Let the physics begin

DOE Under Secretary for Science and Director of the Office of Science Raymond L. Orbach approves the formal completion of the U.S. LHC construction project.

U.S. LHC construction project declared formally complete

The decade-long project to help build CERN's LHC accelerator, and the ATLAS and CMS detectors culminated yesterday (June 25) when Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, Department of Energy under secretary for science and director of the Office of Science, announced the formal completion of the U.S. LHC construction project.

More than 1,200 physicists, engineers and technicians from 90 U.S. universities and national laboratories contributed to this significant milestone, officially known as Critical Decision-4B.

"I would like to congratulate the physicists, engineers and technicians who made the U.S. LHC construction project possible," Orbach said. "The U.S. has made important contributions to this impressive international effort."

The DOE and National Science Foundation jointly funded the $531 million project. Close coordination between the funding agencies, U.S. universities and national laboratories resulted in the on-time and on-budget delivery of all U.S. components.

"We are proud to have partnered with the DOE in supporting the U.S. LHC collaborations in this historic international effort," said Joseph Dehmer, physics division director of the National Science Foundation. "We also note with pride the excellent performance of the construction project, and we look forward to the period of scientific discovery that will result."

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-- Elizabeth Clements

GSA poster award winners

At the annual Users' meeting June 4-5, a panel of judges selected three winners from the 60 posters presented. Winners received monetary awards from URA. From left: Jason Slaunwhite, CDF collaborator from Ohio State University, was selected for his poster titled "The Search for Higgs Bosons Produced in Association with W Bosons at CDF." Jorge Benitez, a DZero collaborator from Michigan State University, was selected for his poster titled "Single Top Quark Production at D0 Using Boosted Decision Trees." Not pictured: Marcelle Soares-Santos, a collaborator in Fermilab's Dark Energy Survey groups from San Paulo University in Brazil. Soares-Santos' poster was titled "Voronoi Tesselation Cluster Finding Algorithm."

Doomsday lawsuit dissed

From MSNBC Cosmic Log,
June 24, 2008

The federal government today struck back in force against a lawsuit that has raised an alarm over the world's biggest particle collider. In 40 documents comprising hundreds of pages, attorneys and government officials contended that "scientifically, there is no basis for any conceivable threat" from black holes or the other theoretical horrors posed in the suit.

If the government has its way, the lawsuit would be thrown out on procedural grounds even before getting to the scientific arguments.

The civil suit, filed in Hawaii's U.S. District Court in March, contends that Europe's Large Hadron Collider might destroy the earth by creating microscopic black holes or other exotic phenomena. The plaintiffs in the case - Spanish science writer Luis Sancho and Walter Wagner, a retired nuclear physicist who lives in Hawaii - want the court to put a hold on collider operations to leave more time for safety reviews.

Sancho and Wagner's call for a go-slow approach runs counter to the prevailing scientific view that the LHC poses no globe-gobbling risk. Just last Friday, Europe's CERN nuclear research organization issued a safety report reiterating that view - and in today's filings, the U.S. Department of Energy said it accepted the findings of that report, as well as earlier reports that came to similar conclusions.

Critics have tried to poke holes in those safety reports, but one of the documents filed today says the Energy Department "is not aware of a single instance where the conclusions of those reports have been contested or rebutted in any particle physics peer-reviewed or scholarly forum."

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