From Fermilab: “NOvA near-detector cavern construction completed, ready for research equipment”

Fermilab is an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to scientific research world wide.

Monday, May 20, 2013
Sarah Khan

“After breaking ground in May 2012, the NOvA near-detector cavern, situated 350 feet underground, is nearly complete—ahead of schedule, no less—and has been ready to accommodate NOvA research equipment since it received beneficial occupancy on May 10.

The lab originally planned for completion in mid-June this year, said FESS engineer Russ Alber. But construction subcontractor Kiewit Infrastructure Co. has been working ahead of schedule and is now ready to turn the cavern over to Fermilab scientists and engineers.

Kiewit is finishing the last steps to cavern construction, which include building a movable walkway that slides down the length of the cavern and entry doors to the cavern.

The empty space is now ready to start taking experiment equipment.

‘It’s exciting for us,’ Alber said. ‘This is not a typical building with typical construction techniques, so we’re glad to have completed this one ahead of schedule.’

Without all the clutter from building materials, the 75-foot-long cavern seems, well, cavernous.

But it won’t be empty for long. Scientists will soon install networking and computing components to process neutrino data once the detector is up and running, said near-detector project manager Ting Miao.

See the full article here.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics.

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From DOE Pulse: “New particle detector records first 3-D tracks”

April 15, 2013
[Andre Salles, 630.840.3351,
media@fnal.gov]

“The NOvA particle detector, under construction in northern Minnesota, has begun recording its first three-dimensional images of particles. At its current size, the detector catches more than 1,000 cosmic rays per second. A webcam documents the progress of the construction of the humongous detector.

A cosmic-ray muon deposits a large shower of energy in the NOvA detector in Minnesota.

This summer, DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, located in Batavia, Ill., will start sending a beam of neutrinos every 1.3 seconds to the NOvA detector—500 miles straight through the Earth; no tunnel is necessary.

When complete in 2014, the full NOvA detector will be the most powerful neutrino detector in the United States. Made of PVC tubes that technicians will fill with scintillating liquid and outfit with light-sensitive electronics, the completed detector will weigh 14,000 tons. It will be the largest free-standing plastic structure in the world.

Scientists plan to use the NOvA experiment and Fermilab’s neutrino beam to discover the mass hierarchy of the three known types of neutrinos. Neutrinos are among the most abundant particles in the universe, but they have barely any mass and rarely interact with other matter particles. NOvA aims to discover which type of neutrino is the heaviest and which one is the lightest. The answer will shed light on the theoretical framework that scientists have proposed to describe neutrino interactions. Scientists suspect that neutrinos played a major role in the evolution of the universe. Neutrinos could help explain the imbalance of matter and antimatter in today’s universe, and scientists think there might be more types of neutrinos than the three known types.

‘The more we know about neutrinos, the more we know about the early universe and about how our world works at its most basic level,’ said NOvA co-spokesperson Gary Feldman of Harvard University.”

See the full article here.

DOE Pulse highlights work being done at the Department of Energy’s national laboratories. DOE’s laboratories house world-class facilities where more than 30,000 scientists and engineers perform cutting-edge research spanning DOE’s science, energy, National security and environmental quality missions. DOE Pulse is distributed twice each month.

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From Fermilab: “NOvA neutrino detector records first 3-D particle tracks”

Fermilab is an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to scientific research world wide.

March 28, 2013

“What will soon be the most powerful neutrino detector in the United States has recorded its first three-dimensional images of particles.

Using the first completed section of the NOvA neutrino detector, scientists have begun collecting data from cosmic rays—particles produced by a constant rain of atomic nuclei falling on the Earth’s atmosphere from space.

This cosmic-ray muon produces a large shower of energy as it passes through the NOvA detector. Image: NOvA collaboration

Courtesy of: NOvA collaboration

‘It’s taken years of hard work and close collaboration among universities, national laboratories and private companies to get to this point,’ said Pier Oddone, director of the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Fermilab manages the project to construct the detector.

The active section of the detector, under construction in Ash River, Minn., is about 12 feet long, 15 feet wide and 20 feet tall. The full detector will measure more than 200 feet long, 50 feet wide and 50 feet tall.

Scientists’ goal for the completed detector is to use it to discover properties of mysterious fundamental particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos are as abundant as cosmic rays in the atmosphere, but they have barely any mass and interact much more rarely with other matter. Many of the neutrinos around today are thought to have originated in the big bang.”

See the full articles here and here.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics.

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From Fermilab: “NOvA data concentrator modules near completion”

Fermilab is an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to scientific research world wide.

Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2013
Leah Hesla

“News on Fermilab’s NOvA experiment has largely focused on the assembly of the enormous blocks that make up the football-field-sized particle detector in Minnesota. But elsewhere in the NOvA collaboration, engineers have been diligently plugging away at a more hidden-away part of the detector, a component without which the giant device would never be able to intelligibly reveal what it sees.

The NOvA data concentrator module collects and organizes all the particle interaction information generated inside the detector. Engineers are completing the design and testing of the system. Photo: Reidar Hahn

This crucial component is the circuitry and computer code that make up NOvA’s data concentrator modules, or DCMs. Now, after several years of design work and many months of testing and prototyping, engineers are completing the system. Nearly all that remains is for the modules to be installed onto the NOvA detector blocks as they, too, are installed.

‘Many people worked hard to develop a DCM system we expect to run very smoothly,’ said Fermilab’s Ron Rechenmacher, who led one of the DCM hardware-software integration efforts.

