We Have Ignition!

So the big news of the week, which was preceded by the rumors a few days before the official announcement, is the breakeven achievement in a fusion process at Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility (NIF).

This is certainly a major breakthrough, and it is something that has achieved for the very first time ever in a controlled experiment (it happens all the time in our Sun and other stars). However, to me, this is more of a proof-of-principle experiment, meaning that it is a demonstration that it is possible, rather than to show that it is viable. It is certainly very, VERY far away from producing anything useful because harnessing this energy is an entirely different matter.

While you can read many sites reporting this, I kinda like the one that I read on CNET because there's a certainly level of sensibility aimed towards the general public. In particular, there is this definition of what is meant by "breakeven":

More specifically, scientists at NIF kickstarted a fusion reaction using about 2 megajoules of energy to power the lasers and were able to get about 3 megajoules out. Based on the definition of ignition used by NIF, the benchmark has been passed during this one short pulse. 

But that doesn't convey the whole thing, because this is what should also be mentioned:

"The calculation of energy gain only considers the energy that hit the target, and not the [very large] energy consumption that goes into supporting the infrastructure," said Patrick Burr, a nuclear engineer at the University of New South Wales.

What it means is that they only considered the energy of the laser hitting the target, and then finding the energy output from the ignition that subsequently resulted in fusion. Sure, that energy output is greater than the input energy of the laser, but this is not the total energy of the entire facility that created the laser. That facility would still not be self-sufficient to run just by using the output energy of the fusion it created, even assuming 100% efficiency.

This does not diminish the amazing achievement, considering that other facilities and techniques have not even reach this level. It is just that it needs to be tampered with a bit more realistic expectations so that we don't oversell ourselves to the public.

Zz.

The Future of CMB Exploration

You would think that once the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has been discovered and studied, that was the end of it. That is not how science typically works, especially on something that has such a rich amount of information as the CMB.

This article reports on the next proposed major research effort in the US in further studying the CMB and refining the measurements that we currently have. The article gives you a good over view of what we currently know about the CMB, what we wish to extract out of it, and how it can be done. This appears to be a joint effort between two major science funding agencies in the US: the US Dept. of Energy and the US National Science Foundation, and will have an estimated cost of $650 million.

As someone who likes to include contemporary and most recent relevant news into my lessons, this will be another item that I will include in my Intro to Astronomy class.

Z.

Work Begins On FACET II at SLAC

The upgrade to FACET facility at SLAC promises to improve the beam electron beam quality at the accelerator facility. One of the direct benefits of this upgrade is further advancement in the plasma wakefield accelerator technique. This technique has previously shown to be capable of producing very high accelerating gradient and thus, has the potential to produce accelerating structures that can accelerate charged particles to higher energies over shorter distances.

Now, when you read the press release that I linked above, make sure you are very clear on what it said. The FACET II facility is NOT a facility that operates using this "plasma wakefield" technique. It is a facility that produces an improved electron beam quality, both in energy and emittance, among other things. This electron beam (which is produced via conventional means) is THEN will be used in the study of this wakefield accelerator technique.

The project is an upgrade to the Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET), a DOE Office of Science user facility that operated from 2011 to 2016. FACET-II will produce beams of highly energetic electrons like its predecessor, but with even better quality. These beams will primarily be used to develop plasma acceleration techniques, which could lead to next-generation particle colliders that enhance our understanding of nature’s fundamental particles and forces and novel X-ray lasers that provide us with unparalleled views of ultrafast processes in the atomic world around us.

So read carefully the "sequence of events" here and not get too highly distracted by thinking that FACET II is a "novel X-ray laser, etc..." facility. It isn't. It is a facility, an important facility, to develop the machines that will give us more knowledge to make all these other capabilities.

Consider this as my public service to you to clarify a press release! :)

Zz.

