#mev wilson

[handeaux]

In Memoriam: Western Hills Press 1924-2022 Part Two – An Ink-Stained Wretch

(When we last left our hero, he was contemplating a life-long career in the printing business. And then he graduated college.)

Within days after I accepted my sheepskin, management called me upstairs. I was told that, on reflection, they did not want a college graduate working in their print shop. The suits weren’t entirely clear why this was the case – I believe dread of unionization might have been involved – but they were insistent that I needed to join the newswriting staff. They were also insistent that Option B was unemployment. I went with Option A.

Problem was, my English degree involved zero journalism classwork. If you wanted a 2,000-word theme on the British Romantic poets, I was your guy. Typing a simple calendar brief? Not so much. Dan Hopwood, the managing editor at the time, undertook my accelerated orientation. He handed me a stack of the obituary forms submitted by funeral homes.

“Give me two-inch obituaries.” “How do I know they’re two inches?” He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Use a pica typewriter. Set your margins like this. Four lines convert to an inch of type. Eight lines is two inches.” I transformed the stack of forms into eight-line obituaries and proudly dropped them and the forms on Dan’s desk. He tossed the forms back at me. “Give me one-inch obituaries.” I turned in one-inch obituaries. He tossed the forms back at me. “Give me three-inch obituaries.” “There’s not enough information on those forms for 12 lines.” “You know how to use a telephone, don’t you?”

And that’s how I became a reporter. Hopwood was the sort of person who read dictionaries from cover to cover for fun. He’d badger me to write headlines in three different font sizes over three different column widths and one to three decks. He was relentless as a reporter. Dan had left the Press and was working for another newspaper miles away when a tornado slammed through White Oak overnight. I dragged myself out to the scene at dawn and found Dan already there, interviewing emergency crews and residents huddled on the street. He gave me his notes and his film and let me carry on while he went to work at his actual job. He was also hilarious. Dan and his wife, Barb, hosted the annual “Thank God Basketball Season Is Over Party & Cotillion,” which was sort of a cross between the Algonquian Round Table and Animal House. Their neighbors are probably still complaining.

Columnist Roger Miller held the Western Hills Press together for decades. He was overworked and underpaid and strung along by the promise that one day he’d be named editor. He knew everybody and made sure to mention everybody regularly. He lived for coincidences, going into spasms of delight when he learned that my sister was graduating high school on her birthday, which was also our grandmother’s birthday. Roger refused to use the same word twice in a story, so an item about a local football star involved his ability to “zing the October oval,” and a column about a pastor’s yen for popsicles ended with a mention of “tundra cones.” He also used at least one exclamation point every column inch.

Nancy Taylor and I got hired about the same time. She actually had a journalism degree, so I paid close attention to how she did things. Our office had the kind of carpet that produces lots of static electricity, so I could shock people at will. If a visiting P.R. flack was getting on Taylor’s nerves, she’d yell, “Hand!” I’d shuffle in and shock the unwanted visitor on the nose. They usually took the hint.

For a couple of years, Pat Obert and I were sidekicks. She took the photos and I wrote the stories. We almost got sued when we covered an outlaw motorcycle club funeral at a local cemetery. The cemetery’s attorney objected to my reporting that guns were fired during the burial, but Pat’s photos shut him up.

Hanging around the office was a high school intern named Mary Evelyn Wilson, who went by Mev. Hopwood affectionately christened her The Twirp. We had a saying in the office when a story fell through that, “Some days you get the bear and some days the bear gets you.” Mev inscribed that saying – in ersatz Latin – on a coffee cup she made in pottery class. I still have it.

Starting out as high school interns and working their way into various editorial roles were Bill Koch, who had a long career with the Cincinnati Post and Enquirer, and Chuck Melvin, who later went on to the Associated Press, Philadelphia Inquirer and other distinguished posts. Sharing an office with them was like acting in an improv troupe. One day we’d have to sing every headline we wrote as a blues, the next day we’d debate whether chess counted as a sport or not, but the rules were you had to argue in falsetto. Somehow we got on a tangent where every lead sentence had to be translated into Neanderthal – “Sewers? Good!”

