UEC Minutes -- May 22, 2004
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Present: Bloom, Bose (GSA), Garcia, Hagopian, Rolli, Tanaka, Tschirhart,
Trischuk, White, Zimmerman. Apologies: Gottschalk, Groer.
Report on April HEPAP meeting (Sharon Hagopian)
Sharon reported on the talks that were given at the HEPAP
meeting. Robin Staffin (DOE) spoke about the discussions that were
underway among the different funding agencies to establish some
consensus on how they could fund the construction of a linear
collider. NSF representatives discussed their HEP budget
crunch. Barry Barish reported on the result of the DOE/HEP
Visitors Committee highlighting manpower shortage in their office
precluding them from doing extensive strategic planning and
oversight.
The LHC status was reviewed by Abe Seiden. As machine turn-on
approaches there is the risk that funding cuts will jeopardise
physics readiness of Americans at the LHC. The re-direction of
effort from the Tevatron collider programme to the LHC is being
discussed widely. The LHC experiments are pushing for a bump in
support for students and postdocs because the Tevatron experiments
naturally will have their most interesting data when the LHC
experiments are most in need of manpower for commissioning and
early operation.
Also discussed presentations from the Cosmos committee. HEPAP
members had some objections to the Cosmos committee report -- that
it didn't include enough astrophysics. There was also some
concerns expressed about the tabular summary of the nine most
important questions in particle physics and how major facilities
are addressing these nine questions.
There are four HEPAP meetings each year. Should try to have a
representative from the UEC (chair or designate) to follow these
discussions. At the very least should get a report from each
meeting as some members of the FNAL community will always be
present.
Status of the Laboratory (Mike Witherell)
Have now been getting feedback from the flurry of spring reviews.
The operations review was very successful. The operations review
was the first of its kind, reviewing the operations of the
entire laboratory, and the report from that was very positive.
On May 6, Ray Orbach, the head of the Office of Science at the
DOE was at the Lab for the On-site review. This is a review by
the Office of Science, rather than the Office of High Energy
Physics. It was clear that he was enthusiastic about the linear
collider and about the lab's plans to increase its effort in that
area. there was a celebration at the LHC magnet factory marking
the shipment of the first quadrupole assembly to CERN. Orbach spoke
at that event and toured the assembly area in the Industrial Buildings.
The BTeV CD1 review went well in technical, cost and management
areas. The schedule was not in a state ready for a baseline,
however the review certified that the schedule was limited by the
funding profile and not technical readiness. It also estimated the
amount of delay that would be necessary to have sufficient float
in the schedule. The project is making a schedule that matches the
late funding profile that will be reviewed by us on May 27-28. It
will include staging about one half of the EM calorimeter and some
trigger bandwidth, but preserving their large advantage over LHCb
for the physics topics in which LHCb is competitive. The detector
would be completed 9 months later. The PAC will review the
physics timeline for this scenario at the meeting this summer. The
PAC review will go to P5 for them to comment. The time for the
CD2 review is not yet set.
The collider has been maintaining the pace laid out for the base
luminosity goal for FY04. The reliability has not been what it
was over the winter so some of the gains from earlier in the year
have been eroded. On the plus side the Accelerator division has
changed the optics and are now getting instantaneous luminosities
comparable to the records earlier in the year with much lower
stacks of anti-protons. If they can tweak these optics to operate
more stably and the spring/summer weather is kinder a flurry of
new record instantaneous and integrated luminosities may be on the
horizon.
Mini-BooNE is doing well. Proton currents are up but losses are up
a little bit more. The Booster group is working to understand the
losses which currently limit the number of protons that can be
delivered. Booster reliability has been very good.
The Long Range Planning report will be released soon. The Director
will present his reaction to the recommendations in this report
(to the Linear Collider R&D group, the LHC Physics Centre and the
Proton Source) at the Users Meeting in his talk in early June.
Q: Any news on the FY05 budget? A: No, but for FY04 it looks like
there will be some number of continuing resolutions, but it should
be possible for the lab to survive this process completing the
necessary shutdown work and resuming high efficiency operation on
the accelerator complex late in the calendar year.
Q: Orbach is very positive on the Linear Collider. Will it be
possible to translate this into action? A: The real way to phrase
this is will this enthusiasm reflect itself in any good news in
the FY06 budget. The answer is maybe, but it will run into many
projects that are starting up in the Office of Science and perhaps
a very tough budget for the Office as a whole.
Q: What are the plans for reviews in the next 6 months? A: Most of
the big projects are in a phase where they are only getting
mini-reviews. NuMI and MINOS are 95% complete and mini-reviews of
those will only be looking at the end game. The PAC will meeting
in June at Aspen. They will look at Nova, the world-wide neutrino
programme and the Lab's place in it. In addition they will review
a modest astrophysics proposal and BTeV, as mentioned earlier.
