MicroBooNE Construction

After much hard work by too many people to even possibly hope to mention, MicroBooNE detector assembly has begun to roll out some of the first tangible construction in this last month. I have had the good fortune of getting to take part in a lot of the assembly activity and detector construction in the last week and thought it would be fun to share some of the work with the Quantum Diaries community. The first thing I should say is that any of the work I am showing here is by no means my own. I am only one of many hands getting to take part in the plan to build the Liquid Argon neutrino detector known as MicroBooNE. While I am trying my best to take on leadership roles in some of these tasks (e.g. be a person that knows what is going on and can get yelled at if things aren't going smoothly), there are many people who are planning and leading the charge and I am just one of many helping hands.

Wires being mounted on the electronics board

The first of the tasks I got to do much earlier in the spring was to take part in the fabrication of part of the wires that will be at the heart of the MicroBooNE detector. From February till May of this year I aided and helped lead the effort to complete the Y-plane wires that will serve as the collection plane for the MicroBooNE detector. This was a very interesting, yet incredibly tedious, task of using a special made machine (made at Brookhaven Labs) to measure and wind > 3840 individual wires and place them on an electronics board (also designed and fabricated at Brookhaven...see I told you I was only a small cog in the wheel) before storing them and shipping them to Fermilab where they await to be mounted in the detector. Along the way we performed various strength and strain tests all in preparation for their final use in the detector.

All the Y-Plane wires awaiting transport to Fermilab

After landing back at Fermilab in the early summer (with a brief layover in Japan for Neutrino 2012 conference) I began to take part in the massive efforts that were going on to sort / clean / and prep all the various large and small parts that were starting to arrive from the various machine shops and industrial companies that will eventually make up the MicroBooNE detector. These efforts were being lead by Jen Raaf (a Fermilab Scientist) along with an army of undergraduates, graduates, and post-docs. An article was even written in Fermilab today (see link here) highlighting some of the work.
However, don't let the fancy picture fool you...this was a lot of hard work. From scrubbing massive pieces of steel to remove grime and particles to cleaning and coating thousands of individual bolts, this massive effort required MANY man hours and lots of dirty clothes and long days. I, along with many other people, aided in a good part of the cleaning efforts as well as some of the sorting and transporting, but a lot of credit has to go to Thomas Strauss from Bern who really threw himself into the task of getting these parts cleaned, labelled and transported .
Finally, with a all the parts needed to begin the full scale construction, MicroBooNE began to come together last week at large scale. The first part of the detector that was to be assembled is what is known as the "anode frame" and is one of the back parts of what makes up the large rectangular TPC detector.
This too was no small undertaking and took the hard work of technicians from Lab F at Fermilab, scientists from Brookhaven Labs, graduate students and post-docs (myself included) and even the spokespeople of the MicroBooNE collaboration in order to get all the various parts to fit together and have any hope of being square and parallel.

Freshly cleaned large steel parts for the TPC

Like most things in life, the judicious application of banging mallets, pulling of chains, and the screwing of allen wrenches eventually got the anode frame assembled and in place in the construction tent currently living in the D0 collision hall at Fermilab.
While the construction work is far from being done, I thought it would be fun to share a flavor of all the exciting things that are taking place as I get the chance to share in my first large scale construction of a particle detector. You can follow all the excitement, thanks to Fermilab visual media services there is a live streaming webcam of the construction tent which can be viewed here: http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/live/MBWebcam.htm

1000's of bolts freshly cleaned and awaiting moly-coating

All the people hard at work getting the frame together (when all else fails, swing the hammer harder!)

The (nearly) completed anode frame

Alex Honnold Free Soloing

While I am not a big fan of the idea of "free-soloing" (climbing tall distances without a rope) I have to recognize talent when talent is there, and without a doubt Alex Honnold is a talented climber.

There is a great piece on 60 minutes about his climbing and some spectacular footage of Alex "no big deal".



http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7383158n

While I am getting settled into the great freeze that is a midwest winter this time of year stuff like this makes me want to hit the climbing gym to remember that feeling of doing what doesn't look possible.

Secret Application on Smart Phones

A really important article and corresponding YouTube video exposing what could be some very disturbing news about a seemingly secret and ever present application on Blackberry, Android, and Nokia phones.

This application seems to log every key you press, every website you visit (regardless of https or not) and every call and SMS message you send and receive as well as every place you physically go. This information is reported to a program that you can't detect easily, can not remove, and will send this information to a company you never heard of.

The article from the register is found here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/30/smartphone_spying_app/

The youtube video is here:



I'll be following this issue closer...I've been considering moving into the 21st century and getting a smart phone, but this makes me much less eager.