John Froschauer was a newly minted graduate of Ohio University when we hired him as a photographer. John taught me more about designing pages than anyone I ever worked with, just by submitting photos with penciled notes indicating how many column widths they should run. If I followed John’s instructions, my pages looked great. If I ignored his suggestion, my pages sucked and he grumbled at me. To get the best photos, John endured any challenge. He showed up at my apartment in the middle of the 1978 blizzard because his camera froze. Although he accepted a cup of tea, he stayed only until the camera thawed and then trudged back into the deep freeze to shoot a Pulitzer-worthy portfolio.

I sent John on assignment one day with a young writer named Debbie Cafazzo. They got engaged a few months later. I count their marriage as among my greatest successes. Deb and another reporter, Jan Kipp, were close friends and, although only a couple years younger than me, were almost from a different generation. I was still stuck in the folk-rock Sixties while they lobbied me to re-evaluate punk. It was years later before I finally relented. I believe it was one or both of this duo who stashed a plate of “enhanced” brownies in the break room refrigerator. I scarfed a couple one Saturday morning when I went in to catch up on some work. Although I wore an illegal smile the rest of the day, I managed to file a lead story and a sidebar on Green Township zoning.

Holding this crew together was receptionist Ruthie Summe, who addressed everyone as “Hon.” Ruthie telephoned all the local bars each afternoon, and posted a list of their happy hour snacks on the office bulletin board. Based on this, we’d pick a saloon, buy a drink and dine on what Hopwood called the “noogies.” Drinks were around two bucks for a double and the noogies were free and filling – short ribs, pigs in a blanket, egg rolls. Thus fortified, we’d scatter to cover our assigned city council meetings.

In 1977, I was promoted to editor of the Western Hills Press. In that role, I inherited Henry Humphreys who, after many years as the Enquirer’s classical music critic, had been sent to pasture at the suburban weekly. We only paid him ten dollars a week for his column, but he kept the gig because record companies shipped crates of free albums for review. Henry was not fond of medieval and renaissance music. When he learned I enjoyed those ancient styles, Henry would send me his review copies, usually with a note: “For Greg Hand. Too many crumhorns.”

A year later, I departed the Press for reasons too complicated to relate in this space. When I left, management gave me a lifetime subscription. They stopped delivery after two years. Who knew I would outlast the paper?

[airmanisr]

Diamond DA20-C1 Katana 'SE-MEV' by Alan Wilson Via Flickr: msn C0561. On static display at the 2012 Malmen Airshow. Malmen, Sweden. 03-06-2012

[mezzopieno-news]

I VECCHI SATELLITI NON DIVENTANO PIÙ SPAZZATURA SPAZIALE

Un vecchio satellite per le comunicazioni in orbita intorno al nostro pianeta, alla fine della sua vita e senza più carburante, è stato recuperato da una missione spaziale prima nel suo genere che apre ad un nuovo approccio delle tecnologie spaziali per fini commerciali.

A circa 36.000 chilometri di distanza dalla Terra, il salvataggio ha coinvolto un satellite Intelsat lanciato 19 anni fa, permettendogli di riprendere il suo lavoro, accompagnato dal nuovo satellite MEV-1 che lo ha agganciato unendosi d’ora in poi ad esso come una sorta di cane guida che lo accompagnerà per 5 anni. I funzionari della compagnia spaiale che ha realizzato la missione, lo hanno definito un momento storico per il commercio spaziale. "Stiamo superando i confini di ciò che molti pensavano impossibile", ha dichiarato Tom Wilson, presidente di SpaceLogistics.

La nuova coppia di satelliti congiunti riprenderanno ora l’attività insieme e ogni 5 anni l’operazione potrà ora essere replicata, evitando la loro dispersione nello spazio alla fine del ciclo di vita delle apparecchiature. Un’altra missione potrà poi alimentare e rifornire di carburante i satelliti permettendogli di prolungare la loro vita ed evitando di creare spazzatura spaziale. Una nuova frontiera dell’economia circolare anche nello spazio.

