Symmetry factor

As a PI of a DOE grant, I received an e-mail today from Dennis Kovar, Acting Associate Director of the Office of Science for High Energy Physics at the US Department of Energy. This e-mail spelled out the consequences of the disasterous budget for High Energy Physics in 2008. Among other things it stated that operations of SLAC’s B-factory will be terminated in 2008:

“…The sudden and unanticipated work stoppage on NOvA and ILC unavoidably results in collateral damage to the rest of the HEP program. Significant cost savings would require laying off everyone working on those projects immediately. That is not achievable nor desirable. Thus the HEP office had to look for other large non-salary costs that could be reduced to meet the overall budget bottom-line. In the end this came down to a choice between running the Fermilab complex (Tevatron Collider and NuMI) or the SLAC B-Factory in FY2008 (or running both at ~1/2 or less of their scheduled operating weeks). Based on the guidance we have received from the scientific community (e.g.; HEPAP, P5, NAS, etc.), the operation of the Tevatron in FY 2008 has higher scientific priority. Thus the Tevatron and NuMI will operate on their planned schedule, and B-Factory operations will be terminated prematurely. This should not be considered a dismissal of the excellent and important science that the B-Factory has produced, but merely a statement of programmatic priorities in the face of difficult fiscal realities…”

Sounds like a rejection letter (”We had an excellent pool of applicants and although your credentials are excellent, we cannot offer you this position”), doesn’t it? But, as Jafar used to say, “Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

You can also read or even listen to Persis Drell’s (SLAC’s Director) All hands presentation today, where this situation was discussed. She also puts a date of March 2008 for the termination of the operations of SLAC’s B-factory and announced that SLAC will lay off 125 of its personnel. Also, “The ILC program will be stopped for the rest of this year and faces a very uncertain future.” Yep, desperate times…

So, what happened in 2007? According to popular and not-so-popular media, many things. Of course, it is customary for the popular press to form “the greatest discoveries of 2007″ in the form of “top-10 lists” (I wonder what criteria are used to order those lists - leave alone what puts those discoveries “on the list”) - maybe we should all blame David Letterman for that. Anyway, it is curious to check out those lists: from Science (which is understandably a bit heavy on the life sciences’ side), Nature (which is actually a collection of articles published there), PhysicsWorld (they break it by month: it is sad that “the best of 2007″ from the month of December is a category “US and UK physicists face funding cuts“), and from the APS service Physics News Update (which absolutely correctly puts MiniBoone’s results and top quark mass updates from FNAL among the top news). Even NPR’s Science Friday had a discussion of “most important events in 2007″ (BTW, that was one of the worst shows they had: they ended up with a nonsense discussion of how US science is funded as a “piramid scheme” and why it brings in foreign postdocs — apparently, only because they can be paid less than US-trained postdocs, total BS).

For the Russian-speaking audience I can add a couple of more: this one and this one. I must say that the last one is a bit strange, as it puts quite a bit of emphasis on the Fermilab’s discovery of cascade-b baryon (lots of PR from Fermilab, I guess…) and the infamous paper by Garret Lisi. But it also talks about funding crisis in the US high energy physics (this counters Peter Woit’s statement that it received so little attention in the press. It is interesting that Time Magazine puts return of excessive earmarks under Democratically-controlled Congress as one of the top-ten underreported stories of 2007 (yet another top-ten list, oh well…) — which might be one of the reasons that HEP got such a funding cut.

Since I mentioned the Russian-language press, here is another thing I read there over my holiday break: Russia is considering to bid for a site of the International Linear Collider built nearby Dubna in Moscow Region. If you can read Russian, here is an interview with Dr. Alexei Sisakian, Director General of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Reasearch (JINR) in Dubna. The interview was conducted by Rossijskaya Gazeta (The Russian Newspaper). Also, here is an interview with JINR’s Chief Engineer G. Shirkov about preliminary studies of building the ILC in Dubna, along with some possible site maps. Maybe its nothing. But maybe not — oil is expensive nowdays and Russia has lots of it…

I usually stay away from discussing politics in this blog. However, it appears that current political decisions are very unhealthy for US science. Case in point: current Omnibus bill that the Congress is about to send to the President.

Amazing thing happened: only several months ago, both US Congress and the President were in total accord with increased funding for US physical sciences. National initiatives such as America COMPETES Act were prime examples of the fact that US science and technology research and education are important for healthy development of the Nation. Fastforward to today: the bill that will soon be signed into law assumes ~10% cut to the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy. Funding for ITER is zeroed out - now, this is after all of the international-agreement-signing-at-highest-levels. Funding for ILC is given at the level of $15M (nice, huh? well, not so: those $15M are already spent, so no funding for ILC either), no funding for NOvA (a neutrino experiment at FNAL). University programs are largerly intact (if you can call a 2% reduction of our WSU base grant “intact”) — and this is the only good sign. We learned all of it during our recent DOE site visit (when a DOE oficial visits a University to check on the progress of a research program) two days ago.

Interesting: imagine you are building a house which is financed by a bank. You have a contract with that bank to deliver money for your construction in several installments. Now imagine that the bank decides not to give you one of your installments. What do you? You never work with that bank again, right? Hint? ITER? ILC?

