{"id":199,"date":"2005-05-26T22:03:31","date_gmt":"2005-05-27T02:03:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=199"},"modified":"2005-05-26T22:03:31","modified_gmt":"2005-05-27T02:03:31","slug":"news-from-slac-and-elsewhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=199","title":{"rendered":"News From SLAC and Elsewhere"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this week Jonathan Dorfan, the director of SLAC, <A href=\"http:\/\/www.slac.stanford.edu\/gen\/pubinfo\/pr\/20050525\/\">announced<\/A> a reorganization of the structure of the laboratory.  The new structure involves four divisions, two scientific and two operational.  One of the scientific divisions will bring together particle physics and astrophysics.  It will be led by Persis Drell who also will be a deputy director of the laboratory, a position previously held by her father, particle theorist Sidney Drell.  The other scientific division will be called &#8220;Photon Science&#8221;, which will make use of the SLAC x-ray sources. At the moment SLAC produces intense x-ray beams at the SSRL, using synchrotron radiation from a ring which is a descendent of the original SPEAR electron-positron ring that was crucial in the &#8220;November Revolution&#8221; of 1974 (and which also provided me with a job one summer).  <\/p>\n<p>The main SLAC linac is being turned into a free electron X-ray laser to be called the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), which will be operational in 2009.  At that time the plan is for SLAC to be out of the accelerator based high-energy physics business, with the PEP-II collider also shut down.  The last fixed target experiment using the linac, E158, recently <A href=\"http:\/\/xxx.arxiv.org\/abs\/hep-ex\/0504049\">reported<\/A> the most accurate measurement of the weak mixing angle at relatively low energies (at LEP it was very accurately measured at the Z pole).  This measurement shows the running of the ratio of coupling constants predicted by the renormalization group.  For more about this experiment, see an <A href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/nature\/journal\/v435\/n7041\/pdf\/435437a.pdf\">article<\/A> in the latest Nature magazine.<\/p>\n<p>This week&#8217;s Science magazine also has an <A href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/cgi\/content\/full\/308\/5726\/1241a\">article<\/A> about particle physics.   It reports on the HEPAP meeting mentioned <A href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/blog\/archives\/000196.html\">here<\/A> earlier where a plan to evaluate whether to shut down PEP-II or the Tevatron early was put forward.  On a more positive note, the House Appropriations committee has restored some of the <A href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/blog\/archives\/000152.html\">cuts in the FY 2006 DOE budget<\/A> proposed by the White House.  The House committe added $22 million to the high energy physics budget, bringing it back to the FY 2005 level (which, accounting for inflation, would still be a cut, but a smaller one).<\/p>\n<p>An <A href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article.ns?id=dn7430\">article in New Scientist<\/A> about the same House bill explains that money is being taken away from the ITER international project to build a fusion reactor and used to bring funding for domestic fusion research also back to FY2005 levels.  This may have something to do with the fact that the latest news about ITER is that a deal has been reached that will site it in France.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this week Jonathan Dorfan, the director of SLAC, announced a reorganization of the structure of the laboratory. The new structure involves four divisions, two scientific and two operational. One of the scientific divisions will bring together particle physics and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=199\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}