___________________

Fonte: Universe Today - 27 febbraio 2020

✔ Buone notizie cambiano il mondo. Firma la petizione per avere più informazione positiva in giornali e telegiornali https://www.change.org/p/per-avere-un-informazione-positiva-e-veritiera-in-giornali-e-telegiornali-e-portare-la-comunicazione-gentile-nelle-scuole

[sciencespies]

Lithium fluoride crystals 'see' heavy ions with high energies

https://sciencespies.com/physics/lithium-fluoride-crystals-see-heavy-ions-with-high-energies/

Lithium fluoride crystals 'see' heavy ions with high energies

by The Henryk Niewodniczanski Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences

Tracks of heavy ions ‘imprinted’ in lithium fluoride crystals. At the top, spot tracks observed under a fluorescence microscope in plates perpendicular to the heavy ion beam. At the bottom, the ion tracks in the parallel oriented plate (the blurring at both ends of the trace is an artifact of the depth of focus of the microscope). Artificial colors. Credit: IFJ PAN

Lithium fluoride crystals have recently been used to register the tracks of nuclear particles. Physicists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow have just demonstrated that these crystals are also ideal for detecting tracks of high-energy ions of elements even as heavy as iron.

When a nuclear particle enters into a crystal, it interacts with the atoms or molecules in its crystal network. In certain crystals and under the appropriate conditions, the resulting defect can be a source of weak light—luminescence. At the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow research has been conducted on materials showing this type of properties for many years. One of them is lithium fluoride LiF. Its crystals have recently been used to detect low-energy particles such as alpha particles (helium nuclei). In their latest publication in the Journal of Luminescence, the Cracow-based physicists show that the field of application of lithium fluoride also extends to the detection of particles with significant energies and even includes ions of such heavy elements as iron 56Fe, completely stripped of electrons.

“Lithium fluoride track detectors are simply crystals. Unlike detection devices that monitor near-real time tracks of particles, they are passive detectors. In other words, they work like photographic film. Once crystals are exposed to radiation, we need to use a fluorescence microscope to find out what tracks we have recorded,” says Prof. Pawel Bilski (IFJ PAN).

Fluorescent nuclear track detectors have been known for about a decade. So far, they have been made only from appropriately doped Al2O3 aluminium oxide crystals in which, under the influence of radiation, permanent colour centres are created. Such centres, when excited by light of an appropriate wavelength, emit photons (with lower energies) which make it possible to see the track of a particle under a microscope. In the case of lithium fluoride, the excitation is carried out with blue light and the emission of photons takes place in the red range.

Lithium fluoride crystal with heavy ion tracks recorded during viewing under a fluorescence microscope. Credit: IFJ PAN

“Detectors with doped aluminium oxide require an expensive confocal microscope with a laser beam and scanning. Tracks in lithium fluoride crystals can be seen with a much cheaper, standard fluorescent microscope,” says Prof. Bilski and emphasizes: “Tracks recorded in crystals very accurately reproduce the path of a particle. Other detectors, such as the well-known Wilson chamber, usually widen the track. In the case of LiF crystals, the resolution is restricted only by the diffraction limit.”

While the impossibility of observing tracks of particles in near real time is difficult to call an advantage, it does not always have to be a disadvantage. For example, in personal dosimetry, detectors are needed to determine the dose of radiation to which the user has been exposed. These devices must be small and easy to use. The millimetre-sized crystalline lithium fluoride plates meet this requirement perfectly. This is one of the reasons why these crystals, grown by Czochralski method in the IFJ PAN, can now be found in the European Columbus module of the International Space Station, among many other types of passive detectors. Replaced every six months within the DOSIS 3-D experiment, the detectors make it possible to determine the spatial distribution of the radiation dose within the station and its variability over time.

