A joint Fermilab/SLAC publication

jan/feb 08

issue 01

volume 05dimensionsofparticlephysics

symmetryA joint Fermilab/SLAC publication

Office of ScienceU.S. Department of Energy

volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 08

02Editorial: symmetry’s Web expansionStarting from this issue we will publish six print issues each year instead of 10 and add a much larger range of online content. Our hope is that this will give readers new ways to respond and become active members of the symmetry community.

03Commentary: Krystle WilliamsWhat will the physics community look like 10 years from now? What should it look like? These are questions the Society of Physics Students are encouraging you to ask yourself.

04Signal to BackgroundSLAC’s rise from an ancient ocean floor; TV goes underground at Fermilab; a shirt as old as St. Francis; path-breaking bicycle; Czechs tackle Japanese opera; mysterious wine sign; engineering with toys.

C1On the coverFor decades, studies of how the eye sees—how the information gathered by light-sensitive cells in the retina is transmitted to the brain for analysis—were restricted to recordings from single neurons. The recording equipment was bulky, and the one-at-a-time approach made it hard to identify rare types of neurons with highly specialized jobs, such as detecting motion. Now, with technology bor-rowed from particle physics, scientists can record signals from hundreds of neurons at a time.

Illustration: Sandbox Studio

contents

08Short Cuts for Newcomers at the LHCIt can take weeks to get into the groove of analyzing data from an unfamiliar detector. A new starter kit cuts that time to hours.

12From Eye to SightA particle physics technology is revolutionizing the study of how we see.

18Physicists Rock!Wherever physics goes, music follows, from the lyrical strains of flute and violin to Blue Wine, Les Horribles Cernettes and Drug Sniffing Dogs.

24Gallery: Satoru YoshiokaA fine-arts photographer turns his lens on high-energy physics labs, capturing everyday work spaces, obscure details and spooky nightscapes.

28Day in the Life: Monica Dunford “Did we really have 5063 meetings last year?”

30Essay: Jennifer OuellettePerhaps the humor in the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory raises some hackles because–like all good comedy–it contains an element of truth.

C3Logbook: W BosonIn August 1982, Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister of the United Kingdom, paid a private visit to the European laboratory CERN. Four months later, CERN Director General Herwig Schopper sent her a letter disclosing “in strict confidence” the news of the imminent discovery of the weak bosons.

C4Explain it in 60 SecondsThe W boson is one of five particles that transmit the fundamental forces of nature. It is responsible for two of the most surprising discoveries of the 20th century—that nature has a “handedness” and that the physics of antimatter is subtly different from the physics of the matter-based world we see around us.

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symmetry’s Web expansionWith 30 issues behind us, this issue of symmetry launches the next phase of the magazine’s development. Our readers now use the magazine in different ways, and we are reaching a much larger audience. While you are outspoken in wanting to keep the print magazine, many of you are now more comfortable reading online.

Starting from this issue, we will publish six print issues each year instead of 10 and add a much larger range of online content. We have completely redesigned our Web site to accommodate this expansion. Our hope is that this will give readers new ways to respond and become active members of the symmetry community.

We still plan to cover the same kinds of topics in the magazine, but will be adding online resources we think readers will find useful, including backgrounders and fact sheets on many topics.

Online, we will be posting new content on a regular basis, a few times per week at least. A symmetry blog will have the latest stories and discussions on topics ranging from research and news to policy and analysis. Of course, there will still be plenty of the fun stories that are a hallmark of the magazine.

Bubbling away in the background, we already have a symmetry Facebook group and YouTube channel and expect to see them become more active in coming months. We will be soliciting science videos and photographs for contests, and looking for other materials from the very creative minds of our readers that deserve a wider audience. As always, if you would like to see us address a particular topic or have ideas you think will appeal to fellow readers, please let us know.

This next phase of symmetry is very exciting for our team, and we hope you will all join in.

David Harris, Editor-in-chief

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from the editor

SymmetryPO Box 500MS 206Batavia Illinois 60510USA

630 840 3351 telephone630 840 8780 faxwww.symmetrymagazine.orgmail@symmetrymagazine.org

(c) 2008 symmetry All rights reserved

symmetry (ISSN 1931-8367) is published six times per year by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, funded by the US Department of Energy Office of Science.

Editor-in-ChiefDavid Harris650 926 8580

Deputy EditorGlennda Chui

Managing EditorKurt Riesselmann

Senior EditorTona Kunz

Staff WritersElizabeth ClementsHeather Rock Woods Kelen Tuttle Rhianna Wisniewski

Copy Editor Melinda Lee

InternsHaley BridgerLizzie BuchenAmber Dance

PublisherJudy Jackson, FNAL

Contributing EditorsRoberta Antolini, LNGSPeter Barratt, STFC Romeo Bassoli, INFNStefano Bianco, LNFKandice Carter, JLabSuraiya Farukhi, ANLJames Gillies, CERNSilvia Giromini, LNFYouhei Morita, KEKMarcello Pavan, TRIUMFPerrine Royole-Degieux, IN2P3 Yuri Ryabov, IHEP ProtvinoYves Sacquin, CEA-SaclayKendra Snyder, BNLBoris Starchenko, JINRMaury Tigner, LEPP Ute Wilhelmsen, DESYTongzhou Xu, IHEP BeijingLynn Yarris, LBNLGabby Zegers, NIKHEF

Print Design and ProductionSandbox StudioChicago, Illinois

Art Director/DesignerMichael Branigan

IllustratorAaron Grant

Web Design and ProductionXeno MediaHinsdale, Illinois

Web ArchitectKevin Munday

Web DesignKaren Acklin Alex Tarasiewicz

Web ProgrammerMike Acklin

Photographic Services Fermilab Visual Media Servicessymmetry

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Putting a new face on physicsWhat will the physics community look like 10 years from now? What should it look like? With the adoption of the theme “Future

Faces of Physics,” these are the questions the Society of Physics Students (SPS) is encouraging you to ask yourself.

In the recent report Beyond Bias and Barriers, the National Academies noted that “to maintain its scientific and engineering leadership amid increasing economic and educational globalization, the United States must aggressively pursue the innovative capacity of all of its people—women and men…It is essential that our academic institu-tions promote the educational and professional success of all people without regard for sex, race, or ethnicity.” The report also stressed the need for professional scientific societies to take a leading role in addressing issues of diversity.

SPS has recognized diversity as an issue of importance for some time now. For three years we have discussed issues relating to diversity at the SPS National Council meeting. In 2007–08, the National Council is calling on students and leaders of the physics community to discuss and act on a wide range of student diversity issues, such as making physics communities more wel-coming and encouraging widespread discourse.

Physics suffers from a unique set of diversity issues. You’ve probably heard the statistics—although women account for more than 60 per-cent of all bachelor’s degrees granted, they receive only 20 percent of bachelor’s degrees in physics. Students from underrepresented minori-ties receive only 12 percent of physics bachelor’s degrees. Students from low-income families and students with disabilities rarely earn degrees in physics. These percentages decline further with each step up the academic ladder.

Why is this? And what can you do to help?One reason is cited in a September 2003

Physics Today article titled “What Works for Women in Undergraduate Physics?” It describes a “leaky pipeline” caused by lack of an inclusive culture in university physics departments, among other things.

SPS has started a grassroots effort to alleviate this disparity. Most of our members are under-graduates, at a stage when the majority of students who studied physics in high school opt out of the field. We are especially equipped to focus on this issue, since local SPS chapters are usually

where physics students make initial contact with the broader physics community. Studies have also shown that community outreach and mentor relationships are important for encouraging the participation of underrepresented groups in sci-ence, and both are primary activities for local SPS chapters.

SPS is engaged in a “Year of Dialogue on Student Diversity in Physics,” and we intend to spark these conversations through workshops at every SPS Zone Meeting in 2008. More than a dozen zone meetings are held each year, often in conjunction with sectional meetings of the American Association of Physics Teachers and the American Physical Society. This allows us to engage both students and professionals in this essential dialogue.

One of the supporting materials SPS created for the workshops is “Jeo-party,” a quiz modeled after the TV game show Jeopardy with questions ranging from basic problems in physics to the field’s history, diversity, and place in pop culture. One example:

This iconic physicist was engaged in many civil rights activities and co-chaired the American crusade to end lynching.

Think you know the answer—or, rather, the question? “Who is Albert Einstein?” is always a good answer when asked about an historic physics figure, and in this case it is right!

We anticipate that participants will take the game and their ideas back to their local commu-nities so the diversity discussion can continue. Students will have a chance to share their diver-sity efforts at a poster session and event during the Sigma Pi Sigma Quadrennial Congress in November 2008 at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. This is a very exciting year for SPS. It is our hope that we will truly engage the physics community in a significant exchange of ideas.

I’ll leave you with one more answer from Jeo-party:

The guitarist from this legendary band recently received his PhD in astrophysics.

