HEPAP

HEPAP is the Department of Energy’s “High Energy Physics Advisory Panel”, which holds meetings 3-4 times a year. At these meetings, people from the DOE and NSF report on the latest news about US government funding for particle physcs, and physicists from the universities and national labs report on how their experiments are going.

The latest HEPAP meeting was held this past weekend in Washington, and some of the presentations there have already been made available online. These include a detailed report on the progress of the LHC and the two experiments (CMS and Atlas) that will do physics there. The LHC construction is 90% complete, with magnets beginning to be installed in the tunnel. Things seem to be on track for turning on the machine in the spring of 2007. Optimistically, this would mean the first physics results should be available sometime in 2008.

Another presentation gave an overview of the DOE’s support of university-based particle physics. This includes the largest source of support in the US for theoretical particle physics. In FY 2003 the DOE spent \$23.3 million supporting theory research at 68 universities, funding 215 faculty, 116 postdocs and 114 graduate students. The other main source of US funding for particle theory is the NSF, which spends about half as much as the DOE (\$12 million in FY 2003).

HEPAP also adopted a new report on the “Quantum Universe“. This follows the trend of recent years of trying to justify particle physics research by emphasizing its relation to the very healthy and sexy field of cosmology. The acid test of this over the next few years will be to see if it helps with the difficult problem of getting funding for the Linear Collider.