Secretary Chu’s Visit to BNL
By Steven Vigdor
Energy Secretary Steven Chu (second from left) at the STAR Detector at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider with (from left) Steven Vigdor, Associate Laboratory Director for Nuclear & Particle Physics; Lab Director Sam Aronson; and U.S. Representative Tim Bishop.
New Secretary of Energy Steven Chu visited Brookhaven on Monday March 23 to announce the first allocations of stimulus funding from the DOE Office of Science via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) — and to take a whirlwind tour of the laboratory’s facilities, including RHIC. This was the Secretary’s first visit to a national laboratory since joining the administration, although of course he was Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2004. In addition to his announcement regarding ARRA funding, Chu gave a detailed talk on the opportunities for transformative research on energy usage and alternative energy sources, and on the nation’s critical need for this research.
ARRA provides a total of $1.6B for the Office of Science, the first $1.2B of which was officially allocated on Monday. Within this $1.2B is $184.3M for BNL. A major goal of the Office of Science funding has been to accelerate already-approved and “shovel ready” construction projects and, by doing so, hopefully to relieve some pressure on science budgets in FY2010 and beyond. BNL’s new light source (NSLS- II) provides an excellent fit to this strategy, and it is getting $150M from ARRA to fund a very robust launch on construction. The ground-breaking for NSLS-II is anticipated shortly. In a similar vein, the Secretary also announced that the Office of Science funding would include $65M to accelerate construction on the Jefferson Lab 12 GeV upgrade. On a smaller scale ($2.25M total), two ongoing upgrades to the PHENIX detector at RHIC — the VTX and FVTX projects — are also receiving forward funding via ARRA of the amounts previously anticipated for FY2010 in their funding profiles. This forward funding will ensure that these projects remain on track for timely completion, and again, should relieve some pressure on RHIC budgets in FY10 and beyond.
Another goal of the ARRA funding is to allow needed repairs and replacements for infrastructure relevant to the nation’s science programs. Within BNL’s $184.3M allotment are $18.67M to launch construction of a new Interdisciplinary Science Building (ISB) and an additional $13.4M to fund a suite of smaller building upgrades. When completed, the ISB will have an indirect effect on Nuclear and Particle Physics at BNL, by allowing significant redistribution of office space within Building 510, housing the Physics Department. Building 510 and several buildings in the RHIC/AGS complex will also be among the direct beneficiaries of roof repairs and other infrastructure improvements enabled by the $13.4M.
The recipients of the balance of Office of Science ARRA funds ($371M) are expected to be announced in the near future. We anticipate significant additional funds for BNL, with more direct benefits to RHIC, to be included in the remaining package. We will have to await the official announcement, however, before we can be more specific.
Among Secretary Chu’s tour stops on March 23 was the STAR detector at RHIC (see photo, above). We felt that this would be of significant interest for the Secretary, due to the very strong contributions made by LBNL to design and construction of that detector. Although the Secretary had less than 15 minutes to spend at STAR, it was an action- packed tour, with surprisingly deep science discussions. As I tried to provide a rapid overview of RHIC’s capabilities and important and ongoing discoveries, Chu asked many excellent questions. Included in the questions and answers were discussion of the following issues:
- What is the experimental evidence for near-perfect liquid behavior of the matter produced at RHIC?
- What are the common features that cause analogous behavior in cold Fermi atom gases?
- Is there any connection between perfect liquids and superfluids?
- How can one hope to distinguish convincing evidence for something as subtle as possible symmetry violations arising at extreme temperatures from the very complicated observed final states in RHIC collisions?
- How will anticipated ARRA funding benefit RHIC?
- What limitations in RHIC science output have been caused by operations funding difficulties in recent years?
In all, I believe we grabbed his interest and he came away impressed. The same was true, as well, at his other stops at the light source (NSLS-I) and BNL’s new Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN). It was an excellent opportunity to expose the Secretary to the scope of BNL’s science programs and to the talents of its scientists and users.
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National
Laboratory is a world-class scientific research facility primarily
funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. Hundreds
of physicists from around the world use RHIC to study what the
universe may have looked like in the first few moments after its
creation. What physicists learn from these collisions may help us
understand more about why the physical world works the way it does,
from the smallest subatomic particles, to the largest stars.