When the director comes to lunch...

And he's the director of Femilab, then you get a big lunch time crowd.  Even I show up.  This is the regular Monday brown bag talk at the Fermi Institute.  Usually we get a preview of someone's analysis on CDF, an ATLAS talk on a SUSY sensitivity study, or a visitor passing through (and sometimes we even spice things up with computing and grids).

But today is special - Pierre Oddone the new director of fermilab stopped by to give us a "roadmap" for Femilab.  This was an informal talk (meant to focus on the accelerator part of Fermilab's future...disclaimer, what follows are random, innacurate notes by rwg) but... the conversation quickly turned serious when the first roadmap slide was shown.  There was a map showing:

• Neutrino frontier - remains leading till 2015, so long as we do something with the neutrino program.

• Flavor frontier - in a leading role now, but not in 5 years obviously with CDF/D0 finishing and killing of BTeV.

• Energy - in a leading role now, not in 2010, how to get back in 2015?

So we're 15 minutes into the talk, still on slide 1.  Why are we abandoning flavor is the question... there's not an easy answer.  Whatever happened to breadth and depth in US particle physics...

Vision for the LC requires strong focusing now, but how do we extract a strong base on which breadth and texture can flourish.

Near term - we have to keep the tevatron (cdf/d0) and neutrino programs strong.

A very impressive set of curves on planned integrated luminosity in FY08,FY09 which will be the last hurrah of the Tevatron.

Woops, going back to previous slide from a question.  Why is fermilab involved in lhc?  Answer, its the biggest hep program in the US - already we've spent 600M on the machine and its two detectors.

Woops2 - now we're all the way back to slide 1, a half an hour into the talk.

Okay, onto the neutrino program.  Here's where the talk takes off...

MINOS just starting.  MiniBooNE looking at muon-electron mixing, will they find what LSND found?  First results soon... Kilowatts (or protons) on target is the game here for the machine performance.  Looks good so far, 10^20 protons every three weeks! (thats a lot of protons)

LHC - delivering the promise.  300 Megajoules of stored energy in the LHC, creates special challenges.

ILC (International Linear Collider) goals for Fermilab.  "Early" decision on whether to build the machine in 2010, to be constructed in decade leading to 2020.  This will be the highest priority for the lab, wherever it is built (US, Japan, Europe).  Measurement of Z' couplings to distinguish models, even at 500 GeV.  Expect to get cost estimate by the end of next year.

Interesting - we don't know yet what the future will hold in 2010, what the LHC may or may not discovery, which will influence the course of events.

See the ILC RDR when it comes out.

Strategy is to look back at the neutrino matrix - going up to 2 MW proton driver at 120 GeV in the MINOS target is the goal.

R&D helps develop SC RF technology. 2% of the ILC, a good test machine.

Alternatives - no tevatron means we still have a recycler, accumulator and debuncher to plaay with.

Cost driver: Klystrons per GeV.  Do an 8 GeV linac to get 0.5 MW on the output (that requires 1.5 Klystrons/GeV).  Compare to a spallation neutron source which is 100 Klystrons/GeV.  Cheap!!

Front end - 325 MHz cavities - these are quite different from the rest of the Linac.

Interesting question - how much R&D can we do for a machine that may never be built? Hard to justify. 

Neutrino Initiative: NOvA - off axis detector to attack the mass hierarchy problem. 

Interesting formula: improvement = (beam power)x(detector mass)x(detector sensitivity).

discovery reach in sin^2(theta_13) - depends on how lucky you are with which parameters are in play, and their ambiguities.

Minos and Miniboone till 2010.

Nova R&D and construction past 2010, competitve runs approaching 2015, complementary to T2K - the Japanese program.

Scenarios are complex to me!  What will CERN and Asia do?  Looking at 8B for ILC? How to share the cost?   CERN is in debt till 2010!  And, note that LHC will need to be upgraded, and will cost 1.5B or so.  Can CERN chip in 1B + other Europe 1B?  Can we then claim 50% from abroad (ask for 4B)?  But what if the ILC RDR comes back at 12B?

More arguments to build the proton driver - excellent neutrino program plus a research program.  Lets walk before we run.

Here is a link for more accurate information.

Comments

[m.visaya]

m^-1

[Scottie]

Rob, Rob, Rob, I feel smarter than I did before I read about your brown bag -- the last one I attended was on "using templates in Microsoft Word" -- however, I want to know what it all means; in 28 words . . . okay a summary will do. Even if you make it up, how will I know ;-)

[robgardner]

Scottie - I'm trying to figure it all out myself. I don't envy the director, for sure!