Who Killed President Kennedy? A Review of Evidence

On November 22nd I had the pleasure to attend a lecture at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs with my brother Robert Asaadi who is a PhD student in the political science.

The reason I drove all the way to Minneapolis to see this lecture was simple, the former Governor Jesse Ventura was coming to discuss the evidence supporting the conspiracy theory around the killing of President Kennedy.

Now he didn't appear alone, with him was Judge John R. Tunheim who served for more than 11 years as a United States District Judge since taking his oath of office on December 29, 1995. Tunheim served as chairman of the U.S. Assassination Records Review Board, an independent federal agency responsible for reviewing and facilitating public disclosure of previously classified government records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Anyone who has ever seen an interview with Governor Ventura knows that he is not a man to speak lightly on such a subject nor does he pull punches. However, unlike what comes across when in a hostile setting (say like fox news) he is a very respectful man and whether you agree or disagree he speaks plainly and directly while still respecting the opposite opinion.

The University of Minnesota has made the audio available (which you can listen to here).

Of course no single issue was resolved here...but it was exciting to hear from two people who have studied this issue in a scholarly way (one from the judicial aspect the other from dedicating reading and publicly available information) that this issue is far from settled and the things that at one time were considered outrageous (such as the presence of more then one shooter) is now becoming more generally accepted!

I would encourage anyone if given the opportunity to see Governor Ventura speak they should defiantly seize upon it.

New measurement by OPERA...same strange result?!?!

So the BBC is reporting that the results of the neutrino run done most recently by the OPERA experiment is confirming their previous result and continuing to find superluminal neutrino speeds.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236

In this iteration of the experiment OPERA attempted to address, amongst many points, one of their largest sources of uncertainty. Namely, the bunch length of the protons that were being sent from CERN and were producing the neutrinos that they were measuring.

By shortening the bunch widths you have a greater certainty about where the neutrinos are being created and thus you know your initial time to a much higher degree of accuracy.

Needless to say this is a big deal if it is true.

They have updated their paper to include this systematic "fix" as well as complete discussion of various other effects taken into account can be found here on the arxiv.

This is a very exciting find in physics and with the reported plan to submit this paper for review to a journal a final vetting is in due course.

Now we must wait for this experiment to be repeated by the many other long baseline experiments, such as MINOS here at Fermilab and T2K in Japan!

So if your days have been anything like mine in recent weeks anytime I talk to anyone with even a vague semblance of what particle physics is and that I am an experimentalist (in training of course) the question comes....
"So what about CERN proving Einstein wrong with those things going faster than light?"
 


To which I respond politely, "Crazy stuff...but anytime someone says they see something going faster than light I put my hand on my wallet because something is fishy".

If the person is nice/interested enough to want a further explanation I try to explain what the OPERA measurement is along with loads of caveats that I don't work on this experiment,  as scientists they did hundreds of cross-checks, and that they wouldn't release this result if they weren't convinced something is strange here...etc...etc...

If someone is daring enough to push and ask what I think about it my response has been simple: "Science is about repeatability and accuracy so I'll wait till the next group of experimentalists weighs in".

Today on the BBC I saw the news announcement that "Faster-than-light neutrino experiment to run again". Aside from the obvious things wrong with the title of the argument (this wasn't an experiment to search for faster-than-light neutrinos) the article explains that during this next run they are going to attempt to remove on of the largest possible sources of systematic errors in the OPERA measurment, namely the length of the length of the proton bunch widths being sent towards Gran Sasso from 10 microseconds to ~ 1 nanosecond  with ~ 500 nanoseconds between pulses.

While you still can't measure exactly which neutrino is from which proton the way you would like to in a perfect measurement, this should allow them to be more accurate on average than before and take away a source of error many people I would consider experts have said is of greatest concern.
While I'm sure this is only one  of many improvements that will be made to this measurement to address all the...shall we say..."constructive criticism" the OPERA experiment has received since their result. The bad news is that if they end up with a null measurement and find that neutrinos don't in fact go faster than the speed of light the news and fan fare will be much less...because while for scientists a null result is still a result...for the rest of the world a null result is not news.

So I think we have some interesting times in experimental physics coming in the very near future!

Quantum Man: Richard Feynman

There was an exceptional lecture about Richard Feynman given at CERN a few days ago that was shared by a colleague and wanted to repost here.

From the CERN document server: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1386327

Lawrence Krauss gives a very nice overview of some of the things that I think made Feynmann exceptional both in his physics and in being a human in a field of giants (physics).

Like most people coming up after this exceptional man I too was influenced by his writings and his legend and as I make the transition from graduate student to Post-doc I can only hope to have my path as rich as Feynman's was!

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!

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!