During the latest research, crystalline lithium fluoride plates were exposed to high energy ions. The irradiation was carried out in the HIMAC accelerator in the Japanese city of Chiba. During the bombardment with various ion beams, the energies of particles ranged from 150 megaelectronvolts per nucleon in the case of 4He helium ions to 500 MeV/nucleon in the case of 56Fe iron ions. The detectors were also irradiated at with 12C carbon ions, 20Ne neon and 28Si silicon beams.

“In the crystal plates placed perpendicularly to the ion beam, we observed practically point sources of light of a size on the border of the optical resolution of a microscope. These were the places where the high-energy ion pierced the crystal,” says Prof. Bilski. “As part of the tests, some of the plates were also placed parallel to the beam. The probability of registering a track was then lower, but when it did happen, a long fragment of the track of the particle was ‘imprinted’ in the crystal.”

The tests carried out confirm that lithium fluoride track detectors are ideal for recording the passage of heavy ions with high energies. In addition, it seems that these are not the only possibilities of LiF crystals. Every other atom in their interior is lithium, which interacts very well with neutrons. Lithium fluoride detectors, especially those enriched with the lithium 6Li isotope, will probably allow for very effective registration of low-energy neutrons, and there is much to indicate that also those of a higher energy. If future studies confirm this assumption, it will be possible to construct personal neutron dosimeters. The small size of LiF crystals would also allow for interesting technical applications that are technologically inaccessible today. LiF track detectors could be used, for example, to study secondary particles formed around the primary proton beam produced by accelerators used in medicine to fight cancer.

Explore further

NIST neutron detection method—long-sought workaround to helium shortage?

More information: Paweł Bilski et al, Fluorescent imaging of heavy charged particle tracks with LiF single crystals, Journal of Luminescence (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.jlumin.2019.05.007

Provided by The Henryk Niewodniczanski Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences

Citation: Lithium fluoride crystals ‘see’ heavy ions with high energies (2019, August 19) retrieved 19 August 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-08-lithium-fluoride-crystals-heavy-ions.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.

#Physics

[arxt1]

Boosting the dark matter signal with Coulomb resonances. (arXiv:1903.00013v2 [hep-ph] UPDATED)

We show that the presence of nearby Coulombic resonances at finite energy could lead to the enhancement of the dark matter annihilation cross section at specific non-zero velocities correlated with the mass splitting between the dark matter pair and that of the resonance. If one of these resonant velocities approximately matches the velocity of dark matter in our local neighbourhood, we would see this enhancement in existing indirect-detection measurements, such as the measurements of the continuum photon spectrum made by HESS and Fermi-LAT. We explore this effect in the context of pure Higgsino and Wino dark matter with a variable splitting between charged and neutral components, controlled by the Wilson coefficient of a higher-dimension operator. For electroweak WIMPs a relevant and appreciable enhancement from Coulomb resonances requires tuning the charged-neutral splitting to be of order the Coulomb binding energies. This leads to strong exclusions of Higgsino dark matter with charged-neutral splittings in the narrow ranges (2, 2.5) and (8.5, 10.5) MeV. In contrast, by decreasing the charged-neutral splitting for the thermal Wino, we can move the Yukawa resonance away from the thermal relic mass, decreasing the indirect-detection signal to a level that is compatible with HESS measurements in the window (25, 35) MeV.

from astro-ph.HE updates on arXiv.org https://ift.tt/2Trz8fZ

[dailybiblelessons]

