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SlAC Director Talks About Science Goals and Develop Plans for Future Facilities to Achieve Those Goals
:: 28 April, 2008
As a laboratory, we must constantly look toward our future. Over the past nine months, there has been a concerted effort across the lab to articulate science goals and develop plans for future facilities that will help us achieve those goals. Faculty and staff from across the laboratory have been involved in a variety of planning efforts. The long term scientific future of the laboratory will be on the agenda for the Scientific Policy Committee when it meets at SLAC next week.
We have an opportunity to share our long term plans with the Department of Energy Office of Science this week and next. The Office of Science has given us the opportunity to include, as part of our annual business plan, a major section on our science strategy for our future. We sent our business plan to the DOE Office of Science this past Monday. Next week, Keith Hodgson, Lowell Klaisner, Bill Madia and I will travel to Washington D.C. to present our long term plans to Ray Orbach, director of the Office of Science.
In the near term we are focused on the completion of Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) and commissioning of the LCLS Ultrafast Science Instruments (LUSI). We are working towards full utilization of the increased brightness afforded by the SPEAR3 upgrade. We will complete the exploitation of the BaBar data and launch and do science with the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST). We will continue to support accelerator research and detector development aimed at a future electron–positron linear collider.
Our strategy for the future is to continue to develop the LCLS facility over the next decade with two additional undulators and utilization of the full linac, broadening the scientific program and delivering unique capabilities not available elsewhere. In parallel, we will seek to strengthen the scientific programs in photon science and particle physics. We will grow and develop our existing SLAC/Stanford science institutes—the Photon Ultrafast Laser Science and Engineering (PULSE) center, the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) and the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC)—and explore the creation of others. We will support users on ATLAS and work on the machine and detector upgrades at the Large Hadron Collider. We will do forefront accelerator research with our unique facilities, exploring new accelerator concepts to help define future machines for high energy physics and photon science alike. Our major new initiative in particle astrophysics and cosmology will be the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and there is ongoing investigation into using the PEP ring as a future light source to replace SPEAR-3 and compliment the LCLS by the end of the next decade.
The science that these programs will deliver is extraordinary. We will investigate the fundamental structure of matter and how it behaves on multiple time scales, length scales and energy scales, and we will address fundamental questions that span a broad range of science challenges including understanding the basic science of matter, investigating materials related to energy and the environment, probing the organizing principles of bio-materials and process, and elucidating the fundamental forces and constituents of the Universe. We have an exciting future!
About Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope
The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, is a future space-based gamma-ray telescope, designed to explore the high-energy Universe. It will study astrophysical and cosmological phenomena such as active galactic nuclei, pulsars, other high-energy sources, and dark matter. GLAST is a joint venture of NASA, the United States Department of Energy, and government agencies in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Sweden.
On February 8, 2008 NASA announced it was seeking suggestions for a new name for GLAST that, "Will capture the excitement of GLAST's mission and call attention to gamma-ray and high-energy astronomy."
GLAST includes two scientific instruments, the Large Area Telescope (LAT) and the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM). The LAT is an imaging gamma-ray detector which detects photons with energy from about 30 million electron volts (MeV) to 300 billion electron volts (GeV). The GBM consists of 14 scintillation detectors which detect bursts of photons from 8 thousand electron volts (keV) to 30 MeV.
General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems (formerly Spectrum Astro) in Gilbert, Arizona built the spacecraft that will carry the instruments. It will travel in a low, circular orbit with a period of about 95 minutes. Its normal mode of operation will maintain its orientation so that the instruments will look away from the earth, with a "rocking" motion to equalize the coverage of the sky. The view of the instruments will sweep out across most of the sky about 16 times per day. The spacecraft can also maintain an orientation that points to a chosen target.
The construction of both instruments is complete. They have undergone environmental testing, being subjected to vibration, vacuum, and high and low temperatures to ensure that they can withstand the stresses of launch and continue to operate in space. They were integrated with the spacecraft at the General Dynamics facility in Gilbert, Arizona.
