Meetings and Minutes
Minutes of the 10 October 2006 UEC Meeting
Attending UEC reps: Barberis, Casey, Chertok, Diehl,
Gollin, Kopp, Landsberg, Merritt, Pitts, Polly,
Quinn, Slaughter, Wittich
Attending GSA reps:
Kendall Mann (Columbia), MiniBooNE
Jason Koskinen (University College London), MINOS
SHORT SUMMARY
Chairs from each of the UEC subcommittees gave status reports from their
working groups. A question and answer session was held with Director
Oddone. Jon Bagger came to discuss the ideas behind the Particle
Physics Envoys program. Young-Kee Kim presented a draft report from a
task force charged with exploring methods of promoting collaboration
between university and laboratory physicists on ILC-related projects.
The recent record-breaking performance of the accelerator complex was
reviewed by Ron Moore.
SUBCOMMITTEE REPORTS
Government Relations (Breese Quinn)
The GR subcommittee has its first meeting scheduled for the middle of
October. They have been planning a short trip by two UEC representatives
to Washington, D.C., the second week of October along with the SLAC Users
Organization (SLUO) and members of ATLAS/CMS. Visits will be conducted
with OMB/OSTP as well as several Congressional offices. After this trip,
the planning of the March Washington trip will commence. There will be
a joint meeting with members of SLUO and the new US LHC users
organization in January.
Quality of Life (Tom Diehl)
The QoL subcommittee met earlier in the month. At that meeting:
Jean Slaughter summarized the contents of a short report that she
presented to a URA visiting committee on Administrative and Operations
support. There she noted administrative services at FNAL which are
important to users.
The QoL subcommittee will consider what issues of relevance to women
users it could assist with. To learn about other efforts in this area,
they heard a report from Cathy Newman-Holmes on a laboratory committee
she chairs, charged by the Directorate with studying the hiring and
retention of female and minority scientists at the lab.
Kurt Riesselmann has been working over the summer to stay in contact
with the Dupage County Transit Authority. It is hoped that there would
be a Fermilab bus stop on the "Circulator" route in 2007. Long-range
plans include the "Star Line" train. Kurt reported the Circulator is
starting small, with 3 in-town bus routes to be chosen as the first step.
The QoL learned of a new service available to Fermilab employees with
school-age children (ages 5-12) that is being implemented on a trial
basis. The Children's Center at the lab will provide daycare on certain
working holidays where the children are out of school, yet the parents
are still working. The service will be available on Veteran's Day
(November 10) from 7:30-5:00 PM. The cost is $35.00 per day. Call
x3762 for registration.
The committee also discussed Fermilab visitor's health care. According
to email distributed to UsersOrg by the Fermilab Users Office,
"effective immediately, we will no longer have available the CIGNA
Health Care Open Access Plus (OAP) medical coverage for purchase by
non-Fermilab employees." The Users Office has information about
alternate coverage plans.
Outreach (Brendan Casey)
The first outreach meeting was held the last week of September and
focused on planning for the upcoming local congressional visits. The
Fermilab UEC (in cooperation with other UECs) is putting together a
list of colleagues at various universities who are willing to make a
visit to their local Representatives and Senators this November and
December. The goal is to present information on the impact our national
labs have on the research programs and communities in their district.
The committee also discussed possibilities for a traveling museum
exhibit on particle physics and other outreach ideas, including
organizing a workshop at FNAL to bring together various individuals
to discuss outreach programs in place at their universities. A member
of the committee will initiate contact with Visual Media Services to
see what it would take to get newer FNAL promotional material (video,
DVD) developed.
Users Meeting (Greg Landsberg)
The planning for the Annual Users Meeting is in its infancy, but efforts
to organize the meeting and getting invitations to key speakers should
be ramping up over the next month.
International Users (Ela Barberis)
The international users sub-committee has not met yet. The two items on
its list are to discuss health insurance and visa procedures.
Visit with Director Oddone
What is the likely impact of the July CERN Council report on the
future directions for European particle physics? Are there good
indications for collaborations with Europe on the ILC?
In a July 2006 meeting, the CERN Council met to discuss the direction of
particle physics in Europe. The Council agreed to adopt the, "European
strategy for particle physics", a report that was recently drafted by a
broad scientific advisory group within Europe. The European strategy
has quite a bit of overlap with the recommendations established for the
US by the EPP2010 committee. In particular, exploiting the physics
opportunities at the LHC is the top priority followed by R&D necessary
to establish an electron-positron collider. Both reports agree that a
machine like the ILC with collision energies in the 0.5-1.0 TeV range is
crucial to complement measurements made at the LHC. Looking toward a
future lepton collider beyond the ILC, the emphasis in Europe is on
establishing the technology for an e+/e- collider in the 2-4 TeV range
(CLIC), while the R&D at Fermilab leans toward building a muon collider.
Director Oddone also mentioned that the European report is particularly
effective because funding agencies from the respective member nations
are involved and have agreed that this program is a cornerstone of basic
research. For more information on the European strategy, see the Sep
2006 issue of CERN Courier or the strategy group's website at:
http://council-strategygroup.web.cern.ch/council-strategygroup/
What can you can tell us about the URA/Chicago contract bid? What
changes may Fermilab users expect to see? What is the new entity which
replaces the URA Board of Overseers?