Don’t know the question? You’ll just have to attend a “Future Faces of Physics” workshop to find out!

Krystle Williams is a second-year graduate student in the bio-physics program at the University of Rochester. She has served on the Society of Physics Students National Council for three years.

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commentary: krystle williams

SLAC's rocky pastForty members of the Society for Sedimentary Geology drove down Loop Road, passed through the Sector 30 gate, and arrived on the north side of the klystron gallery. Stretching before them, the earthen walls of the accelerator trench cut an enticing swath through the foothills, holding the secrets to a story that began more than 55 million years ago.

Led by geologists Susan Witebsky of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Ken Ehman of Chevron, the group of students, academic researchers, and professional geologists explored the high-lights of the lab’s tectonically turbulent past.

SLAC’s campus rests on a two-mile-thick bed of marine sedimentary rock, a rigid reminder of the waters that cov-ered the land until just recently.

The tectonic plate that bears SLAC was once the deep ocean floor, which gradually rose until it broke through the water’s sur-face a mere one million to two million years ago. Each period of this dynamic history left its mark in the earth, depositing minerals and fossilized creatures.

At the start of its October tour, the group heard the tale of Paleoparadoxia, a hippo-like beast whose fossils were dis-covered, excavated, and recon-structed by Adele Panofsky, the diligent and passionate wife of SLAC’s founder. At the west end of the two-mile-long linear accelerator, they examined a large mass of land which had, some millions of years ago, been drastically inverted through faulting and folding. A few hundred meters to the south, they studied 165-million-year-old rocks encrusted with fossilized algae barely 40 million

years of age. This finding revealed a tremendous defor-mation of the Earth’s surface, which saw rocks 15 kilometers below ground abruptly thrust to the shallow ocean floor.

Certain curiosities, however, remain open questions, such as a glaring 20-million-year gap in deposits, and maverick blocks of sandstone in the otherwise-uniform mudstone matrix at Sector 11.

Although Witebsky has been at SLAC for more than 10 years, the rocks continue to excite and intrigue her. “Our primary job is environmental restoration and evaluating the ground water quality,” she says of the SLAC resident geologists. “But every time there’s an excavation, like for the Linac Coherent Light Source, we get to come along and see what’s revealed. That’s the real treat.”Lizzie Buchen

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signal to background

SLAC’s rise from an ancient ocean floor; TV goes underground at Fermilab;

a shirt as old as St. Francis; path-breaking bicycle; Czechs tackle Japanese opera;

mysterious wine sign; engineering with toys.

Notes from the underworldThey had braved Parisian cata-combs, gloomy dungeons, and shipwrecks. Yet as the elevator dropped 360 feet into a cavern-ous hall at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, uncer-tainty flickered across the faces of the globe-trotting tele-vision crew.

Cities of the Underworld host Don Wildman and his crew had come with the intention of peel-ing back the layers of the lab as if peeling an onion. Beginning hundreds of feet below ground and working their way to the top of Wilson Hall, the group docu-mented the Tevatron collider, the deep tunnels of the NuMI and MINOS neutrino experiments, and the science that goes on there. The September 2007 film-ing took two days.

“It turned out great,” says Chris Bray, a producer for Authentic Entertainment. “We were worried about the explanation of such abstract and complicated sci-ence, but when we showed peo-ple an early version, we found that they loved neutrinos.” Although the Fermilab segment is brief, he adds, “This really is the star of the Chicago show.”

Each episode of the hit History Channel series focuses on the tunnels, tombs, and sub-terranean hideouts beneath the foundations of today’s modern cities. The show has explored the dungeons of Scottish cas-tles, the underground infrastruc-ture of Rome, and the caves beneath Budapest.

While most episodes give viewers glimpses of past achievements, Fermilab’s tun-nels offered a look at science working to shape the future.

“It appeals to a wide audience. People are fascinated by look-ing at all different aspects of what goes on in the world,” says Mike Andrews, safety coordina-tor for NuMI/MINOS.

The initial airing of the epi-sode was scheduled for mid-March; see the series’ Web page for listings.Rhianna Wisniewski

Dating a saintTwo towns in Italy lay claim to relics from St. Francis of Assisi—pieces of clothing and an embroidered cushion from his deathbed.

But one of those relics can-not be authentic because it was manufactured decades after the saint’s death in 1226, according to physicists who tested them in May.

Contrary to popular fiction, particle accelerators can’t take people back in time. But they can provide time stamps for clothing, books, and other ancient items that contain carbon.

Scientists at Italy’s Laboratory of Nuclear Techniques for Cultural Heritage in Florence examined three relics tied to St. Francis, an aristocrat who took a vow of poverty, founded the Franciscan Order, and became the Roman Catholic patron saint of animals.

Examinations conducted at the lab found that a tunic and embroidered cushion housed in the Church of St. Francis in Cortona dated from the time when the saint was alive.

However, another tunic from the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence was made decades later.

The method the researchers used, known as accelerator mass spectrometry, requires much smaller samples than other forms of radiocarbon dat-ing. This allowed the scientists to take five to seven samples of woolen fabric from the tunics, each smaller than one square centimeter; the more samples tested, the more accurate the results would be.

The swatches were treated to extract small pellets of graphite, a form of carbon. These pellets were exposed to cesium ions in an accelerator, releasing carbon isotopes that are counted by a detector. By measuring the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12—a delicate undertaking, since there is only one carbon 14 for roughly a tril-lion carbon 12s—the research-ers determined the age of the fabric and discounted Florence’s claim to holding this particular piece of history.Tona Kunz

Tunic from Cortona

Tunic from Florence

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Biking the snow awayAfter seeing a documentary on Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 Antarctic expedition, in which men ate shoe leather to survive in bone-chilling temperatures, David Peterson felt kind of silly about letting snow stop his bicycle ride to work.

“There was no excuse,” he says. “I’ve never had to eat my bicycle.”

So he built a bicycle snow plow.

On the snowiest days, a half-dozen bicycle commuters form a line behind Peterson and his plow as he clears a path to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, where he works as an engineer in the antiproton source department.

“They all ride behind me shouting words of encourage-ment,” he says. “Sometimes they take turns on the plow if it’s really deep or if I look particularly sad, pedaling.”

After experimenting with sev-eral different styles of blades and attachments, Peterson set-tled on two basic methods. For snow more than seven inches deep, he designed a “drift cutter” that can be pushed while walk-ing. In shallower snow he pulls a 70-degree angled wedge plow behind his bicycle; it clears a swath about 18 inches wide. When not in use, the plow pivots on a hitch and hangs over the back tire, inches above the ground.

Peterson gets thank-you e-mails, and occasionally requests for new routes, from walkers, runners, and other bicyclists. In the five years since he started plowing, he says, others have started to pitch in with shovels, snow blowers, and plows hooked up to all-terrain vehicles, although he knows of only one other bike plow like his. “It’s like some kind of underground insur-gency of snow clearing,” he says happily.

Asked if he would ever pat-ent his bike plow, Peterson says no: “I look at it in the same vein as open access publishing. I benefit from things other people put up on the Web, so why should I charge them to look at my plow?”

See symmetrymag.org/plow/ for more details.Tona Kunz

Czech kimono challengeTokio Ohska had an opera to direct.

As always, there were light-ing, scenery, and music issues to contend with. But finding costumes to fit a cast of Europeans? That was a new challenge.

Ohska is a physicist. As the head of research services at KEK, the Japanese particle physics lab in Tsukuba, he tends to the needs of foreign scientists and has a knack for making cultures click. But he’s also a former professional singer with a background in Japanese opera.

So when a Czech theater company needed a stage director for the first Japanese opera to be sung in Japanese by a European cast, Ohska seemed a natural choice.

Jan Snitil, conductor of the Silesian Theater in Opava, had decided to celebrate the the-ater’s 200th anniversary with a performance from his wife’s home country.

“The problem was that the

body sizes of Czech singers are much larger than those of the Japanese,” Ohska said.

He enlisted a friend to help scour Japanese antique stores for the largest kimonos they could find to match the 200-year-old setting of Yuzuru, roughly translated as “the crane at dusk.”

“Fortunately, the singers and the conductor are extremely talented, nice people,” Ohska says. “They worked with me with a lot of patience and gave me helpful suggestions.”

On opening night in October 2007, Ohska sat in the front row, almost holding his breath. As the performance ended he made his way to the stage, expecting polite applause. “But every time I would go to walk off, the curtain would rise again,” he says, for a total of 10 thunder-ing ovations: “I was so relieved.”

The opera sparked an encore in the form of an ongoing cul-tural exchange. Opava has since hosted a Japanese culture week; and in 2009, the Czech opera Dalibor is scheduled for its first performance in Japan.Tona Kunz

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signal to background

Chateau Neuf du PEPNo one is able to claim credit for the ancient wooden sign that hangs on the porch of the old Positron Electron Project buildings at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

The sign, proclaiming the area “Chateau Neuf du PEP,” is a play on the wine they used to drink there. Châteauneuf du Pape is a wine appellation in southern France, named for Pope John XXII’s 14th century summer “new home.”