Saturday: Preparation for the Seventh Sunday After Epiphany

Hebrew Scripture Torah Lesson: Genesis 44:18-34

Then Judah stepped up to Joseph and said, “O my lord, let your servant please speak a word in my lord's ears, and do not be angry with your servant; for you are like Pharaoh himself. My lord asked his servants, saying, ‘Have you a father or a brother?’ And we said to my lord, ‘We have a father, an old man, and a young brother, the child of his old age. His brother is dead; he alone is left of his mother's children, and his father loves him.’ Then you said to your servants, ‘Bring him down to me, so that I may set my eyes on him.’ We said to my lord, ‘The boy cannot leave his father, for if he should leave his father, his father would die.’ Then you said to your servants, ‘Unless your youngest brother comes down with you, you shall see my face no more.’ When we went back to your servant my father we told him the words of my lord. And when our father said, ‘Go again, buy us a little food,’ we said, ‘We cannot go down. Only if our youngest brother goes with us, will we go down; for we cannot see the man's face unless our youngest brother is with us.’ Then your servant my father said to us, ‘You know that my wife bore me two sons; one left me, and I said, Surely he has been torn to pieces; and I have never seen him since. If you take this one also from me, and harm comes to him, you will bring down my gray hairs in sorrow to Sheol.’ Now therefore, when I come to your servant my father and the boy is not with us, then, as his life is bound up in the boy's life, when he sees that the boy is not with us, he will die; and your servants will bring down the gray hairs of your servant our father with sorrow to Sheol. For your servant became surety for the boy to my father, saying, ‘If I do not bring him back to you, then I will bear the blame in the sight of my father all my life.’ Now therefore, please let your servant remain as a slave to my lord in place of the boy; and let the boy go back with his brothers. For how can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me? I fear to see the suffering that would come upon my father.”

Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40

Do not fret because of the wicked;  do not be envious of wrongdoers, for they will soon fade like the grass,  and wither like the green herb.

Trust in the Lord, and do good;  so you will live in the land, and enjoy security. Take delight in the Lord,  and he will give you the desires of your heart.

Commit your way to the Lord;  trust in him, and he will act. He will make your vindication shine like the light,  and the justice of your cause like the noonday.

Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for him;  do not fret over those who prosper in their way,  over those who carry out evil devices.

Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath.  Do not fret—it leads only to evil. For the wicked shall be cut off,  but those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the land.

Yet a little while, and the wicked will be no more;  though you look diligently for their place, they will not be there. But the meek shall inherit the land,  and delight themselves in abundant prosperity.¹

The salvation of the righteous is from the Lord;  he is their refuge in the time of trouble.

The Lord helps them and rescues them;  he rescues them from the wicked, and saves them,  because they take refuge in him.

¹Jesus repeats the first part of this verse in Matthew 5:5, part of the Beatitudes.

New Testament Gospel Lesson: Luke 12:57-59

There is a parallel passage at Matthew 5:25-26.

[Jesus also said to the crowds {verse 54}]

“And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right? Thus, when you go with your accuser before a magistrate, on the way make an effort to settle the case, or you may be dragged before the judge, and the judge hand you over to the officer, and the officer throw you in prison. I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the very last penny.”

Year C Epiphany 7 Saturday

Selections from Revised Common Lectionary Daily Readings copyright © 1995 by the Consultation on Common Texts. Unless otherwise indicated, Bible text is from Holy Bible New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All right reserved. Footnotes in the Hebrew Scriptures that show where the passage is used in the Christian Scriptures are based on information from the Complete Jewish Bible (Updated) (CJB) by David H. Stern, Copyright © 1998 and 2006 by David H. Stern, used by permission of Messianic Jewish Publishers, www.messianicjewish.net. All rights reserved worldwide. When text is taken from the CJB, the passage ends with (CJB) and the foregoing copyright notice applies. Parallel passages are as indicated in the Modern English Version (MEV) , copyright © 2014 by Military Bible Association. Used by permission. All rights reserved. When text is taken from the MEV, the passage ends with (MEV) and the foregoing copyright notice applies. Image credit: Jesus Preaching on the Mount by Gustave Doré, via joyfulheart.com, a ministry of Dr. Ralph F. Wilson. This is a public domain image.