The URA, a consortium of 90 universities, has overseen the construction
and operation of the lab since 1965. A new partnership between the URA
and University of Chicago has presented a contract bid to the DOE to
begin management of the laboratory in January 2007. As was required by
the Request for Proposal (RFP), the partnership will establish a limited
liability corporation (LLC) named Fermilab Research Alliance (FRA) as
the governing entity, with 50% ownership by both University of Chicago
and the URA. The RFP also requires a framework of accountability to the
DOE in which the parent corporations provide performance guarantees for
the contract undertaken by the LLC. The management scheme will be
similar to any US corporation with the Lab Director acting as the
president of the LLC and reporting directly to the Chairman of the Board
of Directors. The Board provides oversight, is chaired by the President
of the University of Chicago, and consists of 24 members. The seven
regional representatives of URA, the Presidents of Northwestern, NIU,
IIT and University of Illinois, as well as members from industry, the
University of Chicago and other national laboratories are members of
the Board.
As part of the bid for lab management, Director Oddone and the management
team were required to demonstrate to the DOE how they would respond under
certain scenarios. In these mock simulations they were given a problem
and had less than two hours to respond to the problem and prepare an hour
presentation. Overall, Director Oddone was extremely pleased by the
performance of the management team, and he felt that the whole exercise
was very useful in improving their effectiveness for the future. A DOE
decision on whether to award the contract is due in November.
What are your thoughts for incorporation of the CMS/LPC into the
Lab's organization?
From the home page of the LPC (http://www.uscms.org/LPC/LPC.htm):
"The LHC Physics Center (LPC) at FNAL was created so the USCMS community
can provide the maximum possible service to the CMS experiment. Our goal
is to ensure that those physicists who must reside inside the United
States can still contribute optimally to the many tasks required for
the CMS experiment to produce physics and be full members of the CMS
team."
Director Oddone envisions the coherent management of CMS by creating a
Center with a single person responsible to direct all the activities
that Fermilab carries for the CMS collaboration. The LPC will reside
within this CMS center and will have leadership from both the laboratory
and the university community. He emphasized that the goal of the LPC
is to enhance the participation and effectiveness of US universities,
and as such, the lab is committed to taking the necessary steps toward
forming it into a useful environment where graduate students and
postdocs can find help and be quickly brought up to speed on CMS physics
and software tools.
In addition to the LPC, Director Oddone mentioned the need to provide
centers for ILC research and astrophysics with similar management
structures. These centers are important to provide a tangible,
intellectual center for projects that do not have a natural facility
at the Fermilab site.
Particle Physics Envoys Program -- Jonathan Bagger
Jonathan Bagger (Johns Hopkins) came to discuss the ideas behind the
Particle Physics Envoy Program. This program seeks to establish a
stronger relationship between the particle physics community and our
representatives. A physicist would be paired with a particular
representative and would then work to establish a rapport by making
visits 3-4 times per year. The visits would not always be motivated
by a request for funding, but could be to say thank you for recent
legislation or just let the representative know how past decisions
are shaping science. The point is that the representative develops
an ongoing, comfortable relationship with a member of the particle
physics community. The envoys should do their best to represent a
coherent view of the field. Envoys could also be used as a resource
for all members of the particle physics community to learn how to
impart the excitement in the field when speaking with others. A
broadly representative steering committee has been assembled and
will be working to establish the envoys this fall. A member of the
Fermilab UEC is on the steering committee. For questions, comments,
or more information on the program contact bagger@jhu.edu.
FNAL Task force on University/Lab ILC Collaborations -- Young-Kee Kim
A task force at FNAL has been charged with considering ways in which
university groups and laboratory particle physicists can collaborate
with accelerator physicists on ILC-related projects. The goal of the
task force is to develop a set of recommendations to the Directorate
that will establish an effective program in which university groups
can use their local resources to work with the FNAL accelerator
physicists. The initial focus is on developing collaboration at the
interface of the machine and the experiment. Recommendations include,
but are not limited to: developing training and education classes
needed to learn instrumentation, encouraging collaboration in beam
instrumentation at the detector/beam interface, creating resources for
a detector simulation and reconstruction framework, detector R&D, and
establishing tenure-track positions for ILC research. It is hoped that
the program is general enough to allow university and lab physicists
to build on the strengths of their departments. Universities should be
able to build items for the ILC and then bring them to the test beam
at the New Muon Lab or possibly other beamlines constructed for
accelerator research. The report from the task force is nearing its
final draft and should be made available to the Director within the next
month. When the report is finished, a two hour session is planned for the
task force to present their findings and recommendations to the FNAL
staff and users with a discussion afterwards.
Tevatron Luminosity Performance -- Ron Moore
Ron Moore (AD-Tevatron) gave a talk on the recent record-breaking
luminosities attained at the Tevatron. A few quantitative records:
Weekly Integrated Lum 33.3 pb-1
pbar Stacking Rate 20.5 10^10/hr
Peak Luminosity 229*10^30 cm-2 s-1
pbars at HEP Start 2870*10^9 pbars
Gains in luminosity have come from higher intensities of both protons and
pbars. Prior to the shutdown, up to 25% of the protons were being lost
during pbar injections. Those losses were dominated by beam-beam
interactions, especially from one particularly bad parasitic crossing
that became worse with higher pbar intensities. The losses were greatly
reduced by increasing separation between the beams using new voltage
settings on the separators. The luminosity lifetime increased by 15-20%
as a result of installing additional separators that allowed the beam
separation to be increased at the parasitic crossing points nearest to
the interaction points. Another contributor to the recent performance
improvement comes from a new tune working point in the Recycler. The
new tune allows for a smaller emittance of pbars delivered to the
Tevatron. In addition, the pbar stacking rate has been steadily
improving. Beyond that, the records can really be attributed to hard
work on the part of everybody in AD to increase the reliable operation
of the accelerator complex. For a more detailed look at Ron's talk, see:
http://beamdocs.fnal.gov/AD-public/DocDB/ShowDocument?docid=2522
Proposed Dates for Future UEC Meetings
- November 3, 2006
- December 8, 2006
Submitted by: Chris Polly, UEC Secretary
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