“Those were quite different days,” says Perry Wilson, a senior scientist on PEP at the time. During the ’70s, when the sign went up, PEP collaborators would gather every Friday for refreshments, music, and danc-ing. Wilson played the gutbucket, a homemade bass. Châteauneuf du Pape, a thick, powerful red wine, was a favorite libation.

Perhaps all that wine addled their memories. Regarding the sign, Wilson points a finger at Francophile John Rees. But Rees, who was director of PEP, denies responsibility. Phil Morton, who was part of PEP’s design team, said, “It sounds like something I might have done. I’d like to take credit for it but, I just don’t know.”

The wine no longer flows, but the well-weathered sign remains, an anonymous monu-ment to the tastes and humor of the old PEP gang.Amber Dance

Caterpillar crawls to a high-energy rescueRyan Schultz and Kris Anderson had a problem: how to inspect a window in a pipe that carries a powerful particle beam, 40 feet below ground and 100 feet down a narrow tunnel.

Their solution: a 15-foot-long contraption that combines a digital camera, a toy Caterpillar excavator, and a scaled-up version of the periscope children use to peer over the backs of sofas. It cost just $200, not bad for a tool that is key to the well-being of a multi-million-dollar experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.

Directed via a 100-foot remote control cord, the bright yellow excavator rolled into the tunnel, bathed the window in LED light and trained a spotting telescope on it. Watching through a periscope inserted into an access shaft, inspectors on the surface snapped pictures.

The photos came out per-fect, and a video of the inspec-tion kept Schultz’s 5-year-old son entertained for days.

“He wanted RIC to go with his other toy cars,” Schultz says. As for RIC, or Remote Illumination Caterpillar, “he’s like a person,” Schultz says. “He had his own

identity. There’s nothing compli-cated about him. He just does his job.”

The window is in a decay pipe linking Fermilab’s Main Injector with NuMI, an experi-ment that shoots a beam of neu-trinos through the ground to a detector in Minnesota. It must be periodically inspected for corro-sion and other wear and tear.

But since the pipe is encased in concrete, wireless devices won’t work, and the low level of radiation in the tunnel fogs photos taken down there.

So Schultz and his supervi-sor, engineer Kris Anderson, drew on a deep well of experi-ence: hours spent driving remote-controlled cars with their kids.

Meanwhile, senior technician Keith Anderson knew from his days working on US Army tanks that he could devise a periscope to look into the tunnel. “It is mostly modeled after the children’s milk-bottle periscope, a box with two mirrors on it,” he says.

In the end, Schultz jokes, one of the most difficult parts of the project was getting reimbursed: “Think about it. I submitted a receipt that says Toys ‘R’ Us.”Tona Kunz

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It can take weeks to get into the groove of analyzing data from an unfamiliar detector. With a new starter kit, physicists at the Compact Muon Solenoid can cut that time to hours.

Photo-illustrations: Sandbox Studio

Postdoctoral researchers like Brown University’s Selda Esen can use the CMS Starter Kit to get a jump-start on their analyses.

Photos of Selda Esen: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab

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By Elizabeth Clements

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When Sal Rappoccio, a postdoctoral researcher from Johns Hopkins University, joined the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment in mid-2007, he did what any newcomer would do. He tried to start his analysis.

It did not go well. “Each group had its own computing tools,” says

Rappoccio. “It was daunting for someone unfa-miliar with the software. It took a few weeks just to get something working.”

Such rough beginnings are not unique to the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS, one of two giant experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland.

Graduate students learn physics in the class-room. When they join an experiment and try to start analyzing data, however, they find themselves in a world of chaos. The early stages of any experiment can be especially overwhelming.

“Nothing works when a new experiment starts, and you need help,” says Boaz Klima, a physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and member of the US CMS collaboration.

The solution used to be simple: Go down the hall, offer to buy a colleague a cup of coffee, and ask for help. That approach worked well for Rappoccio when he was a Harvard University graduate student on the CDF experiment at Fermilab.

Buying coffee for an experimenter on CMS, however, is not so simple. Coffee is still a valuable commodity, but CMS involves more than 2500 people from all over the world. In fact, many CMS collaborators will work from their home institu-tions and not actually live at CERN, the European particle physics center where the Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to start up this year.

Recognizing that a basic and consistent instruction manual might be useful, Fermilab’s LHC Physics Center worked with other CMS collaborators to develop a set of user-friendly computing tools, or “starter kit.”

Essentially a tool box for physicists, the CMS starter kit provides researchers with a set of simple examples that lets them get started on their analyses right away. “The learning curve is so steep in a large experiment like CMS,” says Dan Green, co-coordinator of the LHC Physics Center. “We felt we had to do better, because speed is essential at a discovery machine.” The idea is to allow a user to create a graphic repre-sentation, or plot, of a particle collision in a matter of hours, rather than weeks.

“The main goal is to reduce frustration,” says Rappoccio. “The starter kit makes things simple so that newcomers can get reasonable results right away. It’s for someone who is familiar with physics but not familiar with CMS.”

In Fermilab’s Remote Operations Center from left: Liz Sexton-Kennedy, Sal Rappoccio and Eric Vaandering represent a few members of the CMS Starter Kit Team. Photo: Reider Hahn, Fermilab

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When the LHC starts up, data will pour in from up to 40 million particle collisions that occur each second in the CMS detector. A trigger sys-tem, which acts as a sort of spam filter, selects only the most interesting collisions, roughly 100 per second, for further study. Even so, what’s left is an overwhelming amount of data. Giant computer farms store this data, and physicists later reassemble it into a form the human brain can grasp and analyze. Piecing the collisions together requires complex software with thousands of lines of code. To discover anything new, physi-cists must be able to speak a common language—a computing language.

That is where the starter kit comes in. “If you don’t have a simple way of getting people

on the road, you lose them,” says Klima, who co-leads the LPC Physics Forum, a weekly seminar for young CMS scientists.

Although the starter kit started as a US endeavor, it didn’t take long for all of CMS to embrace the idea and make it an official project. In fact, a Physics Analysis Tools group already existed for CMS, and the starter kit project fit right into its charge. The collaboration appointed a starter kit team, including Steven Lowette from the University of California, Santa Barbara; Elizabeth Sexton-Kennedy and Eric Vaandering from Fermilab; and Petar Maksimovic and Rappoccio from Johns Hopkins. Other CMS col-laborators helped, too. “A lot of tools already existed,” Rappoccio says. “It was just a question of putting things together in a user-friendly way.”

The starter kit consists of a number of “build-ing blocks” that recognize specific particles—for instance, muons or electrons—coming out of collisions. Like templates for a Web page, they allow the user to plug in information and gener-ate immediate results. Later, researchers can customize the computer code to suit their needs. Each building block comes with the collabora-tion’s guarantee that it will work.

After testing the new tools on a few fellow physicists, the team launched Starter Kit 1.0 at a CMS tutorial workshop for graduate students and postdocs in January. For now, physicists are using the kit to analyze simulated data.

The early reviews are positive.Malina Kirn, a graduate student at the University

of Maryland, says she likes the kit because it’s a great way to start an analysis and “not worry about mistakes.”

Kevin Flood, a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, describes the starter kit as satisfaction guaranteed: “It gives you a real sense of accomplishment.”

The starter kit builds on a tradition of preparing people to dive into an experiment. At Fermilab, for example, the CDF and DZero collaborations held tutorials for newcomers. Klima recalls

recording DZero tutorials on videotape in the early 1990s; some institutions even bought copies of the tapes for their users.

ATLAS, the other gigantic detector at the Large Hadron Collider, also has a set of analysis tools to get members started. Based on a handbook from the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the ATLAS workbook introduces experimenters to the detector’s soft-ware and describes basic analysis steps. Last year, ATLAS started another workbook dedicated solely to physics analysis.

CMS also has a workbook, modeled on tools that ATLAS developed. Since both ATLAS and CMS have many members who used to work on BaBar, it’s natural for them to have similar soft-ware tools.

Although the CMS team based parts of its starter kit on the workbook, they say it’s fundamen-tally different because it was designed with the user in mind. And while they originally developed the kit for newcomers, it’s intended to become a repository of CMS-certified code that’s useful to anyone. A newcomer starts with the building blocks; a more experienced experimenter can use the starter kit to test more complicated sce-narios. “If you have an idea, you don’t want it to be months later before you find out if it works,’’ Rappoccio says.

Now that the starter kit is launched, the team serves as the starter kit help desk. In addition to providing user support, they are adding more sophisticated physics tools for expert users. In fact, Kirn, who helped test-drive the kit, is already working on a more advanced set of tools.

With the ever-evolving starter kit providing a common language, physicists will be able to jump into the analysis of their mountains of data right away, leading to quicker scientific results and, ultimately, a faster pace of discovery.

