From ORNL: “ORNL begins implementation of new californium-252 production contract”

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Feb. 28, 2013
Bill Cabage

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory – home of one of only two reactor facilities in the world capable of producing californium-252 (Cf-252) – has begun implementing a new six-year contract between the DOE Isotope Program and industry to make this unique and versatile radioisotope.

The new contract follows the successful completion of a four-year Cf-252 program under an agreement with a consortium of industries that use the neutron emitting radioisotope for a number of applications that focus mostly on analysis, detection and nuclear energy.

‘Californium-252 serves as a unique, portable neutron source,’ said Julie Ezold, who manages ORNL’s Cf-252 production program. ‘A cross-cut of industries including coal, oil and mineral companies rely on it for critical applications, and it is used in defense and national security applications.’”

See the full article here.

ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

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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 Fermilab- “Frontier Science Result: MiniBooNE Nudging the community towards measuring where all the antimatter went”

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

Friday, Feb. 15, 2013
Joe Grange

Joe Grange, University of Florida, performed the analysis for this MiniBooNE result.

“Like many of the processes we study at Fermilab, neutrino interactions probe fundamental properties of the universe. The focus of the MiniBooNE experiment has been to identify whether muon-type neutrinos spontaneously change into electron-type neutrinos in one of the neutrino beams created at the lab, possibly implying an extra neutrino state. However, recent work on the interactions of the muon-type neutrinos themselves has proven compelling as well, and this new result provides a first look at a specific muon antineutrino interaction.

This fundamental cross section shows the probability for a muon antineutrino to interact with a nucleon and produce a positively charged muon and any number of nucleons. For the first time, the MiniBooNE experiment has been able to split this measurement into a function of muon energy and scattering angle. By directly measuring the muon kinematics, these new data offer unprecedented insight into the behavior of the muon in antineutrino CCQE [(traditionally called a charged current quasi-elastic, or CCQE, interaction)]interactions. No image credit

In 2010, MiniBooNE released the first measurement of the cross section for muon-type neutrinos to elastically interact with a neutron to produce a muon and nucleons (traditionally called a charged current quasi-elastic, or CCQE, interaction) as a function of both muon energy and production angle relative to the incoming neutrino.

The new data presented here provides the world’s first look at how muon antineutrinos behave in similar reactions. Like the neutrino-based measurement of 2010, this antineutrino result also contributes to our knowledge of nuclear physics processes. Together, these measurements significantly advance the preparedness of the community to search for new physics with neutrinos.”

See the full article here. Follow the links for added information.

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 Today: “Special Result of the Week – The search for new physics in Fermilab’s Booster neutrino beamline”

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

Thursday, Aug. 16, 2012
Warren Huelsnitz

“The conventional picture of neutrinos involves three types: the electron neutrino (and antineutrino), the muon (anti)neutrino, and the tau (anti)neutrino. As they zip through matter or space, the three types, or flavors, continually morph into each other in a phenomenon called neutrino oscillation. On the rare occasions that they interact with matter, they do so through the weak nuclear force.

In this joint MiniBooNE-SciBooNE analysis, the experiments have excluded the area to the right of the 90 percent confidence level limit curve (blue) as a region where muon antineutrino disappearance may be occurring. This significantly narrows down the oscillation region for sterile neutrinos.

But there is growing evidence for short-baseline neutrino anomalies that cannot be explained by the conventional picture. These anomalies include both an excess of events observed by Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector experiment and Fermilab’s MiniBooNE experiment and a deficit of events observed by reactor and radioactive-source experiments. If these anomalies are in fact due to neutrinos changing from one flavor to another, then there must be one or more new kinds of neutrinos. These additional neutrinos may be what are called ‘sterile neutrinos’ because they do not interact by the weak nuclear force.

The MiniBooNE experiment, operating in Fermilab’s Booster neutrino beamline since 2002, can search for the appearance of electron (anti)neutrinos or the disappearance of muon (anti)neutrinos. MiniBooNE has reported on appearance signals consistent with the Los Alamos LSND experiment. If electron (anti)neutrino appearance in the Booster neutrino beamline is due to oscillations, with a sterile neutrino acting as an intermediary between electron flavor and muon flavor (anti)neutrinos, then observation of the muon (anti)neutrino disappearance would be a smoking-gun signal for the presence of these sterile neutrinos. With some back-of-the-envelope calculations, it can be shown that on the order of 10 percent of the muon (anti)neutrinos, at certain energies, should be transitioning to sterile neutrinos and hence be unobservable.”