Muddy Buddy Chicago 2011

Team Bobby Got Loose (that is my wife and I's team name) took 10th place this year in Muddy Buddy in the COed 46-55 division out of 60 teams in our same bracket!

This was a huge improvement over the last year with a finishing time of 46:16.4. This was only 3 seconds behind the # 9 place and 6:45 behind first place.

The course was extra fast this year and my wife really performed well. I kind-of over sprinted the first few legs of the race and ended up walking at least 2 mins of the last run which I think cost us a higher placing. However, we still did pretty well! Combined with our 11th place finish in Chicago's Urban Assault 2011 I'd say we had a good race year thus far.


Links to the Muddy Buddy Results can be found here and Overall results found here
That's right 194th out of 1124 competitors. That is top 17% out of all Muddy Buddies!

Ubuntu One!

So as I might have mentioned in the past I have made a full transition to every computer in my house to Linux (with the exception of my wife's Mac, which she loves). The platform I have chosen after sampling many different releases is Ubuntu 11.04.

After a few hiccups getting important applications installed on my desktop and laptop that I use for particle physics work (Kerberos, ROOT, etc...all of which have now been resolved by either Ubuntu or the respective software release) I have been very impressed by the look and running of this OS. The installation on both my laptop and my desktop with dual screen was the easiest thing I've ever done in Linux. Gone is the day of having to hack away at your video card and wireless card to trick you computer into accepting Linux and letting you move on with your day.

Now Ubuntu has taken the next step and offers cloud storage FOR FREE! They call their service Ubuntu One and as of this last month you get 5 GB of free storage. Additionally they already offer streaming music to you Android mobile device along with the sync of your contacts. They are also developing the platform on the iPhone as well with that expected to come soon.

This feature alone has improved my work life 5 fold. Between going to meeting, traveling to and from the lab, and working from home I was always trying to remember which file on what computer was the most recent version of my thesis paper, analysis nTuple, or even event reduction table. Now I don't have to worry about it, I just end my work session with allowing Ubuntu One to sync anything I chose to drop into the shared folder and then download it when I get home or to my laptop. Also the looming fear of a computer crashing and losing all my work is greatly diminished, a horror story I've heard from too many particle physics people.

The feature is expandable and for a low price they are offering up to 20 GB of cloud and streaming, however I expect that number to rise. If you have been looking to make the jump into Linux world and the world of free software and open source code, this distribution is for you.

Oh yeah, did I mention that they are allowing Ubuntu One to be open source development...so you know the world of users are only going to make this feature even better.

Cosmology with Prof Susskind from Standford

View this movie at cultureunplugged.com

I found this great video on a cosmology lecture given by Prof Leonard Susskind that is one in a 4 part series of Cosmology lectures. 

I think the video is very good and the Q&A session at the very beginning is a great chance to hear some of the most common questions when it comes to Cosmology explained clearly and with a lay-man in mind!

Enjoy

Fermilab Budget Woes Continue

While most labs managed to dodge a bullet (what really looked like a giant bomb) in the 2011 budget. There is still many problems coming. Announced Thursday and reported on the Courier News and this blog that Fermilab will seek to reduce its staff by 5% through a voluntary program.

With the ending of the Tevatron program in September this doesn't come as too much of a surprise, however it doesn't do much to boost moral around the lab. In fact, even though much of the talk is on the future experiments like Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE), Mu2e (website), and the future of Project X (website) there can't help but be a sense of loss for many scientist working there.

For me, trying desperately to finish my thesis on work at CDF and looking for post-docs that might keep me in the Chicago land area, pieces of news about the shrinking of the lab only causes me to take pause and check to see if going down this path is the best for me.

The little support and almost no excitement coming from a budget strapped government towards science makes it hard for a young researcher to keep a stiff upper lip and look to the future with too much optimism .

Oh well, more focus on thesis and hopefully when I lift my head there will be a good position on an interesting and well funded experiment to work on.

DZero Doesn't see the same excess as CDF!

So the physics world is all a buzz with the reported excess in the W+2 Jet channel reported by CDF.

The graph here shows the most recent result released by CDF in the W+ 2 Jet channel for 7.3 fb-1 and shows a clear (and growing) excess in the invariant mass range around 150 GeV. The community has been buzzing with speculation and ideas as to what this phenomenon could be. From mis-modeling to Technicolor (a new model of physics) the result isn't really clear. But something seems to be really there.

The really exciting thing is that CDF's sister experiment at the Tevatron, DZero, has publicly released their findings in the same channel today and they don't seem to see anything. (See the public release by Fermilab here).

So what does it all mean? Well clearly something is happening here. The CDF result has been checked and double checked from within the collaboration (that is really the only way such a result could ever see the light of day) and now you have an independent check by another experiment on the same data and they don't see anything! The fury of discussion as to whether DZero and CDF are doing identical things will launch as well as much debate as to what it means and how to proceed.