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As a particle physicist, Alan Litke routinely measures tiny signals with equally tiny elec-tronics. Now he’s apply-ing those methods to individual nerve cells, revolutionizing the study of how we see.By Lizzie Buchen

Seeing is easy. We open our eyes, and there the world is—in starlight or sunlight, still or in motion, as far as the Pleiades or as close as the tips of our noses. The experience of vision is so common and effortless that we rarely pause to consider what an astounding feat it is: Every time our eyes open, they encode our surroundings as a pattern of electrical signals, which the brain translates into our moving, colorful, three-dimensional perception of the world.

This everyday miracle has attracted the devotion and expertise of an unlikely individual—Alan Litke, an experimental particle physicist based at the University of California, Santa Cruz. When not in Geneva, Switzerland, where he is working on the ATLAS particle detector for the Large Hadron Collider, Litke is working with neuro-scientists and engineers, adapting the technology of high-energy physics to study the visual system.

The central challenge is to understand the language the eye uses to send information to the brain. Light reflected from our surroundings enters our eyes through the transparent window of the cornea and is focused by the lens, form-ing an image on the retina. The retina of each eye contains about 125 million light-sensitive rods and cones, which translate light into electrical and chemical signals. These signals travel to the visual centers of the brain through a million retinal ganglion cells, or RGCs.

The retina thus encodes the activity of 125 million cells in the signals of one million output cells, which deliver the brain a highly compressed neural code from which our entire visual experi-ence is derived. Litke wants to understand how this neural network processes information from our surroundings and portrays it to the brain.

Coming from a particle physics background presented many challenges for Litke. Not only would he need to adapt particle detector tech-nology for the messier, wet world of living tissue, but he would also need to win over skeptical biologists and funding agencies. He was proposing a whole new way of doing research in neurosci-ence, one that promised a vast leap forward in what could be measured and analyzed.

Litke’s interest in neuroscience began with his daughter’s wobbly first steps. At the time, he was developing the first silicon microstrip detector systems for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center’s MARK II experiment. These systems consist of many very narrow detecting strips, fabricated on a thin silicon wafer, which record the passage of subatomic particles; when read out with specially-designed integrated circuits, they can deliver their vast amount of data over just one line, instead of a nest of wiring. The goal of the project was to detect the charged parti-cles produced in Z boson decays with unprece-dented spatial resolution, but the real object of his fascination was the technology itself. “It

was marvelous,” he recalls. “I really loved that technology.”

As he watched his daughter teeter along, he marveled at how her developing brain adapted to the novel, bipedal world. “I had started reading a little about artificial intelligence, and I thought, ‘This can’t be how the brain works!’ I couldn’t imagine my beautiful daughter learning to walk if her brain was a set of if/then statements, purely logical. It’s much more magnificent and beautiful than that.” He adds, “I didn’t know much about the brain, but I knew that if you wanted to understand it, you need to get in there and really see the circuitry. I kept thinking about this incredible technology we were working with, and I wanted to come up with a way to use it for the brain.”

Litke appealed to his group at SLAC, trying to lure them into his neurobiology vision, but there were no immediate takers.

Meanwhile, Markus Meister, a postdoc in Dennis Baylor’s neurobiology lab at Stanford University, was leading groundbreaking experi-ments on the retina.

An appealing slice of tissueThe retina appeals to scientists studying neural circuitry for a number of reasons: All the input neurons—the rods and cones—are known, as are a number of its output neurons, the retinal gan-glion cells. The input signals can be easily con-trolled just by shining light on the retina. And the output signals can be easily monitored, in principle, by recording the electrical activity of the RGCs with electrodes. Further, what scientists learn from studying the retina can be applied to understand-ing the function of any neural circuit—a central goal of neuroscience.

For decades, studies of neural function in the retina and brain were restricted to recordings from single neurons. It was presumed that these measurements could be pieced together to decipher the functions of complex circuits, but Meister wasn’t convinced; he believed it would be necessary to record from many neurons simultaneously.

Meister had already started working with a 61-electrode array, originally developed by Jerry Pine, formerly a particle physicist at SLAC. But he needed more help. As luck would have it, Meister’s neighbor was a postdoc in Litke’s lab and arranged an introduction.

“It seemed to me like a wonderful project,” Litke recalls. “To a physicist, the retina is like a particle detector. It’s an advanced pixel detector that detects light, and converts it to an electrical sig-nal. I knew the only way to figure it out was to record from live retinal tissue.” As Meister devel-oped the methods for monitoring the simultaneous electrical activity of many neurons, Litke volun-teered to contribute in any way he could. He

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started to help with the electrode array fabrication, and published a paper with Meister in 1991.

The technique involves placing a slice of retinal tissue on top of the array in a chamber filled with a special solution that can keep the tissue alive for several hours. Images are then focused on the retina’s photoreceptors while the electrodes monitor the responses of the retinal neurons. At the time, an array with 61 electrodes was rev-olutionary and, today, is still considered state of the art. But Litke had higher aspirations.

“In physics, when you design a new instrument, like a new accelerator, you want to go up by a factor of 10 in energy, in resolution, whatever it is,” he says. “So, not really knowing what the scale was for interesting neurobiology, I thought, ‘We get tens of neurons now; let’s go up to the hundreds.’ A factor of 10 seemed like an inter-esting step, and it seemed more appropriate for the level of information the retina was feeding to the brain.”

But Litke’s vision wasn’t embraced by his collaborators. “They were still learning to graduate from one to 10, so more would be a big leap, and I couldn’t convince them it was worth doing,” he says. “Without the support of the biologists, we couldn’t get funding.”

Litke then moved to Geneva to devote himself to high-energy physics, visiting California only occasionally to lobby for the next-generation reti-nal measurement device. He had all but given

up when he received a call from Bob Eisenstein, head of the physics division of the National Science Foundation. “I assumed he called to talk about physics,” Litke says, “but it turned out he wanted to talk about neurobiology.”

Cultures collideEisenstein had been trying to push biological physics within the NSF and had heard about Litke’s work with Meister. As Litke recalls, “He had a call for proposals but didn’t receive anything interesting, so he wanted to hear more about my work. I took the proposal very seriously, and faster than any proposal I’ve ever submitted, it was approved.”

Finally, Litke had the financial resources and encouragement to pursue neuroscience once again. He returned to his original goal of develop-ing arrays of electrodes that would record from hundreds of neurons simultaneously. “To biolo-gists, using this many electrodes to record from live animals was inconceivable—they didn’t see how it was technically possible,” Litke says. “But to me, we were doing this daily at CERN!”

Litke assembled a team from the high-energy physics community. His first ally was Wladyslaw Dabrowski, a physicist and integrated circuit designer from the AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow who had been working on read-out chips for ATLAS. To begin, the team made prototype 61-electrode array systems that were

Rods and Cones

Horizontal Cells

Bipolar Cells

Amacrine Cells

Ganglion Cells

Platinum Black

Silicon Nitride

Indium Tin Oxide

Glass

Optic Nerve

Computer-generated pattern

Microscope Lens

Chamber

Live Retinal Tissue

Electrode ArrayGlass Substrate

Physiological Saline Solution

A computer-generated pattern of light is focused on the retina. The electrode array below senses the retina's response so scientists can understand the conversion of light to electrical signals. Image courtesy of Alan Litke

The retina (in cross section here) absorbs light in the rod and cone cells at the top and converts them to electrical signals through a series of cell layers. The slice of retina sits directly on the electrode array, which is mounted on a glass base.Image courtesy of Alan Litke

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smaller, denser, and more advanced than the ones Meister had been working with. The goal was to eventually develop an array with 512 electrodes.

But when Litke asked about more funding from the National Institutes of Health, he was strongly discouraged. “Basically, the program manager said I wasn’t really doing anything, just building equipment,” Litke says. “They wanted a hypothesis. They didn’t want instrumentation.”

Litke was shocked. In the world of physics, technology development is recognized as vital for new discoveries. But the life sciences are more hesitant about exploring something completely unknown, and thus a well-founded hypothesis is required. “I couldn’t believe it. This technology would take neurophysiology to another realm!” Litke says. “It would answer questions that cannot be addressed by current technology. It’s an incred-ible story to me as a physicist.”

At the time, Litke was working full-time on the ALEPH experiment at CERN, while spending nights and weekends working on his neuroscience arrays. He continued making trips to Stanford to talk with Baylor and his postdocs, who were work-ing with Meister’s 61-electrode array.

Although most of the postdocs were unwilling to advance past 61 electrodes—the technology’s possibilities had certainly not been exhausted—one, E.J. Chichilnisky, was captivated. Eventually, Baylor also became convinced, and wrote an influential letter of support to the NSF, generating further funds for Litke’s project.