The US 2017 Omnibus Budget

Finally, the US Congress has a 2017 budget, and this is the time that I'm glad they didn't follow the disastrous budget proposal of Donald Trump. Both NSF and DOE Office of Science didn't fare badly, with NSF doing worse than I expected. Still, what a surprise to see an increase in funding for HEP after years of neglect and budget cuts.

The Office of Science supports six research programs, and there were winners and losers among them. On the plus side, advanced scientific computing research, which funds much of DOE's supercomputing capabilities, gets a 4.2% increase to $647 million. High energy physics gets a boost of 3.8% to $825 million. Basic energy sciences, which funds work in chemistry, material science, and condensed matter physics and runs most of DOE's large user facilities, gets a bump up of 1.2% to $1.872 billion. Nuclear physics gets a 0.8% raise to $622 million; biological and environmental research inches up 0.5% to $612 million. In contrast, the fusion energy sciences program sees its budget fall a whopping 13.2% to $380 million.

It will continue to be challenging for physics funding during the next foreseeable future, but at least this will not cause a major panic. I've been highly critical of the US Congress on many issues, but I will tip my hat to them this time for standing up to the ridiculous budget that came out of the Trump administration earlier.

Zz.

Rick Perry Backtracks On DOE

During his confirmation hearing today, Rick Perry changed his mind about wanting to shut down the US Dept. of Energy.

I have learned a great deal about the important work being done every day by the outstanding men and women of the Department of Energy. I have spoken several times to Secretary Moniz about the operation. I have spoken to his predecessors. And if confirmed, my desire is to lead this agency in a thoughtful manner surrounding myself with the expertise on the core function of the department. My past statements made over five years ago about abolishing the Department of Energy do not reflect my current thinking. In fact, after being briefed on some of the vital functions of the Department of Energy, I regret recommending its elimination.

While it is good of him to chance his mind once he learned a bit more of what he's talking about, it doesn't diminish the fact that he and many other politicians are in a habit of going public with ideas and policies out of IGNORANCE. For some odd reason, many of them do not care that they make up their minds AND going public with such decision BEFORE they actually gather proper information about these things.

And if you think this is an isolated incident, you'd be wrong. I've highlighted several rather DUMB AND STUPID actions or comments made in public by these elected officials, all out of ignorance (read this and this, for example). I think that this is a common, standard-operating-procedure by many elected officials, that they really didn't do their homework in many decisions that they make.

Zz.

Particle Accelerators - Current And Future Applications

Another example of where accelerators have wide-ranging applications outside of just high energy physics experiments.



Zz.

Accelerator Development For National Security

So let me point out this news article first before I go off on my rant. This article describes an important application of particle accelerators that has an important application in national security via the generation of high-energy photons. These photons can be used in a number of different ways for national security purposes.

The compact photon source, which is being developed by Berkeley Lab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Idaho National Laboratory, is tunable, allowing users to produce MeV photons within very specific narrow ranges of energy, an improvement that will allow the fabrication of highly sensitive yet safe detection instruments to reach where ordinary passive handheld sensors cannot, and to identify nuclear material such as uranium-235 hidden behind thick shielding. "The ability to choose the photon energy is what would allow increased sensitivity and safety. Only the photons that produce the best signal and least noise would be delivered," explains project lead Cameron Geddes, a staff scientist at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center.
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To make a tunable photon source that is also compact, Geddes and his team will use one of BELLA's laser plasma accelerators (LPAs) instead of a conventional accelerator to produce a high-intensity electron beam. By operating in a plasma, or ionized gas, LPAs can accelerate electrons 10,000 times "harder" or faster than a conventional accelerator. "That means we can achieve the energy that would take tens of meters in a conventional accelerator within a centimeter using our LPA technology," Geddes says.

I've mentioned about this type of advanced accelerator scheme a few times on here, so you can do a search to find out more.

Now, to my rant. I hate the title, first of all. It perpetuates the popular misunderstanding that accelerators means "high energy physics". Notice that the production of light source in this case has no connection to high energy physics field of study, and it isn't for such a purpose. The article did mention that this scheme is also being developed as a possible means to generate future high-energy electrons for particle colliders. That's fine, but this scheme is independent of such a purpose, and as can be seen, can be used as a light source for many different uses outside of high energy physics.

