Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Fermilab's Tevatron Shutdown Event

So this Friday is the shutdown of Fermilab's Proton/Anti-Proton Collider the Tevatron. After almost 30 years of service and numerous discoveries the collider has run her course and is scheduled to be turned off.
Instead of this being a sad event Fermilab is going to let the old girl go out with a bang! A celebration is planned and I hope to be able to blog about it and bring pictures and thoughts about the days activities.

CDF has their experiments collaboration meeting going on over the next few days (at which I am giving a talk on my own analysis) and then a big celebration planned on Friday when they finally shut down the detector and the accelerator.
Live streaming media from both the Main Control room as well as CDF and D0 control rooms will be provided by Fermilab Visual Media Services.

Additionally, Chicago's own National Public Radio WBEZ did a show about the Tevatron that can be found here

The festivities and physics to come are sure to be exciting. So instead of being sad about the end of one of the most ground breaking experiments in science...here is a picture of a Corgi in a swing....adorable!

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam

Here is the article on the anomaly being reported for the speed of neutrinos from CERN to the OPERA detector in Italy

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.4897v1

Good read and helps deal with the first set of questions I had about this phenomenon. (Accuracy of the position measurement for one)

Now time to digest and see before we turn the world of physics on its head!

Neutrinos going faster than the speed of light?

All the buzz is there...did experimentalists observe neutrinos going faster than the speed of light?

To be honest I don't know and am still gathering information. I'll bet many of my friends and colleagues are in the same boat as me being asked questions through the many channels available to us (Facebook, Twitter, etc...)  to weigh in when we are just finding out ourselves.

There will be a webcast of a talk by the collaborators from OPERA tomorrow and here is the link
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=155620

Hope this helps everyone in figuring out if this is real...I will have more to say on this in the coming days!