A joint Fermilab/SLAC publication
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02/01/07

Budget progress

The Fiscal Year 2008 budget request has just been released by the President of the United States. At the roughest cut of the figures, the FY08 high-energy physics program within the Department of Energy gets a 12% increase over the enacted FY06 budget level.

Logbook of December 2006
12/01/06

“Dirty bubble chamber”

Luis Alvarez, a physicist at what today is the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, attended a 1953 meeting of the American Physical Society and heard a young University of Michigan physicist named Donald Glaser describe a particle detector he’d developed and called a “bubble chambe

12/01/06

Covered

Thank you for symmetry’s beautifully designed covers. I am excited to receive each month’s new issue, since I rip off the cover and some of the articles inside and use them for wrapping paper and craft projects.

12/01/06

Raising the flags

Security officers raise and lower 20 flags in front of Fermilab's Wilson Hall every day. Each flag represents a country that researchers come from to work at the lab. "The problem is that there are twenty flag poles," says Fermilab's Roy Rubinstein.

12/01/06

O Christmas Tree!

Like many particle physicists, JoAnne Hewett can trace the course of her career through her scientific publications. But for a more colorful retrospective of her work, the SLAC theorist simply decorates her Christmas tree.

12/01/06

Record making

Fermilab might not have the world's longest fingernails or the world's oldest man, but, according to Guinness World Records 2007, the lab does have the most powerful beam of neutrinos.

12/01/06

Gigantic pumpkin

Three-year-old Madeleine Rogers stands inside the spooky remains of a 275-pound pumpkin grown by her father, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center engineer Reggie Rogers.

12/01/06

The human side of virtual collaboration

Advances in virtual control technology have shown scientists just how important humans are after all. Although scientists can now essentially operate a particle collider from anywhere in the world, having members of a team work well remotely is just as significant a challenge.

12/01/06

A project worth its salt

The Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) isn't scheduled to open until 2008, but the Tokai campus facility is already the site of discovery—just not of the physics variety.

An illustration of a person walking up a flight of stairs
12/01/06

Postdocs

Postdocs are temporary research positions for scientists who have completed their PhDs.

12/01/06

Dan Vergano: Between the newsroom and the classroom

As lunchtime entertainment a few years ago, I gave a talk to a group of physics journal editors. The topic was covering physics for a national newspaper, using the studies they published as grist for the mill.

12/01/06

Lylie Fisher: Beauty bubbles through

For artist Lylie Fisher, particle physics is much more than a field of science. It is art: "Like art, particle physics deals with the invisible," says Fisher. "One portrays emotional and spiritual experiences; the other studies unseen matter and energy.

12/01/06

LCLS ground breaking

Call it subtle irony: The ground breaking for SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) took place among earth movers that had already been busily transforming the rolling California landscape for weeks.

12/01/06

The many lives of Fermi's magnet

If this magnet could talk, you'd hear some amazing stories. During its half-century career, this four-million-pound magnet contributed to experiments that changed our view of physics while serving some of the field's foremost experimenters, including Enrico Fermi.

12/01/06

Listening for whispers of dark matter

Jodi Cooley works half a mile underground, in a mine that stopped operating 40 years ago. A rattling elevator takes her to work, 27 floors beneath the surface. The ride down the mineshaft is five minutes of complete darkness. A colony of bats inhabits the mine.