Q: What is the emphasis of the current set of reviews of the
University based programme and its ability to bridge the
completion Tevatron programme and the onset of the LHC
experiments? A: There is always a tension between completing a
running programme and the need to construct and commission
experiments for a new machine such at the LHC -- especially when
the time scales for these activities reach beyond the lifetime of a
postdoc or a graduate student. While these surveys are struggling
to get realistic information they are an important input. The
Director will get additional information from the Tevatron
collaborations directly which will both be renewing their MOUs
with user groups. The Lab will then have to see what it can do to
fill the gaps and optimise the physics output from the experiments
it is hosting. One initiative that is being touted to address this
is the LHC Physics Centre at the Lab (see minutes from the April
UEC meeting). This may help user groups address the problem of
sharing postdocs between Tevatron experiments and LHC
experiments. The experiments must also recognise that sharing
personnel between experiments will occur and that they can no
longer expect postdocs and students to devote 100% of their time
to one experiment.
Progress and Status of the NuMI Beam Line (Peter Lucas)
There is now a movement to expand the use of the NuMI beamline
beyond just the MINOS experiment -- that is scheduled to come into
operation in FY05. He showed a map of the site, the MINOS near
detector building beside the Lederman centre and its path from
there to the Soudan mine in northern Minnesota where the MINOS far
detector is complete and taking cosmic rays. He also showed the
elevation view emphasising the steepness and length of the decay
tunnel (1:6 grade) which was a major engineering feat. The
extraction line from the Main Injector to the NuMI beamline was
also tricky to install as the beamline comes off between the Main
Injector and the anti-proton Recycler. All of the magnets for the
NuMI beam line are installed. During this fall's shutdown only the
extraction kickers remain to be installed.
Showed pictures of the target hall, including the target chase
emphasising measures that were taken to mitigate impact on the
water table. While no infiltration has been seen into the water
table from other targets on site, this target is in the
aquifer. There is more steel in the target hall shielding than in
the near and far MINOS detectors combined.
Several experiments have been proposed to use this facility. The
MINOS far detector has been completed for some time and the near
detector is nearing completion. This experiment is the raison
d'etre for the facility. MINERvA has been proposed to study
neutrino-nucleus interactions. There is some concern that this
experiment might generate a muon-neutrino background in MINOS. The
PAC will deliberate on this in June. The NOvA experiment is a
long-baseline, off-axis neutrino oscillation experiment that will
include a fine-grained calorimeter to observe nu_e appearance in a
nu_mu beam.
Three other proposals are much less mature. The Soudan-II detector
might be recommissioned and used to make unique measurements in
conjunction with MINOS. CERN-Gran Sasso experimenters are
considering using a site near the MINOS near detector to test and
calibrate their prototypes. It also turns out that a much steeper
inclination, but the same compass orientation, could deliver a
beam to Tokyo or Bejing where an even further "far detector" could
be sited.
One over-arching issue is providing sufficient protons to produce
the neutrino fluxes required by the experiments. The MINOS
proposal calls for 3.6 x 10^20 protons per year. Until the advent
of mini-BooNE this represented all the protons that had ever been
accelerated at the lab. It still requires more than doubling the
number of protons that the complex can currently
accelerate. Significantly more efficient use of the the Main
Injector will be necessary. About 1/7 of the MI buckets will be
dedicated to anti-proton production for the Collider while 5/7
will be used to generate NuMI beams. The remaining 1/7 of the buckets
are necessary for the various kicker ramps to extract beam cleanly
to the anti-proton target and NuMI.
Q: Is there any consensus on the ability to run miniBooNE at the
same time a MINOS/NuMI? A: The limit is still the loss rate and
activation in the Booster. Should really have a talk from the
Booster early in the Fall to follow up on progress over the summer
and plans for the shutdown.
University-based Program and HEPAP (Chip Brock and Sekhar Chivukula)
They are university representatives (along with Hank Sobel)
nominated by the APS Division of Particles and Fields. They gave
talks at the recent HEPAP meeting focusing on the issue of
manpower in the field as we bridge the transition from Tevatron
experiments to the LHC. Copies of their slides are available at:
http://www.science.doe.gov/hep/AgendaApr04.shtm
They were invited to repeat those presentations to the UEC to enlist
our help.
Sekhar Chivukula began by explaining how he tried to raise the
awareness of the funding agencies of the consequences of the
erosion of base support for University programmes. "User" might
not be a full description of what University researchers do --
they play an integral role in making the experiments (and
sometimes even the machines) possible. This group has also tried
to make some assessment as to whether the University based
resources are matched to the research roadmap that the community
has so successful at establishing and has emphasised the
transition from ongoing programmes at FNAL and SLAC to the
LHC. The goal was to initiate a discussion of these issues and
assemble some relevant statistics on the resources available.
Q: Is there really evidence that the DOE/NSF didn't successfully
optimise their resources vis-a-vis the research road-map? A: It is
too early to tell whether there was sufficient planning for the
road-map. The survey was undertaken to gauge this and it remains
preliminary with large uncertainties. The evidence from this
exercise was that there might be a trend that is worth studying
with more precision. The goal of this first round was to determine
whether this subject deserves further study.