Unfortunately, the confusion is also perpetuated by the way funding for accelerator science is done within the DOE. Even though more accelerators in the US is used as light sources (synchrotron and FEL facilities) than they are for particle colliders, all the funding for accelerator science is still being handled by DOE's Office of Science High Energy Physics Division. DOE's Basic Energy Sciences, which funds synchrotron light sources and SLAC's LCLS, somehow would not consider funding advancement in accelerator science, even though they greatly benefit from this field. NSF, on the other hand, has started to separate out Accelerator Science funding from High Energy Physics funding, even though the separation so far hasn't been clean.

What this means is that, with the funding in HEP in the US taking a dive the past several years, funding in Accelerator Science suffered the same collateral damage, even though Accelerator Science is actually independent of HEP and has vital needs in many areas of physics.

Articles such as this should make it clear that this is not a high energy physics application, and not fall into the trap of associating accelerator science with HEP.

Zz.

The compact photon source, which is being developed by Berkeley Lab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Idaho National Laboratory, is tunable, allowing users to produce MeV photons within very specific narrow ranges of energy, an improvement that will allow the fabrication of highly sensitive yet safe detection instruments to reach where ordinary passive handheld sensors cannot, and to identify nuclear material such as uranium-235 hidden behind thick shielding. "The ability to choose the photon energy is what would allow increased sensitivity and safety. Only the photons that produce the best signal and least noise would be delivered," explains project lead Cameron Geddes, a staff scientist at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-04-national-high-energy-physics.html#jCp

The compact photon source, which is being developed by Berkeley Lab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Idaho National Laboratory, is tunable, allowing users to produce MeV photons within very specific narrow ranges of energy, an improvement that will allow the fabrication of highly sensitive yet safe detection instruments to reach where ordinary passive handheld sensors cannot, and to identify nuclear material such as uranium-235 hidden behind thick shielding. "The ability to choose the photon energy is what would allow increased sensitivity and safety. Only the photons that produce the best signal and least noise would be delivered," explains project lead Cameron Geddes, a staff scientist at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-04-national-high-energy-physics.html#jCp

Three US Dark Matter Projects Get Funding Approval

The US Dept. of Energy and National Science Foundation have jointly approved the funding of three dark matter search projects. These projects were selected based on the recommendation of the P5 panel, which released its report earlier this year.

Two key US federal funding agencies – the Department of Energy's Office of High Energy Physics and the National Science Foundation's Physics Division – have revealed the three "second generation" direct-detection dark-matter experiments that they will support. The agencies' programme will include the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search-SNOLAB (SuperCDMS), the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment and the next iteration of the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment (ADMX-Gen2). 

Certainly, with High Energy Physics funding in the US being squeezed and shrinking each year, this is the best outcome on funding for the search of dark matter experiments.

Zz.

Revamping The DOE Labs

A new report produced by an interesting group of organizations has recommended sweeping management changes at DOE in the structure and running of the US Department of Energy's non-weapons laboratories.

One jolt would be to name a single DOE undersecretary for science and technology to oversee the 13 nonweapons laboratories, instead of the two that do the job now. Another recommendation would remake how the department evaluates the contractors that run the labs for the federal government. The labs should also have more flexibility to set their own spending priorities, charge fees for the use of their facilities, and develop broader entrepreneurial partnerships with industry, the report asserts. The goal, the authors write, "is not to just tinker around the edges but to build policy reforms that re-envision the lab system."

The current system is enmeshed in red tape, reporting requirements, and program directives, according to the report. "Decisions that should be made by research teams and lab managers are instead preapproved and double checked by a long and growing chain of command at DOE," it notes. "At the smallest level, DOE, in concert with [the White House Office of Management and Budget] and Congress, micromanages internal lab-directed investment decisions."