[swissforextrading]

CERN’s American sibling Fermilab turns 50

This is an RF Cavity in the Recycler Ring in Fermilab’s Main Injector Tunnel, its most powerful particle accelerator (Image: Reidar Hahn/Fermilab) Fifty years ago, physicists in the US established a new laboratory and with it a new approach to carrying out frontier research in high-energy physics. It began in the 1960's, when Cornell physicist Robert Rathbun Wilson saw early plans for a new accelerator in the US to rival Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, and CERN in Switzerland, he considered them too conservative, unimaginative and too expensive. Wilson, being a modest yet proud man, thought he could design a better accelerator for less money and let his thoughts be known. By September 1965, he had proposed an alternative, innovative, less costly (approximately $90 million cheaper than the original) design. It was approved. This period coincided with the Vietnam war, so the US Congress hoped to contain costs. Yet the discovery of the omega baryon particle at Brookhaven in 1964 meant high-energy physicists felt that a new high-energy accelerator was crucial to exploring new physics. Simultaneously, physicists were expressing frustration with the geographic situation of US high-energy physics facilities.  Groundbreaking in October 1969 for the new 200 GeV Synchrotron (Image: Fermilab) Against this backdrop arose a major movement to accommodate physicists in the centre of the country and offer more equal access. Columbia University experimental physicist Leon Lederman championed “the truly national laboratory” that would allow any qualifying proposal to be conducted at a national, rather than a regional, facility. In 1965, a consortium of major US research universities, Universities Research Association (URA), Inc., was established to manage and operate the accelerator laboratory for the AEC (and its successor agencies the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) and the Department of Energy (DOE)) and address the need for a more national laboratory.  Today, Wilson Hall, the central laboratory building, is the heart of the 6,800-acre Fermilab site. Following an architectural design competition among the DUSAF firms, it was built between 1971 and 1974. The design was acknowledged in 1975 with an award from the Society of American Registered Architects, and the building was named for Robert Rathbun Wilson on September 18, 1980. (Image: Reidar Hahn/ Fermilab) Following a nationwide competition organised by the National Academy of Sciences, in December 1966 a 6800 acre site in Weston, Illinois, around 50 km west of Chicago, was selected. Another suburban Chicago site, north of Weston in affluent South Barrington, had withdrawn when local residents “feared that the influx of physicists would ‘disturb the moral fibre of their community’”. President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill authorising funding for the National Accelerator Laboratory on 21 November 1967. Science dedicated to human rights “The formation of the Laboratory shall be a positive force…toward open housing…[and] make a real contribution toward providing employment opportunities for minority groups” Robert Wilson, Director of Fermilab Fermilab’s Betz Prairie was once the largest prairie reconstruction project on the planet. The site now hosts about 1,000 acres of restored prairie and is also home to a herd of bison, a symbol of Fermilab’s place on the frontier of physics. (Image: Fermilab) It wasn’t easy to recruit scientific staff to the new laboratory in open cornfields and farmland with few cultural amenities. That picture lies in stark contrast to today, with the lab encircled by suburban sprawl encouraged by highway construction and development of a high-tech corridor with neighbours including Bell Labs/AT&T and Amoco. Wilson encouraged people to join him in his challenge, promising higher energy and more experimental capability than originally planned. He and his wife, Jane, imbued the new laboratory with enthusiasm and hospitality, just as they had experienced in the isolated setting of wartime-era Los Alamos while Wilson carried out his work on the Manhattan Project. Wilson and colleagues worked on the social conscience of the laboratory and in March 1968, a time of racial unrest in the US, they released a policy statement on human rights. They intended to: “seek the achievement of its scientific goals within a framework of equal employment opportunity and of a deep dedication to the fundamental tenets of human rights and dignity…The formation of the Laboratory shall be a positive force…toward open housing…[and] make a real contribution toward providing employment opportunities for minority groups…Special opportunity must be provided to the educationally deprived…to exploit their inherent potential to contribute to and to benefit from the development of our Laboratory. Prejudice has no place in the pursuit of knowledge…It is essential that the Laboratory provide an environment in which both its staff and its visitors can live and work with pride and dignity. In any conflict between technical expediency and human rights we shall stand firmly on the side of human rights. This stand is taken because of, rather than in spite of, a dedication to science.”  