“Most people weren’t interested because they didn’t see the point,” Chichilnisky says. “We didn’t have enough information from our 61-electrode arrays to know whether it was worthwhile to go to another level. It was risky.” Yet Chichilnisky was excited about the project, and confident of its significance: “The truth of the matter is I don’t know why. It was a gut feeling.”

A groundbreaking leapWhen Chichilnisky took a faculty position at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, in 1998, he began collaborating with Litke, using the prototype 61-electrode version of a new, more advanced array to help evaluate the function of live retinal tissue.

“These chips were completely different than the original 61-electrode arrays that Meister was using,” Litke says. “We completely redesigned everything. We needed it to be high-density, with many interconnected channels. Everything was inspired by silicon microstrips.” The geometry was different, but the concepts were all direct from the Mark II Silicon Strip Vertex Detector.

The first 512-electrode array went into use in 2003.

Litke says, “When biologists saw this, they were flabbergasted. When they think of 512 elec-trodes, they think of 512 cables coming out, a

big amplifier, a room filled with electronics. When they saw this tiny array—hundreds of electrodes, all squeezed into 1.7 square millimeters on a small printed circuit board, and one little cable—they were really excited.”

Chichilnisky says the unique technology has revolutionized his work, allowing his lab to exam-ine, with unprecedented power and resolution, how patterns of RGC activity interpret the visual world for the brain. While focusing on specific aspects of visual perception, such as motion and color, he is also developing models that would allow one to predict and reproduce RGC activity from the visual stimulus alone, an accomplish-ment that could contribute to the development of prosthetic devices for the visually impaired.

For Chichilnisky, the ability to monitor the activity of hundreds of RGCs simultaneously was initially the biggest draw. But in 2007 a new reason emerged, leading to the group’s biggest discovery yet.

Among the one million RGCs “there are some-thing like 20 different types of ganglion cells,” Chichilnisky explains, “each of which is distinct and conveys different types of information. But less than half have really been studied, because they’re so rare you can’t detect them with traditional tech-niques.” The various types of cells form parallel visual pathways that communicate contours, movement in specific directions, and colors as separate images for the brain to piece together. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the information the brain receives, it is vital to under-stand what each of the 20 types does.

A 61-electrode array doesn’t have enough cov-erage to do that. However, with a 512-electrode array, the researchers could distinguish each type of cell and its function, Chichilnisky says: “You get a completely new level of clarity about all the visual signals.”

This clarity led to a groundbreaking finding that established the value of Litke’s device as a tool in neurobiology. In a paper published in October 2007 with Dumitru Petrusca—a physics student who had developed software for ATLAS—as the lead author, Litke, Chichilnisky, and their team reported the discovery of a new class of RGCs in the primate retina, thought to help primates detect motion. They named it the “upsilon” cell. “They’ve been searching for it in primates for over 40 years,” Litke says. “It’s such a small frac-tion of all the ganglion cells, so it was impossible to confidently detect with single- or even 61-electrode techniques. But when we recorded with this array, we’d get five to 10 upsilon cells, so we knew it wasn’t an artifact.”

Pushing the limitsWhen Litke and Petrusca started to write the paper, they encountered another major difference between physics and neuroscience. “I was hoping

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In the center of this chip, an array of 512 electrodes no bigger than the head of a pin records signals from neurons that transmit information from the retina.

Photo courtesy of Alan Litke

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I could just write about our methods and present the data,” Litke says. That’s how it works in phys-ics—there are so many new devices and tech-niques that researchers typically just reference the most recent and most relevant. But in neurosci-ence, the publishing culture requires references going back nearly a century at times. He also had to get used to sensitivities involving the order in which authors are listed on a paper. The average neuroscience paper typically has fewer than six authors, Litke says, and the order matters when people are trying to get jobs. In high-energy physics, on the other hand, collaborations of several hundred simply use alphabetical order.

Authorship of papers is not the only difference between particle physics and neuroscience cul-ture. Litke’s experience with the highly collabora-tive nature of particle physics has influenced his neuroscience labs. “He changed the atmosphere here,” says Jeff Gauthier, a graduate student in Chichilnisky’s lab. “In most neuroscience labs, everyone is working on their own project and is very independent from one another. But the experiments with Alan’s array will only really work if everyone in the lab helps each other out. We have our own projects, but in order to maxi-mize the use of the technology and the animal tissue, we all work on each others’ projects, too.”

Encouraged by progress in Chichilnisky’s lab, Litke decided to expand his neuroscience work at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he was still working full-time on ATLAS. But it continued to be a struggle: “We didn’t have a lab, we didn’t have animals to work with, and even getting a postdoc to work on the project was a challenge, because the work was so risky. You come from a field where you know a lot, and

enter one in which you know virtually nothing.” Litke was eventually able to convince high- energy physicist Alexander Sher to join his neu-roscience crusade as a postdoc. “We talked about whether it would be better to continue in high-energy physics and work with ATLAS,” Sher says. “But with neuroscience, I’d be part of a small team, doing groundbreaking work. I really got into the biology.”

The reach of Litke’s technology now goes beyond the retina. He has ongoing or proposed projects to study the brain activity of naturally behaving barn owls and rats to try to understand the connections between their behaviors and their neural activities. Nevertheless, he is still frustrated by funding issues. “With neuroscience proposals, you have to start out by saying how your research is going to help autism or Alzheimer’s disease and such,” Litke says. “I can't just talk about how won-derful the technology is, and all the potential it holds. Everything has to be low-risk. I learned from the biologists that you only propose to do things you’ve essentially already done.”

Litke doesn’t think he’ll be able to spread him-self between physics and neuroscience much longer. “It’s getting to the point where I’m going to have to decide on one field, and the truth is I don’t know which it will be,” he says.

Still, he is reveling in the possibilities before him: Stick with the ATLAS collaboration to help open a new era of particle physics, or move full-time to neuroscience and try to answer the questions raised by watching his daughter start to com-prehend the world. Either way, he’ll be pushing the limits of detector technology to measure and probe, in search of the answers to the most fundamental questions of science.

Wherever physics goes, music folloWs, from the lyrical strains of flute and violin to Blue Wine, les horriBles cernettes and drug sniffing dogs. By tona Kunz

physicistsrocK!

standing on a stage near the border of France and Switzerland, the songwriter and keyboard player for Les Horribles Cernettes looks up at the sky and grimaces. So much for the annual free Hardronic

Music Festival, he thinks. Thousands of physicists, engineers, technicians, and their families sit in a grassy field, far from any shelter, at CERN, the European particle physics center. The crowd got in free; they won’t hesitate to leave, Silvano de Gennaro thinks. He sighs, and his fingers touch the first note of the song “Big Bang” just as buckets of rain start to fall.

People start moving—but not to go home. Concertgoers pick up plastic chairs to shield their heads. Others alternate clapping to the beat and wiping rain out of their eyes.

Then water shorts out the lighting system. A bevy of upcoming special effects—heart-shaped balloons, bubbles, disco lights, smoke—vanish into the darkness. Disappointed, de Gennaro gets ready to pack up.

A beam of light streaks across the stage, focuses on a musician and stops, followed by another, and another. People are pointing flashlights retrieved from their cars.

“They were singing along. They called us back three times,” recalls de Gennaro, who heads the laboratory’s multi-media production department. “They were all drenched, and they stayed anyway.”

Their set finished, de Gennaro and his wife, Michele, change from the 1950s-style attire of the Les Horribles Cernettes, who sing doo-wop songs with physics themes, into the black and leather of a heavy-metal band.

Backed by a grinding guitar and pounding drum beat, a seductive Michele closes out the festival, whose 10-band lineup had the audience swaying to jazz, lindy-hopping to the Cernettes and, at the end, flailing wildly.

“They jumped on the stage with us and sang along,” de Gennaro says. “They head-banged.”

With two decades of history behind it, the Hardronic Festival may be the biggest and best-known event in the high-energy physics music scene, but it’s no anomaly.

Wherever physics is done, music rears its head—from a 20-year-old revolving-door rock band in Illinois to the sound of bamboo flutes in Japan, a jazz band in Germany, and a college physics instructor from California who spreads a message of science activism through a provocative night-club act.

The Canettes

From left to right: Jim Stone,

Connie Potter, Wojt Krajewski,

Wolfgang von Rüden, Simon

Baird, David Boys, Marc Dambrine,

and (top right) Steve Goldfarb.

Photo: Claudia Marcelloni

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CERN’s Les Horribles CernettesThe Cernettes are known not just for their physics-flavored doo-wop, but also for posting the first photo on the Web. They also claim the first home page for a musical group. From left: Anne MacNabb, Michele de Gennaro, and Vicky Corlass. Photo courtesy of Les Horribles Cernettes

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Beautiful connections “I kept telling people it’s not that different liking science or music,” says Tokio Ohska, a former professional classical singer and semi-professional opera singer who is now a physicist at Japan’s KEK laboratory. “In science you appreciate the beauty of the structure of nature. In music it is the same. You appreciate the beauty of the structure.”