This is fine and dandy, but I echo the comment by former Lab Director Burton Richter:

One former DOE lab director, however, is skeptical that implementing the report's recommendations will produce lasting change. "The report is very good in many respects, and I'm delighted to see these issues being discussed out in the light of day again," says Burton Richter, the director emeritus of DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California. He supports many of the recommendations but says that the report doesn't "explain how you would actually achieve the culture change within DOE and Washington you'd need to persuade Congress and the bureaucrats to loosen the reins." He believes that a return to micromanagement is inevitable without a fundamental change in the culture. 

In other words, one has to point the finger at Congress as well, who seem to think that they know the science priorities to set, and therefore, do their own micromanagement. If the report does NOT address that and ignore this huge component, then the DOE can make as many management changes as they want and nothing will actually change.

As a former physicist that has worked at a US Nat'l Lab, I can tell you that, while adopting to the maddening array of DOE regulations and redundant directives can be a huge pain, I'd rather deal with that than the uncertain, meandering, and ill-conceived funding directives from Congress. With DOE regulation, one at least knows what what is getting into, and the bureaucracy made them slow to change. So you can expect almost the same thing year in, year out. With the politicians, who knows! It is significantly more difficult in dealing with uncertain priorities and not knowing what will happen in the next few months.

So how come no organization is doing any kind of study on how politicians screw the US science effort, huh?

Zz.

Ernest Moniz Leading Candidate For DOE Post

The rumor that we have been getting is that MIT Physicist Ernest Moniz is the leading candidate to replace the retiring Steven Chu for the Secretary of the US Department of Energy (DOE). This makes for another physicist being selected to run that branch of the Federal Govt.

The leading candidate to replace departing energy secretary Steven Chu is Ernest Moniz, director of the Energy Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. He would bring to the office a pragmatic support for nuclear power and natural gas, along with a candid desire to, in his own words, “innovate like hell” on basic energy technologies. Colleagues at MIT are waiting for a confirmation of the appointment, which could come as early as this week. “Ernie is a real people person, and he took us to a whole new level in terms of both size and visibility,” says Howard Herzog, a participant in the Energy Initiative who works on carbon capture and sequestration technologies at MIT.

From that news article, it certainly appears that Moniz might be able to better navigate the politics of Washington, since he has had plenty of experience dealing with that kind of cra... err ... environment before.

If this comes true, I would be happy enough. I was dreading the idea of a non-scientist, a non-engineer, or worst still, a career bureaucrat, running what is essentially a science/engineering/technical branch of the govt. We have had those before with other administrations. I'd rather not have that again.

Zz.

Steven Chu Resigns

In case you didn't see this already, Steven Chu announced his resignation as the US Energy Secretary.

Chu will enter the record books as the longest-serving Secretary in DOE's 35-year history, and the first Nobel laureate to lead the sprawling, $27 billion department. Once a successor is named, Chu says that he plans to return to California. He spent 17 years on the faculty of Stanford University before moving to the University of California, Berkeley, and was director of DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory before coming to Washington in January 2009.

Despite the Solyndra debacle, I thought he did an admirable job considering that he was faced with a hostile congress that was determined to cut funding to the sciences regardless of the harm it will do not only to the advancement of knowledge, but also to the US economy.

It will be interesting to see who President Obama will nominate to replace him. I'm hoping that it will be someone who is a scientist and not a science-challenged bureaucrat (cough bill richardson cough!).

Zz.

RHIC In Danger Of Being Shut Down

In operation for only about 12 years, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven is in danger of being shut down, due to budget shortall for DOE's Nuclear Physics division.

A panel of scientists has recommended shutting the last U.S. grand atom smasher, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, to make room in a tight budget for other projects funded by the Department of Energy (DOE).

Closing RHIC would be a disaster for the U.S. nuclear physics community, says Robert Tribble, a nuclear physicist at Texas A&M University, College Station, who chaired the committee that suggested doing exactly that in a report today to DOE's Nuclear Science Advisory Committee (NSAC). "I don't think there are winners and losers here," he says. "We're all losers if this comes to pass." NSAC is expected to approve the report tomorrow, and DOE has usually followed such recommendations from its advisory panels. 

