The issues of the week
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Pier Oddone |
Two issues dominated last week. The first arose from the decisions about the LHC that followed from the Chamonix meeting, affecting the LHC's running schedule, the accelerator repairs and plans for future upgrades. The second was the unveiling of the President's budget for FY2011.
The results of the Chamonix meeting were presented last Friday at CERN in a series of presentations culminating in Steve Myers's summary. The most important decision was to run the LHC at 7 TeV center-of-mass energy for about two years or one inverse femtobarn, whichever comes first. After that, the LHC would be shut down to fix a few thousand interconnections once and for all, a shutdown that would require at least a year.
Coming out of the shutdown the accelerator would be ready for a long run at the full 14 TeV center-of-mass energy. Not surprisingly these plans brought the press asking how the extended run at low energy and relatively low luminosity would affect our own plans for the Tevatron. We support the decision to run the LHC conservatively. The planned first run of two years already opens significant physics opportunities beyond the Tevatron, so at this time we do not expect this decision to affect our own plans to conclude the Tevatron run at the end of FY2011.
While the schedule of the LHC is now more concrete, CERN will revisit the timing for the upgrades of the LHC accelerator and detectors. This could have consequences for our own plans in the US. In particular a rigorous examination of the limits on performance has raised questions about the need for the SPL, a major superconducting linac that CERN would build as part of replacing the LHC injection chain.
The President's budget request, unveiled Monday of last week, was favorable for both the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy Office of Science. Despite the freeze on overall domestic spending the Office of Science has a proposed increase of 4.4 percent and high-energy physics a proposed increase of 2.3 percent. This is a good outcome for science in these very difficult times.
As we analyze the proposed budget for FY2011 at Fermilab, it is easy to conclude that we will have a very challenging year in 2011. We will be trying to ramp up the future programs at the same time that we extend the Tevatron run through a full year of operations with significantly increased power costs. We will need to exercise maximum efficiency and austerity. We might as well tighten our belts two more notches, starting now.
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Snow