Music, he says, “kind of trains your mind so you can be creative. If you like physics and nothing but physics, I don’t know if you can be creative.”

Music and physics go back a long way. The Greeks used musical con-structions to explain the orbits of planets. Albert Einstein played the violin. Werner Heisenberg played piano. Richard Feynman played bongos. Even today, college courses and popular science books such as Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe use musical analogies to explain string theory.

“It is amazing how much music has inspired physics,” said George Gibson, a physics professor at the University of Connecticut who teaches a course on the physics of music. “It’s kind of a one-way connection. Physicists are interested in music, but musicians aren’t necessarily interested in physics”—although he says his course has persuaded some students to switch to physics majors.

Both music and science require self-discipline and the ability to work toward a distant goal, often by yourself. Like the math underlying physics, music consists of symbols making up a non-verbal language that uses patterns to forge meaning.

“We find order with a few gaps intriguing,” Gibson says. “A gap in the Standard Model makes you want to find out what it is. Gaps in music draw you in because the pattern is not resolved until the song plays out. I assume an interest in music or physics is just playing on the same process in the brain.”

Others take a less cerebral view of the connection, suggesting it is a byproduct of the long work hours and frequent travel that careers in physics often entail. People seek out music as a way to relax or to connect with researchers from other countries.

“It’s really magic,” de Gennaro says. “You all work together, and then you see your colleagues jumping around on the stage.”

Dogs rock the prairieFermi National Accelerator Laboratory sits in the midst of an Illinois prairie that has been restored to its pre-settlement, early 1800s condition. The users’ center and bar feel almost as old. Hand-me-down couches abandoned by graduate students push up against faded, wood-paneled walls. When the center fills with students and collaborators from the Collider Detector experiment at Fermilab, or CDF, it has the cozy feel of a family reunion at a small-town lodge. The feeling is heightened by the fact that the collabora-tion has its own rock band, Drug Sniffing Dogs.

“It is definitely fun to do something with your colleagues in a non-work context,” says saxophone player Andy Hocker. “It is kind of a natural way to keep the camaraderie going.”

The band’s name was the result of a stalemate: after failing to find something everyone liked, members agreed that the name would be based on the next television image they saw. It was a show about police dogs.

The group plays for collaboration meetings, members’ weddings, and block parties, and occasionally at the users’ center for the whole lab. Dancing always ensues.

“A lot of people bring their children, so there are usually a half-dozen 2- to 5-year-olds swinging their arms in front of us,” says Ben Kilminster, lead singer for the Dogs.

“We feed off the energy in the crowd.”In a world where jobs depend on yearly grants and researchers fly

around the globe to work in international collaborations, holding a band of physicists together takes work. Band members rotate in and out. Founder Steve Hahn, the only constant, finds new members and offers his home for practices.

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To ensure that enough players are available for each gig, the band has to build in redundancy. The Drug Sniffing Dogs roster includes five lead guitarists, two bass guitarists, two saxophonists, and a couple of horn players who can play several instruments.

In its 20 years of existence, the band has experimented with musical styles to see what would get people on their feet. Feel-good, ageless rock classics work best. Cover tunes with physics lyrics drew interest, but not as much dancing, so they’ve been dropped from the repertoire.

At one lab Halloween concert, a saxophonist jerked his head at his band mates when he saw most of the crowd on its feet rocking to the song “Knock on Wood.”

“So we started running around in the crowd,” Hocker says. “Someone grabbed one of the horn players and that just sort of spontaneously morphed into a conga line.”

Building a music sceneEach laboratory has a unique musical culture, a blend of local styles, on-site amenities, and staff tastes.

At KEK, for instance, Ohska tried to get a band together, but people were too busy. So he created a concert series that brings in outside musicians,

Fermilab’s Drug Sniffing Dogs

One of many incarnations of a band

that has been evolving for 20 years.

From left: (front) Louise Oakes, trombone,

euphonium; Jared Yamaoka, drums;

Ben Kilminster, vocals; Steve Hahn, guitar,

keyboards; (back) Antonio Boveia, guitar;

Andy Hocker, saxophone; Ulrich Husemann,

saxophone; and Aron Soha, bass.

Photos: Fred Ullrich, Fermilab

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as well as an annual art festival that mostly features solo or duet performances by lab personnel. There, the music takes on a soft and lyrical quality as crowds gather to hear co-workers on bamboo flutes and violins.

CERN has more success building bands. The lab has a practice room and a music club with 120 members. But it took nearly 30 years to grow such a substantial musical base. For the first Hardronic Festival in 1989, de Gennaro could barely scrounge up a dozen musicians to forge last-minute acts to fill the stage. Today the festival has more would-be participants than it can accommodate, and the lab hosts smaller concerts every two or three months.

“The Hardronic Festival was really the spark that started the fire,” de Gennaro says. “There was a massive number of people who came around and joined the music club after that.”

By providing mixing boards, microphones, and other equipment for a small fee, the music club has encouraged the creation of bands like the Canettes, whose name is both a play on Cernettes and a nod to the half-liter beer orders popular in Geneva.

“I said, ‘OK. Let’s try this out,’ and it was fun,” says Steve Goldfarb, who along with fellow ATLAS experiment member Connie Potter is a lead singer for the blues band. Three more CERN employees and four local residents complete the roster.

Although vacation schedules make it hard for the blues band to play the Hardronic Festival, it appears regularly at local clubs, drawing a fan base of several hundred Americans and Britons. Some members wear black suits, sunglasses, and hats reminiscent of the American movie classic The Blues Brothers.

During a recent gig at the 7 Arts pub, harmonicas and saxophones moaned as Goldfarb jumped around and fell to his knees, crooning to the standing-room-only crowd. “Some real blues, man!” yelled a Florida man, Paul Vega, from the audience. “Finally, some blues in Geneva.”

Blue jazzAt Germany’s Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron Laboratory, or DESY, the music scene grew more slowly. The lab now has a choir, a classical band, and an orchestra. Individual staffers practice banjos, pianos and trumpets for solo shows. Rock bands are rare, but a jazz band with a soulful side has found a niche.

Blue Wine took its name from the bottles consumed during practice to loosen lips and fingers, and—depending on which band member you ask—the German term for “drunk” or a term for blues-inflected scales and notes. The 10-member band plays occasional gigs before a crowd of about 150 in a nearby small town. It also performs three or four times a year at the lab’s restaurant, for holiday parties and at employee birthday parties.

Core band members come from the technical, computer, administrative, and research sections of the lab. One non-lab musician rounds out the group, which ranges in age from 32 to 67, and visiting researchers sit in. “The band is very open,” says trumpet player Manfred Rüter.

DESY’s Blue Wine

Below: Manfred Rüter, trumpet. Bottom: Yorck

Holler, front, records the session; at back (from

left) are Felix Beckmann, trombone; Peter

Gasiorek, drums; Jan Kuhlmann, bass; Bernd

Reime, guitar; Hans-Bernhard Peters, saxo-

phone. Top right: Christian Mrotzek, saxophone.

Photos courtesy of DESY

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As at other labs, weekly practices must compete with work and family commitments. “Sometimes we have more bottles of red wine than musicians,” says saxophone player Christian Mrotzek. That’s OK, he says, because the night is as much about socializing and relaxing as making music.

Rüter, who initiated the group, took to music much later than his band mates did. As a young man he was captivated by the free-spirited, high-energy vibe of jazz clubs and wanted to take up the trumpet. He just never found the time until a DESY colleague walked into his office talking about music. Rüter was 50 at the time. He shared his desire to play, the col-league said he had extra trumpets at home, and for the next nine years Rüter practiced and played off and on with friends before launching Blue Wine with fellow lab employees. The band has been together five years.

Mrotzek, meanwhile, had been playing saxophone. He didn’t want to bother anyone, so he practiced his instrument in a guest room below the lab’s cantina. That’s where guitar player Bernd Reime found him. As Mrotzek recalls it, Reime asked, “What are you doing here? There is a band nearby. You have to come play.”

Later, Reime saw Felix Beckmann walking through the lab with a trom-bone case. The men started bumping into each other and into other music lovers and talking about songs. Blue Wine was solidifying.

Drummer Peter Gasiorek had retired, but came back at age 67 to join the band because it gave him a connection to the lab and his old colleagues.

Judging from audience reactions at DESY and other labs, they seem to enjoy those connections, too.

Physics cabaretSome bands use music to enrich their lives; others use it as a way to show non-scientists their world.

The Cernettes sing about physics concepts in songs like “Every Proton of You” or “Big Bang.” They also sang “Surfing on the Web” in 1992, at a time when the World Wide Web, created at CERN to allow physicists to share data, was a mystery to most people. The first photo on the Web was of the Cernettes, who also claim to have created the first homepage for a musical act.