While this is a sad news, it is not unexpected, considering what the panel had to deal with, especially when faced with the 2 new construction projects that they had to consider.

The Tribble committee weighed the relative importance of three very different facilities. RHIC uses twin accelerators to smash heavy nuclei together to produce fleeting puffs of a weird type of matter called a quark gluon plasma that filled the newborn universe. In contrast, DOE's other existing major nuclear physics rig, the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia, fires electrons into protons and neutrons to study their inner workings. In addition, physicists plan to build a $615 million Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University in East Lansing that would generate myriad exotic nuclei usually produced only in supernova explosion.

Researchers are currently finishing a $310 million upgrade to CEBAF, and the committee recommended exploiting that investment, Tribble told NSAC. That forced the group to choose between continuing to run RHIC, which has been collecting data since 2000, and building FRIB, which could start taking data by the end of the decade. The committee included representatives from all three projects, says Tribble, who declined to give the vote tally.

As has been said, we are all losers if this facility shuts down.

Zz.

Scaled-Down LBNE

After the full-blown LBNE was rejected by US DOE, Fermilab's official submitted a scaled-down version of LBNE to full review.

Kim presented the new plan for the first stage of LBNE. The preferred option calls for building a new beam line at Fermilab to fire neutrinos 1300 kilometers through Earth to a particle detector on the surface at the abandoned Homestake gold mine in Lead, South Dakota. That detector would contain 10,000 tonnes of frigid liquid argon. (The original LBNE design called for a larger, 34,000-tonne detector buried 1480 meters deep in Homestake and a smaller "near detector" at Fermilab.)

Let's see if this thing will fly, AND, with the $135 million from international collaborators.

Zz.

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.

Severe Blows To US Nuclear Physics and High Energy Physics Funding

The current President Obama's 2013 budget proposal for the Department of Energy appears to be devastating for Nuclear/Fusion physics and High Energy Physics funding.

Overall, the budget numbers for the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science, the single largest funder of physical sciences research in the United States, look reasonably good. The office would see its budget climb by 2.4% to $4.992 billion. Three of the office's six major research programs, however, are slated for potentially devastating cuts. While programs with connections to clean energy technologies come out ahead, the fusion energy science, nuclear physics, and high-energy physics programs suffer.

While this is severe, it isn't surprising. The US appears to have "shut down" and freely relinquish any kind of initiative to reclaim its powers in high energy physics. And let's be clear about this, the economic impact will be felt soon enough, not just in terms of the direct scientific benefits, but also the technological side effects that typically accompany a major accelerator facility. Somehow, people still do not see how advances in experimental high energy physics have trickled down into devices that are now being used in material science, medicine, etc. Advances that we make for particle detectors will be the high resolution detectors in medical physics of tomorrow. That type of benefits have somehow been lost completely.

And again, as in the past, it appears that the burden of trying to "cut spending" falls onto the small guys, the ones with the small budgets, rather than on the big boys.

Zz.

Steve Koonin To Leave DOE

The US Dept. of Energy has announced that Steve Koonin will leave his post as Undersecretary for Science at the DOE.

Koonin's departure, announced in an 8 November memo from Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, busts up something of a scientific dream team within the upper echelons of DOE. Its other members are Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and William Brinkman, the director of DOE's Office of Science, who was executive director of physics research at the storied Bell Labs. However, observers say they're not surprised to see Koonin go, as his position gave him little power.

"Steve's been looking around for awhile—it hasn't been a secret," says Michael Lubell, a lobbyist with the American Physical Society (APS) in Washington, D.C. "He has not been terribly happy at DOE for some time."

You may read the possibler reasons for his departure in the article. At first I thought this was one of the fallout from the Solyndra debacle. Luckily, it wasn't!

