Funding situation, future plans given at Users' meeting

Steve Koonin, DOE under secretary for science, spoke about physics and energy at the annual Users' Meeting last week.

Hundreds of particle physicists and graduate students from around the globe converged at Fermilab last week for a chance to hear the latest news about their colleagues' experiments, present their own results and learn about the laboratory's future.

Just as the Users' Meeting gives attendees a peek into the current, planned and proposed programs at Fermilab, it also provides a broader picture of the field. Members of the Department of Energy and Congress, as well as Fermilab Director Pier Oddone laid out current funding and political situations and future plans for meeting attendees.

Oddone highlighted some of the laboratory's recent successes, lauded recent results and laid out a plan for all three frontiers, particularly focusing on up-and-coming experiments at the Intensity Frontier, such as NOvA.

Some of the laboratory's future plans at the Energy Frontier remain uncertain, Oddone explained, but only because Fermilab will choose its experiments in that area once results from the LHC indicate what areas of study need more research.

Both Dennis Kovar, DOE associate director of science for High Energy Physics, and Steve Koonin, DOE under secretary for science, explained that the government is taking cues from advisory groups and the P5 report (pdf), a strategic 10-year plan put together by the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel.

"We've got to put together a plan that will deliver outstanding science and make investments in next-generation technology and accelerators," Kovar said. "We need to invest to advance science and technology. This is important to the nation. Our field drives innovation."

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-- Rhianna Wisniewski

International Workshop on Heavy Quarkonia

Participants of the 7th International Workshop on Heavy Quarkonia, which was held at Fermilab May 18-21. More than 120 experimentalists and theorists from around the world gathered to present and discuss the latest progress in the understanding of the physics of heavy quarkonia (bound states of heavy quark-antiquark pairs). Many new and exciting results were presented on heavy-quarkonium spectroscopy, decay, and production mechanisms and properties in nuclear media, within the Standard Model and beyond. More information.

Earth's random walk could jolt particle accelerators

From Physicsworld.com, June 4, 2010

A study in the US has revealed that, apart from motion due to tides, seismic activity and other geophysical phenomena, the ground also moves entirely at random, at least over scales ranging from metres to kilometres. Vladimir Shiltsev came to this conclusion after using data from several particle accelerator facilities, where accurate information about the facility's precise position is essential. The result confirms a simple equation he put forward to describe the motion and may also prove useful in the design of future particle accelerators.

Much of the early work on random ground motion was done by Russian researchers who had worked on the design of VLEPP, a planned electron-proton collider in Protvino, about 100 km south of Moscow. VLEPP was to have operated in the trillion electron volt range, comparable to the energy of CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which is today the world's largest and most powerful accelerator. Although VLEPP was scrapped with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian physicists continued to publish papers on random ground motion.

Shiltsev, now working at Fermilab, was just starting his career when some of these papers appeared, and has spent the past two decades trying to expand on some of the preliminary findings. This led him to create a simple, back-of-the-envelope calculation to estimate how the distance between two points will change over time. It involves multiplying the distance between two points along an accelerator by both the elapsed time and a coefficient describing the amount of random motion in a give locale, generally around 100 nm in any direction each minute. The square root of that number gives the rate of movement.

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