See APS reaction to this here.

Yesterday CERN appointed new Director General. Rolf-Dieter Heuer will succeed Robert Aymar as CERN’s Director in January 2009. See CERN press-release here. Also, according to the current Director, the LHC is on-track for the promised  start of operations in the summer of 2008. Incidentally, my WSU experimental particle physics colleagues are at CERN this week, talking to CMS collaboration about future collaborative work. Our nuclear experimentalists are already part of the ALICE collaboration, so in the nearest future WSU would be one of the handful of US universities with participation in both high energy particle (CMS) and heavy ion (ALICE) physics activities at CERN. Very exciting!

Ouch! What a news from the UK! PhysicsWorld reported that due to a funding crisis in the UK science (aren’t we always in crisis when it is about funding science? It’s much easier to give out subprime loans and then moan about the crisis when peoople default on those), the country is pulling out of the International Linear Collider project. And not just pulling out because of the lack of funds — here is the exact text from the Delivery Plan, the document that is produced by the UK’s Facilities Council (which is “… [the organization that] operates world-class, large scale research facilities and provides strategic advice to the UK government on their development. It also manages international research projects in support of a broad cross-section of the UK research community. The Council also directs, coordinates and funds research, education and training.” — see the website):

“We will cease investment in the International Linear Collider. We do not see a practicable path towards the realisation of this facility as currently conceived on a reasonable timescale. “

How about that? And this is with all the ideas and plans that are already on the table (including projects that were chopped because of the ILC)… The International Linear Collider just became a chunck less international… This is really bad timing — as we learned recently, the real cost of ILC would also likely to go up…

P.S. One can find the complete text of the Delivery Plan here.

As I predicted here, Persis Drell has been named the fourth director of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. She is a great physicists and, I’m sure, will lead SLAC to a brighter future (which can be read as you wish — especially since SLAC will soon have no on-site particle physics experiements, but will have a very bright X-ray source). We interacted a bit what I was a postdoc at Cornell (she was a professor there for 14 years). She helped turn SLAC into an active astrophysics lab and resisted attempts to argue for building of a super-B factory there.

Hmm… maybe I should do predictions for money… wait, I actually do that — I’m a theorist…

How much does it cost to build the ILC? Well, according to the ILC Reference Design Report (already discussed here and here), it would cost about $7B (plus manpower) — not that expensive, if you put it in the perspective: for example, one new aircraft carrier costs about $8B.

Now, there is a letter to the Editor in the recent Physics Today which disputes this figure. In fact, Michael Riordan (UC Santa Cruz) claims that the correct estimate of the cost is not what was released in that report. To quote the article,

“The $7.5 billion total estimate cited is what such a collider might cost according to European accounting practices, assuming it were located at an existing laboratory, like CERN, that could absorb much of the construction management, R&D, and other costs into its normal operating budget. Nor does it include the costs of experimental detectors, contingency, or inflation. Adding those costs would push the total well north of $10 billion, by my calculations. If, as many of us hope, the ILC were to be built in the US, the Department of Energy would insist that all of the other costs be included, making it—as correctly reported in Science—a $10 billion to $15 billion project.”

Now, $15B — that is a big number. According to Burton Richter (Nobel Prize winner and former Director of SLAC), this number is about right:

“The cost in US terms is easy to calculate. The ILC value cost estimate leaves out lab personel costs, inflation, contingency, detectors, physics support buildings, and R&D in support of construction. When I put those in I get about 15-16 billion for the cost of the 0.5 TeV version as construction projects costs are usually calculated here.

The DOE has been through this before for ITER. The value cost of ITER is about $5 billion, but in US terms the budget throught he construction project for our share (10%) is not $500 million, but $1.1 billion. The DOE and the administration made the decision to join based on the cost in US terms. The same process will be used for the ILC. The US HEP community should take its head out of the sand and face the reality. A US 50 % share as host is within the
realm of possibility, but only if the community gets behind it and recognizes the true financial impact.

Feel free to circulate this iif you wish.

Burton Richter”

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So… well, supersymmetry (or something truly exciting) is better be there - let’s see what LHC tells us about that…

I got back from Fermilab, where I stayed for a day of a Project X workshop. This workshop is the second in a series of trying to chart the intermediate future of Fermilab — in other words, in between 2009 when we loose Tevatron until 202X when the International Linear Collider (ILC) will be operational at FNAL (ok, I’m an optimist here). The first workshop was about accelerator issues, i.e. technical aspects of high intensity source at FNAL. So this one was regarding building the “physics case”, i.e. what physics one can do at the “intensity frontier” with that machine. I was curious what would be the outcome of that workshop - you see, there originally was an “intermediate project” - it was called BTeV and it was supposed to study flavor physics. So to make the long story short, I actually was in “physical” attendance for the first day of the conference and was asked to connect “virtually” for the second day (I participated in the “antiprotons” working group).