The campus brought inner-city youth out to the suburbs for employment, training them for many technical jobs. Congress supported this effort and was pleased to recognise it during the civil-rights movement of the late 1960s. Its affirmative spirit endures today. Aerial view of Weston, the site for the National Accelerator laboratory in 1966 (Image: Fermilab) Fermilab in 1977, showing the Main Ring accelerator (top) and Wilson Hall next to it. (Image: Fermilab) International attraction By the 1970's experimentalists from Europe and Asia flocked to propose research at the new frontier facility in the US, forging larger collaborations with American colleagues. Its forefront position and philosophy attracted the top physicists of the world, with Russian physicists making news working on the first approved experiment at Fermilab in the height of the Cold War. Congress was pleased and the scientists were overjoyed with more experimental areas than originally planned and with higher energy, as the magnets were improved to attain higher and higher energies within two years. The higher energy in a fixed-target accelerator complex allowed more innovative experiments, in particular enabling the discovery of the bottom quark in 1977. Fermilab has had many successes over the past fifty years, including the discovery of the bottom quark in 1977. (Image: Fermilab) Superconducting-magnet technology was the future for high-energy physics, and was championed by Wilson, and a new director to take this forward was sought. Lederman, champion of the "national laboratory", spokesperson of the Fermilab study that discovered the bottom quark, and later a Nobel Prize winner for the discovery of the muon, accepted the position in late 1978 and immediately set out to win support for Wilson’s energy doubler - a colliding-beams accelerator, which would employ superconductivity. Experts from Brookhaven and CERN, as well as the former USSR, shared ideas with Fermilab physicists to bring superconducting-magnet technology to fruition at Fermilab. This led to a trailblazing era during which Fermilab’s accelerator complex, now called the Tevatron, would lead the world in high-energy physics experiments. By 1985 the Tevatron had achieved 800 GeV in fixed-target experiments and 1.6 TeV in colliding-beam experiments, and by the time of its closure in 2011 it had reached 1.96 TeV in the centre of mass – just shy of its original goal of 2 TeV. A Remote Operations Center in Wilson Hall and a special US Observer agreement allowed Fermilab physicists to co-operate with CERN on LHC research and participate in the CMS experiment. (Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN) Lederman also expanded the laboratory’s mission to include science education, offering programmes to local high-school students and teachers, and in 1980 opened the first children’s centre for employees of any DOE facility. Lederman also reached out to many regions including Latin America and partnered with businesses to support the lab’s research and encourage technology transfer. The latter included Wilson’s early Fermilab initiative of neutron therapy for certain cancers, which later would see Fermilab build the 70–250 MeV proton synchrotron for the Loma Linda Medical Center in California. A time-lapse of the Fermilab muon g-2 ring being installed and prepped, from June 27, 2014 to June 5, 2015. Replay Animation (Image: Fermilab) In 1999, experimentalist and former Fermilab user Michael Witherell of the University of California at Santa Barbara became Fermilab’s fourth director. Mirroring the spirt of US–European competition of the 1960s, this period saw CERN begin construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to search for the Higgs boson. Accordingly, the luminosity of the Tevatron became a priority, as did discussions about a possible future international linear collider. After launching the Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) research programme, including sending the underground particle beam off-site to the MINOS detector in Minnesota, Witherell returned to Santa Barbara in 2005. Physicist Piermaria Oddone from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory became Fermilab’s fifth director in 2005. He pursued the renewal of the Tevatron in order to exploit the intensity frontier and explore new physics with a plan called “Project X”, part of the “Proton Improvement Plan”. A Remote Operations Center in Wilson Hall and a special US Observer agreement allowed Fermilab physicists to co-operate with CERN on LHC research and participate in the CMS experiment. The Higgs boson was duly discovered at CERN in 2012 and Oddone retired the following year. Currently, prototypes for the future DUNE experiment are being built at CERN (Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN) Under its sixth director, Nigel Lockyer, Fermilab now looks to shine once more through continued exploration of the intensity frontier and understanding the properties of neutrinos. In the next few years, Fermilab’s Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) will send neutrinos to the underground DUNE experiment 1300 km away in South Dakota, prototype detectors for which are currently being built at CERN. Meanwhile, Fermilab’s Short-Baseline Neutrino programme has just taken delivery of the 760 tonne cryostat for its ICARUS experiment after its recent refurbishment at CERN, while a major experiment called Muon g-2 is about to take its first results. This suite of experiments, with co-operation with CERN and other international labs, puts Fermilab at the leading edge of the intensity frontier and continues Wilson’s dreams of exploration and discovery.   This article is a condensed excerpt from a feature article by Adrienne Kolb, published in The CERN Courier June 2017 issue, which you can read in full here. http://home.cern/about/updates/2017/06/cerns-american-sibling-fermilab-turns-50 (Source of the original content)