Lynda Williams also sings about physics, but with a political message. As the Physics Chanteuse, she croons about the 1980s political downfall of the Superconducting Super Collider, which was abandoned midway through construction in Texas. In “Hi Tech Girl,” set to the tune of Madonna’s “Material Girl,” her backdrop is a photo montage of 300 women scientists.

Women have not always found her act endearing, though. She dresses in evening gowns or slinky cocktail dresses with go-go boots, turning her act into a cabaret. Some say the sex appeal in the show demeans the sci-ence, but Williams, who teaches physics and astronomy at Santa Rosa Junior College and formerly at San Francisco State University, says it does just the opposite.

“I can prove science is super-sexy,” she says. “I don’t mean pornographic; I mean titillating. It’s cool. It’s slick. String theory and high-energy particle physics are as cutting edge as there is. People are really, really interested in smart, sassy, sexy science and that is what I do.”

The American Institute of Physics commissioned her to write a song for Valentine’s Day. The result was “Love Boson,” about an unmeasurable particle that mediates the force of love. Physicists cheer the show, she says, but it’s the engineers, political junkies, and science fans who really go wild. And winning over those groups helps scientists make the case for cutting-edge research projects to the general public.

She says she hopes her songs encourage people to spread the message that understanding science is power.

“If I am going to talk about global warming or carbon dating, before I can make a political comment people have to understand the science,” Williams says. “They are always surprised. They say, ‘I had no idea this is what sci-ence is about.’”

Physics Chanteuse

Lynda Williams, whose day job is

teaching physics and astronomy, adds

a cabaret feel and political bent to

her music as the Physics Chanteuse.

Photo courtesy of Lynda Williams

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gallery: satoru yoshioka

The two facets of Satoru Yoshioka’s work could not be more distinct.

His black-and-white Polaroid photographs have been exhibited in the United States, Japan, and Europe. They range from distorted, enig-matic images of people to wall-sized projections of Nagasaki’s Fountain of Peace and the war-strafed streets of Sarajevo, both part of an 2001 art project at The Museum of Art in Kochi, Japan, his home town. “I wanted to express a sense of never-ending time with never-ending human tragedies in this work,” he wrote on his Web site.

Meanwhile, Yoshioka has been traveling the world taking pictures of high-energy physics labs—inside and out, in daylight and in the spooky glow of artificial lighting at night. People rarely appear in these photos, which instead focus on equipment, everyday work areas, streets, land-scapes, and buildings.

“I want to use photography to do art. That’s the way I started, actually,” says Yoshioka, an ebul-lient man who will sometimes spend hours getting a photo just right. “That’s still the focus, but it’s changing a little bit.”

With his physics photos, he says, he hopes to make “a kind of record of the ordinary person looking at such a special place.” Most visitors focus on the big detectors and other spectacular sights, he adds, “but they don’t imagine just a

An extraordinary eye for the everydayText by Glennda ChuiPhotography by Satoru Yoshioka

street or a building. So I wake up in early morning and walk around taking pictures and put them on the Web site.”

Yoshioka studied photography at Palomar College in San Diego and was one of a select group of photographers chosen for the European Photography ’90 exhibition, which opened in Berlin the day after the Wall fell (see bottom photo on previous page.) His love of particle physics goes back to 2005, when a friend who worked at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California arranged for him to see the lab.

Since then, he has prowled CERN, the European particle physics center in Geneva, Switzerland; KEK and J-PARC in Japan; and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, one of many stops on a honeymoon tour of the United States that included New York City and Niagara Falls.

“I went to CERN and these machines are so huge,” Yoshioka says. “It’s just amazing, it’s beyond my imagination, and it’s beautiful.”

Like his black-and-white Polaroids, his digital images of physics labs are often manipulated. By changing the contrast or intensifying colors, he creates his own interpretation of a scene.

Yoshioka seeks out obscure places and details—things that are hard to find on an official lab tour, which in any case would not give him nearly enough time to get the shots he wanted.

Top left and right: Fermilab, August 2007“Their accelerator was running so I couldn’t

take pictures of it, so we went looking for something special. We were driving around

looking at Wilson Hall and the patterns were very interesting.”

But with his outgoing nature, he often finds someone who will take him around and give him all the time he needs.

At J-PARC, for example, “the people were really, really friendly, and they were so eager to show me—‘Come this way!’” he says. His unofficial guides, including accelerator physicist Masakazu Yoshioka, showed him deep inside the lab, allowing him to photograph empty rooms that would soon fill up with equipment: “That was really fortunate, to get a really deep insight into the facility.”

In August, Yoshioka was invited to show his work at the UCLA-KEK-Sokendai International Symposium and Workshop, which focused on strategies for studying contemporary science in Japan and in the United States. His photos are featured on a 2008 KEK calendar designed by his wife, Ayako—it is for limited distribution, not available to the public—and hundreds are displayed on his Web site, www.sypi.com.

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gallery: satoru yoshioka

Top: CERN, February 2007 “I made a friend, and he said, ‘Take all the pictures you want!’ This is near Building 180, where they’re making the parts for ATLAS.”

Bottom: KEK, August 2007 “In the nighttime KEK is much more dramatic. I went so many places—the machine shop, storage areas, everywhere.”

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Top: SLAC“This is the ordinary life of

SLAC, behind the klystron department where there is

a workshop.”

Bottom: J-PARC, August 2007 “At J-PARC everything is just

beautiful. This is a brand-new tunnel, a place where equipment

had not been installed yet, totally empty space.”

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Meetings: You gotta have ’em, love ’emReally? Really, guys? Did we really have more than five thousand meetings last year?

Some friends and I were discussing the volume of meetings within ATLAS, one of the two big detector experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, and I thought I might support this discussion with some statistics.

According to the 13-year summary of ATLAS meetings registered on our main scheduling Web site, we had 5063 meetings in 2007, nearly twice as many as the year before.

But even that number understates the case. What the chart actually shows is the number of “events,” and a single event can range from a one-hour meeting to a week-long conference. Trigger and Physics Week, for instance, which involved five full days of meetings, is listed as one event, which makes this figure all the more depressing. Say there are approximately 250 working days at CERN, the European particle physics lab where the LHC will soon start oper-ations; this would work out to approximately 18 meetings per day. It baffles me that we have that much to talk about!

Since I just couldn’t resist, I looked at the number of 2007 events for CMS, the other big detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Although ATLAS and CMS each involve roughly the same number of scientists—about 2000 people from around the world—there were 2938 CMS events to ATLAS’s 5063.

Hmm.I think there are two possible explanations here.

Maybe CMS uses a different scheduling and

conferencing Web site. Or perhaps CMS is more verbally efficient; they say in one word what ATLAS says in two.

It would be interesting to see the monthly sta-tistics, but the Web site doesn’t generate those. That’s probably for the greater good of the exper-iment. People can really get into plotting all the various statistics; and knowing ATLAS, we would probably have to schedule a meeting to discuss the results.

If you were to ask me—and I feel I represent the population well on this—“Do you spend too much time in meetings?” I would say, “Yes.” But if the next question was, “Which meetings do you think ATLAS could afford to get rid of?” I would say, “None.”

Take Trigger and Physics Week. In the talks I attended, the information presented was useful and relevant, meaning that for the most part it was information I needed to continue my own work. I cannot point to a single talk that was not worth hearing. Certainly there was some overlap, but I didn’t feel I was being told the same thing twice. So maybe 5063 meetings per year is the reality of doing physics in an experiment with 2000 people.

Here’s my meeting schedule for the week of January 15, 2008, which did not include any big, multi-day events. All but one of these meetings is weekly. My meeting load is pretty typical, I think. People have different focuses, but the volume is similar.

Monica Dunford is an Enrico Fermi Fellow from the University of Chicago who works on the Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS experiment. She lives in a quaint little house in the French countryside. When not attending meetings, she enjoys rowing, backpacking, running marathons, and blog-ging about her work at http://uslhc.us/blogs/.

Plenary session of the ATLAS Trigger & Physics Week at CERN Main Auditorium. Photo: CERN

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day in the life: monica dunford

Monday, January 15, 20089:00–10:00 a.m. We call this the Tile morning meeting. Everyone at CERN who is working on cali-bration and commissioning of the tile calorimeter, or TileCal, gathers in the coffee area to discuss activities for the next two days. TileCal is an ATLAS sub-detector that measures the energies of particle jets coming from the collision point. This is a very nuts-and-bolts meeting—where the detector will have power for the day, who is doing what tests and when, things of this nature.

5:30–6:30 p.m. The University of Chicago group meeting. Every week we have a phone meeting between the seven Chicago people located at CERN and about 15 back home in Chicago. People give informal presentations about their work. It helps the group stay connected and gives us con-structive suggestions in a relaxed environment.

Tuesday, January 1610:00–11:00 a.m. Counting room management meeting. The “counting room” is a series of under-ground rooms near TileCal that contain most of the electronics and services for the sub-detector, such as the low-voltage power lines. This meeting discusses system-wide problems that might affect the sub-detectors, from power cuts to disruptions in the computer networks. Usually one per-son from each sub-detector attends this meeting and passes the information on to their group.

