News from the ALD
By
Steve Vigdor
Planning for RHIC Run 9
Although there is still much uncertainty concerning the federal budget for FY2009, we have to develop a tentative schedule and plans for the next RHIC run. I want to bring you up to date on our planning, so that you can adjust your own plans for completing shutdown work and travel to BNL accordingly. I’ll also take the opportunity of this column to inform you about some other recent events concerning RHIC.
Some of you may have heard that the Supplemental Funding Bill passed in Spring brought an additional $1.5M for RHIC operations support in FY2008, which we are carrying forward into FY2009. In addition, an extension of BNL’s power contract with New York State and a rebate based on our actual power usage during FY2008 have helped to ameliorate cash flow problems we expect to encounter early in FY2009 under a Continuing Resolution (CR). These positive developments allow us to contemplate an earlier start to Run 9 than would have otherwise been possible under a long CR. Nonetheless, if we had to deal with a full-year CR in FY2009, our budget would not support more than 10 weeks of cryogenic RHIC operation, including 5 weeks of overhead accompanying any physics production. If we were told early in the fiscal year that we would indeed have a full-year CR, the most cost-effective response would be to bypass Run 9 altogether, and carry forward some FY2009 funds to allow a longer run in FY2010.
However, the above scenario does not presently seem the most likely to occur. It is more likely that we will see short-term CR’s early in the fiscal year, with decisions about federal budgets postponed until January, after a Transition Team for the new administration has had some opportunity to work through their own budget plans. Under this scenario, our goal is to maximize the opportunity to have as productive a Run 9 as realistic budgets might support. Toward this end, we are currently planning to start the RHIC cooldown on or about February 1, 2009, allowing physics production measurements with 500 GeV polarized proton collisions to begin by March 1. If we do not get a budget above the FY2008 dollar level by mid-April, we will have to terminate the run early, but having delivered enough physics production time for the experiments to have obtained meaningful first 500 GeV pp collision results, hopefully including first observation of a clear W production signal above background at RHIC. If we do get an FY2009 budget by April that moves significantly (e.g., about halfway) toward the President’s FY2009 request, we hope to be able to continue the run through the end of June. That would give a total of 21 cryoweeks of operation, sufficient to satisfy the highest priorities of both PHENIX and STAR for Run 9 polarized proton collisions at both 500 and 200 GeV. This is the best outcome I can currently foresee for Run 9, staring at a CR of at least three, and more probably six, months duration.
Other recent RHIC news
The annual DOE Science and Technology Review of RHIC took place at BNL on July 7-9, 2008. The reviewers were overall very positive about recent RHIC performance and productivity, as well as future plans, scientific and technical vision. The main area of concern focused on finding ways to get more effective BNL consultation and oversight on detector upgrade projects, several of which have suffered recently from a variety of technical or cost glitches. In response, Tom Ludlam, Ed O’Brien and I will be working with the Collaborations over the coming months to increase the interaction of Project Management teams for detector upgrades with experienced BNL personnel. The costs for this increased BNL oversight cannot be charged to project costs for upgrades already under way, but will rather be borne by the laboratory. One additional area of concern emerging from the S&T review is the robustness of STAR planning for TPC operations, maintenance and analysis under the now imminent higher luminosity conditions anticipated for the next few years. The STAR Collaboration will be charged with assembling a sufficient team to address these concerns convincingly by the time of next year’s S&T review.
We also learned around the time of the S&T review that the PHENIX NoseCone Calorimeter (NCC) project was not approved by DOE. This decision was also announced publicly at the August 21 NSAC meeting. Reviews of the NCC project concluded that technical feasibility to attain the science goals highlighted by the proposers had not been established sufficiently convincingly under anticipated occupancy conditions in central gold-gold collisions. This is a significant setback for PHENIX and also indicates that the internal BNL review process for detector upgrade proposals has not recently been sufficiently demanding concerning feasibility demonstration of specific science goals to ensure successful DOE reviews. I will be working with PHENIX and STAR management to make the internal review process more stringent for future projects. This will affect the timeline users and collaborations must consider in planning for new upgrades: proposals will not be submitted to DOE before they have satisfied RHIC management that they can stand up to intense scrutiny. For now, I am also working with PHENIX management to recover from the setback, considering possible alternative plans for adding some forward calorimetry coverage to the detector.
Finally, I want to offer my public congratulations on a long, outstanding career including seminal contributions to RHIC, and best wishes for the future to Gerry Bunce, upon his retirement from BNL earlier this month. Gerry’s vision, persistence and skills were central to making the RHIC Spin program a reality and a successful cornerstone of the overall RHIC science portfolio. A search for a replacement as leader of the BNL spin group is currently at an advanced stage. We hope to bring in another first-rate scientist who will help to make sure that RHIC Spin delivers on all of its potential, while also contributing to the development of a compelling spin physics case for an Electron Ion Collider.
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.