[sciencespies]

DARPA picks Northrop Grumman as its commercial partner for satellite servicing program

https://sciencespies.com/space/darpa-picks-northrop-grumman-as-its-commercial-partner-for-satellite-servicing-program/

DARPA picks Northrop Grumman as its commercial partner for satellite servicing program

The announcement comes on the heels of Northrop Grumman’s successful operation of its first satellite servicing Mission Extension Vehicle.

WASHINGTON — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency selected Northrop Grumman as its commercial partner for the Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites program, the company announced March 4.

The announcement comes on the heels of Northrop Grumman’s successful operation of its first satellite servicing Mission Extension Vehicle. The MEV-1 launched in October 2019 and last month docked in-orbit with an Intelsat communications satellite in an effort to keep the spacecraft in operation for an additional five years.

Under the agreement, DARPA will provide the robotics payload for a Mission Robotic Vehicle that will be used to service satellites in geosynchronous Earth orbit. The payload was developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. It consists of two dexterous robotic manipulator arms, along with several tools and sensors. Northrop Grumman’s SpaceLogistics division will provide the bus technologies it developed for the MEV.

The deal with Northrop Grumman caps a tumultuous three years for DARPA’s Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites program. The agency in February 2017 selected SSL as its commercial partner over competitor Orbital ATK (later acquired by Northrop Grumman). After DARPA announced its selection of SSL, Orbital ATK unsuccessfully protested the decision in a federal court.

In January 2019, SSL’s parent company Maxar Technologies bowed out of the partnership for financial reasons.

DARPA decided to give it one more try and solicited new bids in May 2019.

Tom Wilson, president of SpaceLogistics, said the robotics technology that will be used in the DARPA program “advances our vision to build a fleet of satellite servicing vehicles that provide customers with a variety of options to select the type of life-extension or in-orbit repairs they need.”

The company is developing life-extension services for satellites known as Mission Extension Pods. The pods augment the propulsion system of aging satellites and provide six years of life extension. The vehicle that will be developed with DARPA will be used to install these platforms on existing in-orbit commercial and government satellites to extend their service lives.

#Space

[arxt1]

Boosting the dark matter signal with Coulomb resonances. (arXiv:1903.00013v1 [hep-ph])

We show that the presence of nearby Coulombic resonances at finite energy could lead to the enhancement of the dark matter annihilation cross section at specific non-zero velocities correlated with the mass splitting between the dark matter pair and that of the resonance. If one of these resonant velocities approximately matches the velocity of dark matter in our local neighbourhood, we would see this enhancement in existing indirect-detection measurements, such as the measurements of the continuum photon spectrum made by HESS and Fermi-LAT. We explore this effect in the context of pure Higgsino and Wino dark matter with a variable splitting between charged and neutral components, controlled by the Wilson coefficient of a higher-dimension operator. For electroweak WIMPs a relevant and appreciable enhancement from Coulomb resonances requires tuning the charged-neutral splitting to be of order the Coulomb binding energies. This leads to strong exclusions of Higgsino dark matter with charged-neutral splittings in the narrow ranges (2, 2.5) and (8.5, 10.5) MeV. In contrast, by decreasing the charged-neutral splitting for the thermal Wino, we can move the Yukawa resonance away from the thermal relic mass, decreasing the indirect-detection signal to a level that is compatible with HESS measurements in the window (25, 35) MeV.

from astro-ph.HE updates on arXiv.org https://ift.tt/2Trz8fZ