Interested? Read on 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 Today: “Physics in a Nutshell – Coping with high luminosity”

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

Friday, July 13, 2012
Don Lincoln

“For some sorts of physics, the probability of an interaction is really, really small. This is the case with neutrino physics. Every two seconds, about ten trillion protons are extracted from the Fermilab accelerator and blasted into a target, making neutrinos. These neutrinos travel through the Earth to a distant detector, in which scientists observe a few neutrino interactions. To give a sense of scale, after about 1021 protons, the MINOS experiment has observed about 3,000 neutrinos in the far detector. In rough terms, that works out to about one observed neutrino interaction every eight to 24 hours. That’s pretty straightforward to keep track of. Increasing the beam’s intensity by a factor of ten means the time between neutrino interactions shrinks to something like an hour or so – still very easy to track. The slow rate doesn’t tax the capabilities of the equipment at all. Thus, more intensity just shortens the length of time it takes to record enough data.

This figure is a side view of the center of CERN’s CMS detector immediately after two beams passed through one another. Our best estimate is that 50 independent collisions occurred simultaneously. This figure gives an idea of the challenges that come with increasing the luminosity of our beams. No image credit.

However, not all experiments have such a low interaction probability. In the LHC, collisions are far more frantic. At design luminosity we’re talking about 20 interactions every time the beams cross. Since the beams will cross, or collide, about 40 million times a second when the machine is operating in its final configuration, we’re talking about nearly a billion interactions per second. At that rate, the detector and electronics are barely coping. Scientists have to come up with some interesting tricks.
The first trick is called a trigger…”

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.

From CERN: “CERN’s Neutrons Fly Higher”

“The construction of a second experimental area for n_TOF – CERN’s neutron source – has just been approved by the CERN Council. The new facility will provide the scientific community with a higher neutron flux, which translates into a higher sensitivity for the experiments. The new neutron beam line will open the way to a wider variety of research fields including nuclear energy applications, nuclear astrophysics, basic nuclear physics, dosimetry and radiation damage.

The 4π calorimeter inside the n_TOF experimental area. Image courtesy of the n_TOF Collaboration

The project involves building a vertical flight path roughly 20 m above the current neutron target and a new experimental hall – Experimental Area 2 (EAR-2) – in the current Building 559. EAR-2 will be located on top of the neutron production target and partially on top of the ISR building (see the image below of a model of the facility). ‘The hall will be housed in a bunker, which will be connected with the n_TOF underground facilities via a duct 60 cm in diameter,’ explains Enrico Chiaveri, spokesperson for the n_TOF collaboration. ‘Due to the expected weight of the bunker, support pillars roughly 12 m high will have to be built with their feet located on the concrete structure of the n_TOF tunnel.’”

See the full article here.

Meet CERN in a variety of places:

Cern Courier

ATLAS

ALICE

CMS

LHCb

LHC

Quantum Diaries

From Fermilab Today: “MINOS reports new measurement of neutrino velocity “

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

Friday, June 8, 2012
Leah Hesla

“Scientists from Fermilab’s MINOS experiment are reporting a new measurement of the velocity of the neutrino.

Scientists at the MINOS experiment measure neutrinos that travel 450 miles through the earth. They travel first through a detector at Fermilab and then through a second detector, pictured here, in a mine in Soudan, Minn. Photo: Fermilab

The neutrino, which is the lightest known particle, is expected to move so close to the speed of light that experiments use it as a point of comparison and expect any deviations to be extremely small.

The new MINOS measurement, presented yesterday by Fermilab’s Phil Adamson at the XXV International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto, Japan (Neutrino 2012), uses seven years of data taken by the MINOS experiment. This extends an earlier published study by MINOS using a factor of 8.5 more data.