Data from the instruments will be available to the public through the GLAST Science Support Center web site. Software for analyzing the data will also be available. Scientists with plans for research will be able to apply to the Guest Investigator program.
On 7 February 2008, NASA's Alan Stern, associate administrator for Science at NASA Headquarters, launched a public competition, closing 31 March 2008, to re-name GLAST in a way that would "capture the excitement of GLAST’s mission and call attention to gamma-ray and high-energy astronomy... something memorable to commemorate this spectacular new astronomy mission... a name that is catchy, easy to say and will help make the satellite and its mission a topic of dinner table and classroom discussion."
About Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator located at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. It lies in a tunnel under France and Switzerland.
It is currently in the final stages of construction, and commissioning, with some sections already being cooled down to their final operating temperature of ~2K. The first beams are due for injection mid June 2008 with the first collisions planned to take place 2 months later. The LHC will become the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. The LHC is being funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.
When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and "missing links" in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify the three fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why gravitation is so weak compared to the other three forces. In addition to the Higgs boson, other theorized novel particles that might be produced, and for which searches are planned, include strangelets, micro black holes, magnetic monopoles and supersymmetric particles.
The collider is contained in a circular tunnel with a circumference of 27 kilometres (17 mi) at a depth ranging from 50 to 175 metres underground. The tunnel, constructed between 1983 and 1988, was formerly used to house the LEP, an electron-positron collider.
The 3.8 metre diameter, concrete-lined tunnel crosses the border between Switzerland and France at four points, although the majority of its length is inside France. The collider itself is located underground, with many surface buildings holding ancillary equipment such as compressors, ventilation equipment, control electronics and refrigeration plants.
The collider tunnel contains two pipes enclosed within superconducting magnets cooled by liquid helium, each pipe containing a proton beam. The two beams travel in opposite directions around the ring. Additional magnets are used to direct the beams to four intersection points where interactions between them will take place. In total, over 1600 superconducting magnets are installed, with most weighing over 27 tonnes.
About Large Synoptic Survey Telescope
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is a planned wide-field "survey" reflecting telescope that will photograph the available sky every three nights. Construction should start in 2010 with first light in 2015.
The telescope will be located on the El Peñón peak of Cerro Pachón, a 2682 metre high mountain in Coquimbo Region, in northern Chile, alongside the existing Gemini South and Southern Astrophysical Research Telescopes.
The LSST is unique among large telescopes (8m-class primary mirrors) in having a very wide field of view: 3.5 degrees in diameter, or 9.6 square degrees. For comparison, both the Sun and Moon, as seen from the Earth, are 0.5 degrees across, or 0.2 square degrees. Combined with its large aperture (and thus light-collecting ability), this will give it a spectacularly large etendue of 319 m²degree².
To achieve this very wide undistorted field of view requires three mirrors, rather than the two used by most existing large telescopes: the primary mirror will be 8.4 metres in diameter, the secondary mirror will be 3.4 metres in diameter, and the tertiary mirror, located in a large hole in the primary, will be 5.0 metres in diameter. The large hole reduces the primary mirror's light collecting area to 35 m², equivalent to a 6.68 m diameter circle. (Multiplying this by the field of view produces an etendue of 336 m²degree²; the actual figure is reduced by vignetting.)
The primary/tertiary mirror will be built as a monolithic unit, and construction of the mold began in November 2007 at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Lab, with casting planned for late March 2008. A 3.2 gigapixel prime focus digital camera will take a 15-second exposure every 20 seconds.
Allowing for maintenance, bad weather, etc., the camera is expected to take over 200,000 pictures (1.28 petabytes uncompressed) per year, far more than can be reviewed by humans. Managing and effectively data mining the enormous output of the telescope is expected to be the most technically difficult part of the project.
In January, 2008 software billionaires Charles Simonyi and Bill Gates pledged $20 million and $10 million respectively to the project. The project continues to seek a National Science Foundation grant of nearly $400 million.
