found in 1995 & 1999, and also one of Seven Dream Towns That Have it All.
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HyperCP has reported seeing no evidence of the widely observed
theta-plus(1.54) pentaquark.
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HyperCP has published a null result from a search for CP violation in
Lambda and Xi hyperon decays. This result (UVa graduate student
Tim Holmstrom's thesis), from about 15% of the data,
is a factor of twenty more sensitive than the best
previous result, and is constraining some supersymmetric models
of the asymmetry. Analysis of the full dataset is being done
by UVa graduate student Chad Materniak. See Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 262001
(2004).
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