Zz.

New Hope For Sanford Lab at Homestake

After the National Science Foundation (NSF) balked at funding DUESL, the Dept. of Energy (DOE) appears to be the steward of the underground laboratory at Homestake. In the new proposed congressional budget, a $15 million funding has been allocated to building this lab.

The combination of federal funding and support from the scientific community means the associated laboratories being built underground for experiments into dark matter and neutrinos -- which were the objects of Nobel Prize-winning research at the 4,850-foot level of the mine decades ago -- should be finished and can begin operation next year.

But the scale of this laboratory has been cut back significantly from the original plan for DUESL envisioned by NSF.

The Deep Underground Science & Engineering Laboratory, or DUSEL, was originally conceived as a complex of laboratories at different levels down to 7,400 feet below the surface and costing $1 billion or more. That structure seems to be fading into the realities of a tight federal budget and a shift in responsibility for the project from the National Science Foundation to the Department of Energy.

It is a transition that will at least for now limit the scope and cost of the underground laboratory work and mean DUSEL will not be part of the project lexicon.

 One can only hope that the scaled-down project will get that funding, and this becomes the newest US National Laboratory.

Zz.

High Cost For Underground Physics Experiments

The cost for building a suite of underground physics experiments has come in, and it isn't pretty.

So DOE's Office of Science asked a committee led by Jay Marx of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena to evaluate the costs and risks of different options for the three main experiments slated for Homestake. The first is a gigantic particle detector known as the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) to snare particles called neutrinos fired from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), 1300 kilometers away in Batavia, Illinois. The second is a detector weighing several tons to spot particles of the mysterious dark matter whose gravity appears to bind the galaxies. The third is a detector weighing at least a ton that would search for a revolutionary form of radioactivity called neutrinoless double beta decay.

The cost for building LBNE and the Homestake Mines is estimated to be between $1.2 to $1.5 billion, while the costs for the dark matter and neutrinoless double beta decay experiment will be $300 and $400 million, respectively.

It's a daunting issue considering that the whole physics community in the US are expecting flat to lower budgets for the next several years. High energy physics certainly is a tough sell on any given year, but the next few years will certainly be a tremendous challenge and could affect the future of high energy physics experiments in the US as the Tevatron retires.

Zz.

DOE Office of Science Sparred Severe Cuts

The tentative agreement on the US 2011 budget presented the most optimistic scenario that one could ever imagine in this climate. It is reported that the DOE Office of Science budget will be cut only by 0.6% from 2010 level, when compared to the originally-proposed 18%. One can hear a collective sigh of relief from not only the National labs, but also a lot of universities and industries that make use of the many user facilities within those labs.

However, this is only a temporary reprieve. We are already in the battle for the 2012 budget, and a lot of people, especially politicians of a certain persuasion, simply are ignorant of the value of basic research and how it affects the economy. This is a continuing effort and a continuing struggle to make people be aware of such impacts.

In particular, DOE-funded scientists are worried about the office's 2012 budget request, now before Congress. "It's been an educational year," Isaacs says. "We learned that the argument [about the value of basic research] is still on the table and that we still have to make that argument."

So if you had written to your representatives during this last budget debacle to support science funding, thank you! But please, do not let up your support for basic science research if you truly believe in it. Continue to write to your representatives and ask them to consider what drives our economy and how science research has been a major player in that.

Zz.

Japan's Nuclear Crisis - Steven Chu Interview

Newsweek interviewed US Dept. of Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, on the aftermath of Japan's nuclear crisis. It didn't just cover his job, but also him being a physicist and still producing his own research work.

Last summer you wrote a paper called “Subnanometre Single-Molecule Localization Registration and Distance Measurements.” When asked about it, you said, “I consider it my equivalent of vegging out in front of the TV.”

The first 80 hours a week of my time go to my full-time job at the Department of Energy. But in the wee hours of the morning, on airplane trips, I can go back and forth. It doesn’t take much time, and it’s a good release.

Zz.