5:00–6:00 p.m. Fast Tracker weekly meeting. The Fast Tracker is a hardware upgrade being pro-posed for the ATLAS trigger system, which sifts through the enormous amount of data coming out of particle collisions and decides which events are interesting enough to examine further. The goal of the upgrade is to quickly search for particle tracks in the innermost ATLAS sub-detectors. The tracks can be used to select events that produce b quarks, for example, which are of great phys-ics interest. This group is doing research and development for the proposal; in our weekly meeting we discuss any results and the progress we have made.

Wednesday, January 179:00–10:00 a.m. Another Tile morning meeting, going over plans for Wednesday and Thursday.

10:00–11:00 a.m. Phase 2 commissioning meeting: This is an ATLAS-wide meeting to discuss the integration of each sub-detector into ATLAS as a whole. During commissioning—the process of get-ting ready to take meaningful data—each sub-detector is basically autonomous. But as we move closer to the day when the Large Hadron Collider starts running, we have to get all the sub-systems operating together. We work toward this by running multiple sub-systems at a time. In this meeting we discuss the planning and coordination of these combined runs, and tally up the things still to be done before the commissioning phase is over.

1:00–2:30 p.m. CERN supersymmetry meeting. We discuss how we are going to search for super-symmetry—a theoretical phenomenon in which each known particle would have a heavier partner—with ATLAS. We spend a lot of time talking about how we can realistically measure the background “noise” of particles coming out of collisions and how to measure uncertainties, so we could recognize any evidence of supersymmetry that might pop up.

Thursday, January 189:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Level-one calorimeter trigger meeting. We discuss the commissioning of the level-one calorimeter trigger, another system for sifting data to find interesting collisions. It is a monthly meeting, so it is longer. The level-one calorimeter trigger receives signals from TileCal, so I work with the level-one people on jointly commissioning and calibrating the combined TileCal/level-one system. This meeting is good for me; I can connect with some of my level-one colleagues, whom I might not interact with on a daily basis, and see their recent work.

4:00–6:00 p.m. TileCal weekly commissioning meeting: We talk about calibration results, how the commissioning is going and the things we still need to do before the beam turns on. About 50 people spend a large fraction of their time commissioning TileCal. Among other things, this meeting allows me to see what others are doing.

Friday, January 199:00–10:00 a.m. Yet another Tile morning meeting, going over plans for Friday and the weekend.

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The Big Bang TheoryOne of my favorite scenes in The Big Bang Theory involves the two main characters, Leonard and Sheldon, trying to move a large, flat box up two flights of

stairs. Faced with no equipment and little upper-body strength, Leonard declares, “We are physi-cists! The intellectual descendents of Archimedes!” He proceeds to work the problem, tilting the box against the stairs, explaining (for the benefit of the studio audience) the mathematics of how that reduces the force required to lift the box.

I think of that scene whenever I hear a member of the physics community griping about the show and how it reinforces negative stereotypes of sci-entists. The premise is quite simple: Two nerdy physicists befriend the pretty blonde waitress who moves in next door, and wackiness ensues from the cultural clash. It’s the show about phys-ics that physicists love to hate: “How dare network television call us nerds for fun and profit!” But chances are the person griping hasn’t even seen the show. And that’s too bad, because The Big Bang Theory is actually a very smart, savvy series.

More importantly, the science is right on tar-get–a rare accomplishment for a TV sitcom. Much of that is due to the efforts of UCLA physicist David Saltzberg, who serves as the show’s tech-nical consultant, painstakingly fleshing out the physics jargon in the dialogue and making sure the equations on the white boards lurking in the set’s background are accurate.

When was the last time you were watching TV and the characters brought up the formula for determining the force required to push an object up a slope…and then used it to solve a practical problem? There are more obscure in-jokes, too: When Leonard spends the night with a brilliant female physicist, she “fixes” Sheldon’s equation-in-progress by changing the sign, prompting Sheldon to gripe that now he’d have to share his Nobel Prize with her. Only PhD physicists famil-iar with QCD theory are likely to get that joke, yet there it is, on network television.

So it’s not the science that physicists are likely to find problematic. It’s the way the main char-acters are portrayed. Sheldon is a genius physi-cist with a serious case of Asperger’s syndrome who needs cue cards to alert him to sarcasm in casual conversation, and arranges his breakfast cereals numerically according to fiber content.

His other regularly appearing friends are no better. Leonard emerges as the sweet-natured count-erfoil to his geeky compatriots, and much of the show’s premise rests on whether he has a chance with the waitress Penny. Will she recognize Leonard’s true romantic worth?

It’s understandable that watching a shy, awk-ward physicist drooling over the stereotypical “dumb blonde” might annoy some folks in the physics community. Why can’t television portray scientists “accurately” instead of falling back on unfair stereotypes? That’s the familiar refrain, but women could make the same complaint about Penny–who isn’t nearly as stupid in later episodes as she is initially made out to be. The characters are evolving as the show develops, moving beyond the initial caricatures. The humor is evolving, too. It’s more in the vein of good-natured teasing than outright ridicule, and it stems from a genuine fondness for geek culture. After all, Penny genuinely likes the geeky physicists next door.

Perhaps the humor raises some hackles because–like all good comedy–it contains an element of truth. We have all encountered phys-icists who fail to pick up on common social cues; who make inappropriate comments to attractive women; and who engage in animated, technical arguments on the difference between centrifugal and centripetal force, to the bemuse-ment of any non-scientists who happen to be present. In another scene, the guys argue at length about the scientific inaccuracies con-tained in the first Superman movie. There are entire Web sites devoted to bad movie physics, and scientists are notorious for griping at length about minor technical inaccuracies in film and television.

Comedy is a funhouse mirror: It’s an exagger-ated reflection, to be sure, but it is still a reflection. If we don’t like what the funhouse mirror shows us, maybe we need to change the reality. Only then will we see a change in the reflection. Or maybe we could just relax a little and learn to chuckle good-naturedly at our own human foibles. The physicists in The Big Bang Theory are likeable, even endearing. How can that be bad for physics?

Ultimately, the primary objective of any TV show is to entertain, not to teach. But humor is infectious. People can still come away with a tiny bit of physics insight, and a better apprecia-tion for its relevance to our lives.

Jennifer Ouellette is the author of The Physics of the Buffyverse and Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics. She also blogs about science and culture at Cocktail Party Physics: http://twistedphysics.typepad.com.

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essay: jennifer ouellette

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logbook: W boson

In August 1982, Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister of the

United Kingdom, paid a private visit to the European lab-oratory CERN. On her arrival she told Director General Herwig Schopper that she wanted to be treated as a fel-low scientist. Schopper gave Thatcher, who had studied chemistry, a tour of the laboratory and told her about the ongoing search for the carriers of the weak nuclear force. The particles, dubbed W and Z bosons, enable radioactive decays and make the sun shine.

At CERN, scientists operating two large underground detector assemblies, UA1 and UA2, were in hot pursuit of these bosons. They were collecting signals of particles emerging from proton-antiproton collisions produced at the laboratory. Schopper promised the prime minister that

he would inform her when the scientists had found the elusive bosons. Four months later, Schopper sent her this letter, sharing with her “in strict confidence” the news about the imminent discovery of the weak bosons. He explained that scientists had found the decay of a posi-tively charged W boson into a positron and a neutrino (W + → e+ +ν).

On January 25, 1983, CERN held a press conference to announce the discovery of the W boson. UA1 and UA2 had recorded a total of nine events consistent with a W signature. The particle was more than 15 times heavier than any other fundamental particle previously observed. About four months later, CERN announced the discovery of the Z boson.Kurt Riesselmann

SymmetryA joint Fermilab/SLAC publicationPO Box 500MS 206Batavia Illinois 60510USA

Office of ScienceU.S. Department of Energy

symmetry

explain it in 60 seconds

The W boson is one of five particles that transmit the fundamental forces of nature. It is responsible for two of the most surprising discoveries of the

20th century—that nature has a “handedness” and that the physics of antimatter is subtly different from the physics of the matter-based world we see around us.

The W boson comes in positively and negatively charged varieties. They collaborate with another particle, the electrically neutral Z boson, to cause the force known as the weak interaction, which is responsible for some forms of nuclear decay, among other phenomena.

The W is very massive, which means its effects are very short range and very weak at everyday energies. Hence, the effects of these particles are subtle—but important! For example, the W can change the very nature of an interacting particle, turning an electron into a neutrino or a down quark into an up quark. This is important in the fusion reactions that power the sun, which involve protons turning into neutrons. Finally, the W provides the only established mechanism for allowing matter and antimatter to evolve in different ways.

When W bosons are created in particle accelerators, they live for only about 10–25 seconds, but they provide important tests of the Standard Model of particle physics.Patricia Burchat, Stanford University