Instead of reporting about the workshop (you can actually look at the transparences of the talks here), I want to convey the atmosphere of what was happening there, in particular concentrating on the talk by Jon Bagger (which had the gist of what other theorists, Joe Lykken and Hitoshi Murayama also said). It was a bit surprizing to me to see Jon give a Project-X talk, since, as far as I know, he was the one of the biggest proponents to streamline the the high energy physics program by consolidating the efforts of most of the US physicists around ILC (which practically resulted in the cancelation of BTeV and a number of other flavor physics experiments with great physics programs such as RSVP or CKM). He concentrated on three physics topics that one can do with this device: quark flavor physics (kaon rare decays), charged lepton flavor physics (muon transitions via flavor-changing neutral currents (FCNC)) and neutrino physics. Indeed those are the things one can do with 8 GeV super-intense proton beams.

The point is that LHC might not be sensitive to flavor physics of the first two generations, i.e. how new physics at the TeV-scale couples to them. That used to be the reason to do flavor experiments — and continues to be in Japan and at CERN. The only thing that we know now that we didn’t know when the plug was pulled on experimental flavor physics effort in the US is that the Nature happened to be following the concept of “Minimal Flavor Violation” (or MFV) - or very close to it. Which means that whatever new physics awaits us at a TeV-scale, for some reason it chose to communicate itself to low energy scales by the Standard Model-like operators. We were hoping for spectacular results in B (or charm) physics, but it didn’t happen… and we don’t know why.

What was interesting in his talk are the messages that he decided to draw — and which gave him a very hostile reception. First, he asked if “some experiments could be done cheaper elsewhere” (yes, indeed - as someone in the audience noted, the US can simply NOT do any HEP experiments and wait for the Europeans/Chineese/Japaneese physicists to do them — but is this a good approach?). Second, Jon said that “detailed calculations needed to convince everybody of the importance of Project X in the world flavor program” (that drew lots of emotions from people who were on the cancelled Fermilab kaon experiments, which passed the physics studies with flying colors). I actually think that one does need to go back to the drawing board here. First of all, feasibility of new kaon experiments was not demonstrated for the high-intensity setup project X is going to be. Second, one needs to see if the expected results will improve on the approved CERN and KEK experiments. Of course, having an estimated statistics of 800-1000 events for a kaon experiment in Project-X in the FCNC channel K+ -> pi+ nu nu-bar is great! Finally, Jon said the following: “If Project-X positions Fermilab as a credible host [for ILC], it might be well worth the effort. If not — it will be a mistake”… It’s an interesting statement that reflects the ILC-centric views of many in US high energy physics (BTW, the preceeding talk by David McGinnis actually stated that accelerator issues in Project X are very much alligned to what one expects to have at the ILC). But, as many people later complained in private conversations, it significantly narrows the scope of US particle physics program. In particular, it implies that studying QCD is not worth the effort. So here is the gist of it — we report, you decide :-).

One of the impressions that I got at this conference is that how difficult it would be so see if Project X has an easy place to be in the world-wide flavor-physics effort. Many similar studies of kaon decays are done at CERN and KEK; experiments with charged leptons are being performed at PSI in Switzerland, neutrinos are being studied at CERN and KEK, and antiproton experiments will be done at GSI in Germany (PANDA) - their FAIR facility just got government approval. Of course, independent checks of the results are needed… at any rate, it’s the huge intensity of the proposed proton source that can give us an edge…

P.S. For a general discussion of the Project-X workshop (including Gene Golowich’s quote from the CHARM-2007 conference — which really has nothing to do with that particular Project-X workshop, but tells you something about the status of flavor physics in the US) see here.

I am at Fermilab today. Yesterday I gave a seminar in the Theoretical Physics Department there, but today I decided to stay for the Project X Workshop. Basically, the idea is to toss around ideas for the physics case for the Fermlab’s intermediate future project — the high intensity proton source. Indeed, he most obvious physics application of this is a some sort of neutrino experiment. But people talk about new experiments with muons, kaons (some sort of revival of the RSVP experiment idea — but at FNAL — and with a possibility of 800-1000 events of the type K -> pi nu anti-nu), and even antiprotons (low energy, only 8 GeV). Let’s see what hapends…

The 2009 meeting of the Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) of American Physical Society (APS) will be held on campus of Wayne State University in Detroit. How do I know that? Well, I am a Chair of the Local Organizing Committee. And Executive Committee of DPF has just accepted our proposal to host this meeting.

So, what kind of meeting is that? Well, this is the main event for the DPF, usually attended by about 500 physicists working in, well, field of particles and fields (and also strings). We are looking forward to hosting this meeting. Here is the Local Organizing Committee:

Alexey Petrov (WSU, co-Chair), Claude Pruneau (WSU), David Cinabro (WSU), Eizabeth H. Simmons (MSU), Gordon Kane (Michigan), Paul Karchin (WSU, co-Chair), Rene Bellwied (WSU), Robert Harr (WSU), R. Sekhar Chivukula (MSU), Sean Gavin (WSU), Sergei Voloshin (WSU)

Please consider attending this conference to hear first results from the LHC, new results from Fermilab and B-factories and recent advances in theory. If you want to dispel some of your stereotypes about Detroit, this would be great time to do so.