Fermilab Today Tuesday, September 25, 2007
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Fermilab makes case to keep Tevatron on

Fermilab Director Pier Oddone gives a presentation on long-term planning at the P5 panel Monday afternoon.

Fermilab Director Pier Oddone called for an extension of running at the Tevatron through 2010, given the productivity of DZero and CDF.

Oddone and members of the CDF and DZero collaborations asked the P5 panel to recommend the extension of the Tevatron run though 2010. P5 consists of 16 members from laboratories throughout the United States, including three Fermilab representatives: Dan Green, Boris Kayser and Marcela Carena. P5 makes recommendations to the High-Energy Physics Advisory Panel on the prioritization and funding of U.S. high-energy physics projects.

"There are a lot of interesting things going on, many of them very positive. So that is good," P5 chairman Abraham Seiden told Fermilab scientists at the start of a series of talks on laboratory initiatives.

The two-day visit to Fermilab is the last in a series of meetings throughout the country before P5 gives an update to HEPAP. A P5 recommendation would provide Fermilab a solid footing from which to launch requests for funding and entice scientists to plan for work with the Tevatron in 2010 rather than work on other experiments.

Tevatron collaborations have been churning out results and show no signs of slowing down. CDF has submitted 31 papers so far this year, and DZero 21.

"A positive recommendation from P5 soon on the 2010 running would better allow us to line up people and resources," said Darien Wood, co-spokesperson for DZero. "Let's keep this opportunity open and not lose it, and move forward."

CDF and DZero have been streamlining and automating operations and analysis so that they would have enough manpower to continue research through 2010. A steady stream of postdocs coming into the collaborations and a plan to retain senior scientists would make the extension viable, collaboration leaders said. Current estimates put the collaboration at about three times the minimum number of people needed to continue with a narrowed research focused on the Higgs search through FY 2009.

"We have enough people to do the physics," said Jacobo Konigsberg, cospokesperson for CDF. But the longer the delay in cementing the decision to extend the Tevatron research, the more difficult it will become to hold onto people and secure funding, Konigsberg added.

Without an additional $30 million, extending the Tevatron run would delay NoVA's launch in June 2011 by a few months and limit resources for Project X, International Linear Collider research and development and the neutrino program, Oddone said.

An extra year of research increases the amount of data collected and allows time for results from luminosity and technique improvements, Wood said. Collaboration leaders said a year's extension of the Tevetron's run could provide a 25 percent increase in analytical statistics over the current proposed end in September 2009. All of that points to a stronger chance of finding a Standard Model Higgs at the lowest mass scale, 115 GeV.

CDF and DZero are within "kissing distance" already of excluding a Higgs boson at 160 GeV, Oddone said.

It makes little sense to pull away and leave the Higgs standing at the door of discovery for a year or more while the LHC gears up.

During that time, the Tevatron could serve as a valuable aid to the LHC, Wood said. An extended run at the Tevatron prevents a gap in physics and eventually provides an overlap of research that cross checks discoveries at low-mass levels. The Tevatron uses some production and decay studies for low-mass, Standard Model searches not proposed by the LHC, Wood said.

"It would be a shame to have missed a discovery, or an important piece of physics, that could have been within our reach and we prematurely decided to stop," Konigsberg said.

--Tona Kunz

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