The NOvA DCM is a key component of the detector’s data acquisition system, which is responsible for collecting and organizing all the particle interaction information generated inside NOvA’s two detectors. When a particle interacts inside the detector, its energy is transmitted through the detector’s fiber optic system as light signals, which get converted to digital signals by electronics boards, travel through the DCMs and eventually make their way to the larger data acquisition system. The electronics boards and DCM together convert the signals into language that experimenters can later analyze.

NOvA’s DCM system comprises about 180 modules. Each of these custom modules, about the size of a briefcase, attaches to the detector. One hundred sixty-eight of them are assigned to NOvA’s far detector in Minnesota, and a dozen or so belong to the smaller near detector at Fermilab.”

See the full article here.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics.

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From Symmetry and Fermilab: “What may be the world’s largest plastic structure is taking shape in Ash River, Minnesota. You’re invited to watch.”

September 25, 2012
Sarah Charley

“When it comes to designing an experiment that looks for the universe’s smallest particles, bigger is better. But when the experiment is so big that it spans multiple states, sometimes scientists need to find a way to keep everyone in the loop. That’s why the NOvA experiment is broadcasting real-time video showing the construction of its 14,000-ton neutrino detector.

‘NOvA is a huge experiment,’ says Fermilab physicist and NOvA deputy project manager Rick Tesarek. ‘The experiment is based at Fermilab, but the majority of the construction is taking place 500 miles away in rural Minnesota. People sometimes feel distanced from it, which is why we installed these cameras so that everyone can watch NOvA’s progress.”

So, from the mighty men and women of the awe-inspriring Fermilab, take a look.

And, see the full Symmetry article here.

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From Fermilab Today: “Proton beam upgrade team springs into action this week”

Fermilab continues to be a great source of strength in the U.S. Basic Research Community.

“Technicians and engineers have a lot of work ahead as the beam line and accelerator complex is revamped to sustain a faster-pulsed, more intense proton beam. The 11-month long shutdown of the beam line for upgrades begins today.

‘This is going to be the most work done on the beam line and its supporting infrastructure since the main injector was constructed in the mid-1990s,’ said Cons Gattuso, who is responsible for coordinating the upgrades during the shutdown. ‘We have a lot of work to do, and we’re eager to get started.’

The upgrades will prepare the beam line for the NOvA experiment, as well as experiments like Mu2e and g-2, which require more protons than the accelerator complex and beam line were originally configured to create and sustain.

This Fermilab Accelerator Complex Illustration shows the upgrade plan. Photo: Reidar Hahn

‘In the current set up, the main injector accumulates the protons, bunches them and ramps up their energy, Gattuso said. ‘In the new set up, all the accumulating, batching and processing will occur in the recycler, which will then deliver the ready-to-go protons packets to the main injector. Metaphorically speaking, it’s like switching from retail to whole sale—we’re outsourcing the boxing and packaging work to the recycler so that we can more-efficiently disseminate the pre-packed protons from the main injector to the rest of the accelerator complex.’”

See the full and exciting article here.

From Fermilab Today: “Mind over matter at NOνA”

Fermilab continues to be a great source of strength in the U.S. Basic Research Community.

Sarah Charley
Thursday, March 22, 2012

“Neutrinos may not be faster than light, but their curious shape-shifting properties might be the reason matter exists in the universe.

‘Equal parts of matter and anti-matter should have been produced in the big bang and then annihilated each other, leaving just a sea of photons,’ said neutrino physicist David Schmitz, PPD. ‘But we exist, which means there must have been something that tipped the scale in favor of matter. Neutrinos might be the answer, and, to find out, we need to make extremely detailed measurements of the phenomenon of neutrino oscillations.’”

Scientists know that there are three types of neutrinos but they don’t know which is the heaviest. Image courtesy of NOνA

Several experiments at Fermilab are designed to scrutinize the curious properties of neutrinos. One is the NuMI Off-Axis νe Appearance Experiment [NOvA], which will use advanced detection techniques to watch for neutrino shape shifting, or oscillations.

At Fermilab, the Main Injector Oscillation Search (MINOS) has been studying how muon neutrinos change into other forms since 2005. Along with other experiments elsewhere, it has found that they change primarily into tau neutrinos with a small fraction changing into electron neutrinos. The NOνA experiment will continue these measurements with much more precision.

The NOνA project was conceived ten years ago at Fermilab and has evolved into a collaboration among 152 scientists from 25 institutions. It uses the same principles as the MINOS experiment but takes the science to the next level.”

See the full article here.

From Fermilab Today: “Pivotal pivoter test paves way for plastic behemoth”

Fermilab continues to be a great source of strength in the U.S. Basic Research Community.

Engineers at Fermilab designed and tested a hydraulic system that will move and rotate the huge, 200-ton plastic blocks for the assembly of the NOvA detector. Photo: Reidar Hahn

“It could be the largest structure ever to be built from plastic. Its footprint of 1,052 square meters will cover an area about the size of a quarter of a football field. Its height will rise past the top of a five-story apartment building. With 368,640 tubes of white PVC, the structure will have about as many components as some of the largest LEGO structures built in the world.

But this huge structure, to be constructed in Ash River, Minn., won’t serve as a plastic replica. It will be the skeleton of a fully functional particle detector. Wired with fiber optic cables and filled with 500 truckloads of mineral oil, the 15,000-ton NOvA detector will enable scientists to discover how the masses of the three types of neutrinos—the lightest, tiniest particles known to mankind—stack up.”

Here is a video from Fermilab

See the full article here.