News from HEPAP

Last week there was a meeting of HEPAP held in Washington, presentations are available here.

HEP has done very well recently in recent US federal government budgets, due to the stimulus and large deficit spending going on to fight the recession. The FY2010 DOE budget has been passed by Congress, and it includes $810 million for HEP (up 2% from $797 million in FY2009), and there is also $232 million in stimulus package money currently being spent on HEP. The FY2010 NSF budget has not yet made it through Congress, but the Administration request for NSF physics research is up by 9% from FY2009.

DOE is planning to keep running the Tevatron now at least through FY 2011, since it is likely to be competitive with the LHC in the Higgs search business at least that long. The current Fermilab long-term planned run schedule is here.

DOE will keep supporting ILC research through FY2012, but the plan to make a decision about building it at that time now seems to be off the table. The LHC will have just begun producing results, and the current estimates of the ILC cost are so high that making the case for it will be very difficult. A story in Science quotes William Brinkman, the head of DOE’s Office of Science as saying:

With all the contingencies, you’re talking about $20 billion. In my opinion, that price pushes it way out into the future, and onto the backburner.

Funding for new high-energy accelerators is likely to mainly be devoted to participating in any upgrade of the LHC at CERN, and the Project X/muon collider proposals at Fermilab. There will be workshops at Fermilab next month to discuss Project X and the muon collider. Brinkman in his HEPAP talk notes that the HEP community will have to come up with a compelling scientific case for these projects, which will largely revolve around an expanded neutrino program.

There was also discussion of a report from PASAG (the Particle Astrophysics Assessment Group). For discussion of the issues surrounding proposed experiments relevant to particle astrophysics and cosmology, see stories from Eric Hand at Nature News here and here.

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2 Responses to News from HEPAP

  1. Yatima says:

    Unfortunately, the long-term signs are not good. It is rather likely that recessions are not fought with (Keynesian) deficit spending but with (Austrian) hands-off management and the return to a “save&invest” mentality. The next ten or so will most probably be a period of stagflation. Once this becomes clear I hope DOE will not quickly revise its spending plans downwards. As for liberating 20 billion+ (an initial estimate?) for ILC, well, the SSC was killed at 12 billion in 1993 dollars (that’s arund 18 billion USD in 2009), when the overall economic situation was actually far, far better. So, no.

  2. srp says:

    And still no money for early development research on advanced accelerator concepts. You guys need to learn about decision trees…

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