No LBNE

... or at least, not the way it has been envisioned.

The US Dept. of Energy has requested that LBNE be scaled down in light of flat budget for the Office of Science in the next foreseeable future.

At a projected $1.5 billion, the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, is not affordable, says William Brinkman, director of DOE's Office of Science. So this week he asked physicists to come up with a cheaper way to do the same science.

This seems to be a common pattern lately. The FRIB project also initially was supposed to be twice as expensive, until it was scaled down. We shall see what kind of a plan the Fermilab/LBNE collaboration can come up with to salvage the project.

Zz.