Most importantly, the new MINOS study significantly reduces the systematic errors of its earlier work with detailed measurements of the behavior of the experiment’s GPS timing system, improved understanding of the delays of electronic components at every stage of the MINOS detectors and the use of upgraded timing equipment, designed and implemented with the assistance of the National Institute of Science and Technology and the United States Naval Observatory.”

See the full article here.

Wilson Hall

From Fermilab Today: “LBNE builds 35-ton prototype cryostat”

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

Thursday, June 7, 2012
Anne Heavey

“The Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment is moving ahead with its prototyping activities for a liquid-argon far detector.

Construction workers examine the concrete support for the 35-ton membrane cryostat for the LBNE project. Photo: Barry Norris

The LBNE far detector will require a cryostat to hold between 5,000 and 17,000 tons of liquid argon at 89 K – a significantly larger volume than any existing liquid-argon detector. The LBNE project team is currently constructing a 35-ton-capacity prototype cryostat at PPD’s PC-4 facility with the primary purpose of verifying that the high purity levels achieved last year in the Liquid Argon Purity Demonstrator, LAPD, are reproducible in a non-evacuated cryostat of the type planned for the LBNE detector.”

The LBNE Configuration at Fermilab

See the full article here.

From SLAC Today: “Underground Search for Neutrino Properties Unveils First Results”

[Work on neutrinos seems all the rage these days, witness this article from SLAC, and the previous blog post from Fermilab]

June 5, 2012
Lori Ann White

“Scientists studying neutrinos have found with the highest degree of sensitivity yet that these mysterious particles behave like other elementary particles at the quantum level. The results shed light on the mass and other properties of the neutrino and prove the effectiveness of a new instrument that will yield even greater discoveries in this area.

The Enriched Xenon Observatory 200 (EXO-200), an international collaboration led by Stanford University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, has begun one of the most sensitive searches ever for a mysterious mechanism called “neutrinoless double-beta decay,” in which two neutrinos – acting as particle and antiparticle – do not emerge from the nucleus.

The Enriched Xenon Observatory 200 (EXO-200) is a neutrino experiment housed 2,150 feet below ground in a salt basin at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). The subterranean location isolates it from cosmic rays and other sources of natural radioactivity.

If this decay were observed, it would signal that neutrinos have a different quantum structure than other elementary particles. EXO-200, which is capable of detecting decays that happen, on average, only once every 10^25 years (1 quadrillion times the age of the universe), did not observe this decay, which constitutes the strongest evidence yet that neutrinos behave like other particles.

‘The result could only have been more exciting if we’d been hit by a stroke of luck and detected neutrinoless double-beta decay, said Giorgio Gratta, a professor of physics at Stanford University and spokesperson for EXO-200. “In the region where double-beta decay was expected, the detector recorded only one event. That means the background activity is very low and the detector is very sensitive. It’s great news to say that we see nothing!’”

See the full article here.

SLAC is a multi-program laboratory exploring frontier questions in photon science, astrophysics, particle physics and accelerator research. Located in Menlo Park, California, SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the DOE’s Office of Science.

From Fermilab Today: “Fermilab experiment announces world’s best measurement of key property of neutrinos “

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

June 5, 2012
Katie Yurkewicz, Fermilab Office of Communication

“Scientists from the MINOS experiment at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have revealed the world’s most precise measurement of a key parameter that governs the transformation of one type of neutrino to another. The results confirm that neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos, have similar masses as predicted by most commonly accepted theories that explain how the subatomic world works.

The MINOS far detector is located in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota. Image: Fermilab

The new measurement is one of several announced this week by the MINOS experiment at the Neutrino 2012 conference in Kyoto, Japan. These are the final results from the first phase of the MINOS experiment.”

When operating at highest intensity, the NuMI beam line transports a package of 35,000 billion protons every two seconds to a graphite target. The target converts the protons into bursts of particles with exotic names such as kaons and pions. Like a beam of light emerging from a flashlight, the particles form a wide cone when leaving the target. A set of two special lenses, called horns (photo), is the key instrument to focus the beam and send it in the right direction. The beam particles decay and produce muon neutrinos, which travel in the same direction. Photo: Peter Ginter.

See the full article here.

[See also the following post from SLAC. Neutrinos and Neutron science appear to be all the rage these days.]

Wilson Hall