What's New
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.
Click here to see the first test bast.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Andrew Norman was appointed head of the Rare B Decay group for the D0 experiment. Those decays will include searches for lepton flavor violation.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
HyperCP has reported seeing no evidence of the widely observed theta-plus(1.54) pentaquark.
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).