To me this is where physics is really interesting! Methods of analysis and meaning and understanding will be hotly debated. DZero will be giving a seminar talk today at 4pm and is webcasted here.

For sure what is to come will be what makes science great. Checks, cross-checks, argument, and ultimately (and probably after many sleepless nights and hurt ego's) agreement to what causes such deviations.

Get Excited!

Fermilab Users Meeting

Today and tomorrow are the 44th annual Fermilab Users Meeting.
This meeting will highlight the many exciting activities that are coming from Fermilab including Collider Physics (like the stuff I work on) as well as Astro-Particle, Neutrino, and future plans for the lab.

The big draw this year seems to be the already "sold out" (I put this in quotes because the tickets were free, but had to be requested) public talk that will be given on Thursday by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. There is some overflow seating that will be made available so even if you don't have tickets it may still be worth the while to come.

So far today there has been many good talks, one I especially liked was given by Brendan Casey of Fermilab on the new g-2 experiment that is slated to begin after the much morned shutdown of the Tevatron. His talk can be found here (https://indico.fnal.gov/conferenceOtherViews.py?view=standard&confId=4156). Something that won't come across in the slides (which are very well done!) is the fact that he gave the talk in flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt and said that the exciting part of his experiment is "we get to use helicopters, and everyone knows helicopters are awesome". This eludes to how they will transport part of their experimental set-up from where it is now to Fermilab.

See an overview of the meeting here: http://www.fnal.gov/orgs/fermilab_users_org/users_mtg/2011/

Urban Assault 2011 Chicago

Well, this years Urban Assault ride was a spectacular as the rest! My wife and I didn't have time this year to do the online quiz (really busy with work and thesis stuff) so the bad news is we started in the last wave (5 mins behind the first wave).

However even with this handicap we still managed to finish 11th place for all coeds (Team "Bobby Got Loose") and 38th overall! This is our best finish ever and we had a lot of good luck.


View Urban Assault 2011 in a larger map

First of all Heather did a great job planning out the route (see map above) and choosing the initial path to go clockwise around the circle. Then as we approached the first mystery checkpoint a very kind women was screaming the location (and solution to the anagram) of the second check point (Fat Cat Bar and Grill). This allowed us to spend very little time at the mystery checkpoint and it also happened to be right in our direction as we were heading back to home base!
As always the orgainizers did an outstanding job and the beer and food was ready and waiting for all the riders when we got back. Heather and I didn't do costumes like last year (we had come in banana costumes) but people recognized us and the vibe was quite friendly. This was the first year some Chicago friends did the race as well and they loved it. Granted we smoked their time ;-) so I think we really had the best of times. More pictures from the race to come....

Tevatron still kicking proton/antiproton butt!

I thought I would share this post from the Tevatron's Facebook page (can be found here).
Just in the last week we had 6 of the top 10 initial luminosity stores from the Tevatron and the accelerator delivered 78 pb-1 of data in just the last week!
This is really an amazing accomplishment for this accelerator and with this rate of data delivery we can be sure that both experiments that operate on the Main Ring (CDF and D0) will have lots of data to analyze before the planned shutdown in September.
For those of you that don't exactly know what these numbers mean, this is just a simple way of measuring the amount of interactions (or collisions) that we will get during the operation of the accelerator. The higher the luminosity, the greater chance that the collisions will occur and the more interesting data we have to record. What is truly amazing is after 25 years of operations the Tevatron is performing like never before and delivering data and unprecedented rates! This means that there is a greater chance of catching a glimpse at rare processes in physics that may be buried in our data.
Even more clear explanations and updated numbers for the Tevatron can be found here:
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/now/tevlum.html
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/now/tevlumexp.html

Support your Schools

Very simple, this came across my Facebook news feed  and I think it speaks volumes to the problem with the way education is viewed in the United States.

Quote from the photo:
"School elections and levies today in Helena- this picture was taken by a good friend and school librarian here in Helena. She couldn't help herself, had to go back and add the correction sign under the vote no sign. Poor funding really does have a long term result!"

Important Reults coming from XENON100

In an article titled Dark Matter Results from 100 Live Days of XENON100 Data the XENON collaboration reports some of the most stringent restrictions on direct dark matter searches to date.

You can find the article here on the arXiv.

With only 3 candidate events on a background of ~2.4 this puts strict restrictions on the available parameter space for WIMP dark matter candidates.

Just eking out their CDMS rivals their results spell trouble for many SUSY models that predict Lightest Stable Particles (LSP's) of low mass range to make up the world of dark matter we observe from astronomy.

Any way you take it, science is honing in on what dark matter "could" be by excluding where it isn't!