The LHC experiments have addressed physicist effort in more detail
than has been attempted in the past by polling US ATLAS and US CMS
groups as to their plans for dedicated personnel to the projects.
What has not been done is assessing the running experimental
programs for their needs for personnel. In order to prepare for
this discussion, DOE and NSF were both asked to provide some
histories of funding as well as demographic information in order
to get a picture of trends. Postdoc funding/numbers are
particularly relevant. The ability of the agencies to respond to
such inquiries is apparently limited. DOE responded after
considerable internal effort. NSF found it difficult to respond in
detail.
Chip Brock continued by emphasising the breadth of the running
programme, despite the fact that it might appear mundane relative
to the excitement we have to generate for new initiatives in order
to make them a reality. There is a need to emphasise that we do
not operate like the astronomy community where facilities 'spit
out' data and university groups analyse it. The HEP community has
been successful in attracting support to build and commission
large facilities. Maintaining support to operate these facilities
to harvest the data has been very difficult. To try to understand
how this works now they undertook a first rough survey of running
experiments (CDF, D0, BaBar and CLEO) as to their current (2004)
allocation for post docs, students and faculty/lab staff to
Operations and Data Analysis. In addition, future experiments
(ATLAS, CMS, MINOS and BTeV) were probed for their 2004
allocations (where 'Operations' in these cases refers to
commissioning and/or construction and 'Analysis' referred to Monte
Carlo production). All of these experiments were then asked to
project these needs through 2009.
Brock showed summaries of Faculty/Postdocs/Students,
Foreign/US/USLabs, Operations/Total. Projecting out to 2009, the
ramp up of LHC activities is clearly not mirrored by a reduction
of effort at the facilities that continue to operate. He was
reluctant to draw any numerical conclusion from this exercise and
insisted that it has large uncertainties and known inconsistencies
due to the few-week time during which the survey was made. Rather,
he emphasized that the goal was to indicate whether there might be
enough concern to suggest that further study might be useful. If,
after a more thorough investigation, the field as a whole is
lacking a few post docs, a fix might be doable and not very
expensive (note: 10 post docs cost about $1M).
He emphasised that this is a critical time when BaBar, CDF and D0
are all starting to mint new PhDs. If the field has a need for
them as postdocs we shouldn't figure it out 2 or 3 years from
now. At that point it will also be too late to have an impact the
LHC programme. There is some consensus that the survey should be
re-done to try to reduce the uncertainties from the current level
of +/- (20-25)% to closer to 10%.
Q: Do you have any statistics on postdoc openings that are not
being filled due to a lack of graduating students? A: This is a
good point. It is still a little early to see the full effect of
the first wave of RunII graduands. Many CDF/D0 students will want
to stay on as postdocs to see the 1-2 fb^-1 they may have
anticipated seeing when they started their degrees. Q: What is
your take on the LHC Physics Centre at Fermilab? A: This seems
like a very good idea. But eventually it boils down to a question
of resource allocation -- is it better to put additional resources
into positions at the lab to support such an effort as opposed to
putting those resources into the universities who are working on
the LHC experiments?
UEC members commented that we shouldn't lose sight of the fact
that University based researchers also work on smaller, more
speculative experiments that sometimes come up with surprises and
un-correlated benefits. Chivukula and Brock agreed that we also
need to preserve the entrepreneurial spirit of University based
researchers.
Report from the Users Meeting Planning Committee (Chris White)
Registration for the Annual Fermilab Users Meeting, June 2-3, is
free and includes an invitation to dinner Wednesday. Optional box
lunches may be ordered for Wednesday and Thursday at registration
time. The form for registration can be found at:
http://www.fnal.gov/orgs/fermilab_users_org/users_mtg/2004/reg_2004.html
Posters for the meeting have been put up in Wilson Hall and
distributed to the experimental areas. All speaker slots for the
Users Meeting have been filled. Video and audio of the talks will
be archived. Copies of the talks are
being collected in advance of the meeting by Ken Bloom and will be
downloaded on a PC for the presentations. The slides will also be
attached to the agenda, which can be found at:
http://www.fnal.gov/orgs/fermilab_users_org/users_mtg/2004/users_2004.html.
Arrangements for the Users Meeting Dinner, to be held at the Users
Center, Wednesday evening, June 2, have been completed. Chris is
trying to arrange a public lecture for Thursday evening, June 3.
Nominations for the Users Executive Committee will be accepted
through noon June 8th. The nominations need the signature of 12
members of the Fermilab Users Organizations and the person being
nominated. Forms can be found at the UEC Meeting web site given
above or picked up at the Users Office.
New Perspectives Conference (Lydia Lobo)
The Fermilab Graduate Student Association is sponsoring the New
Perspectives Conference June 3 and 4. A poster session and
reception will be held on Thursday, with talks on Friday. Invited
speakers include Leon Lederman and David Hertzog. The agenda can
be found at:
http://www.fnal.gov/orgs/gsa/calendar/np/2004/schedule.html.
A barbecue will be held at the Barn Friday evening, June 4.
Next meeting sometime in the Fall of 2004 ...