SLAC In the Future*
(*Also see transcript of Opening Remarks)
Jonathan Dorfan
Director, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
October 2, 2002
SLAC’s future looks extremely bright! The
achievements of the first 40 years will be difficult to top, but the ingredients
are already in place to make the next forty years just as memorable. Certainly
there is more competition now for basic science funding than ever before; but we
are involved in research directions and projects that have the compelling
scientific imperatives to generate full and enthusiastic support.
Our current HEP and X-ray workhorses, the B Factory and SPEAR2 are producing
world-class science at a prodigious rate. The upgrade to SPEAR2 will be
completed in 2003, making SPEAR3 the equal, in the 1-10 Kev range, of any
worldwide light source currently operating or in the design/construction phase.
New vistas in structural molecular biology, environmental science, material and
medical science will be opened up by this new generation of synchrotron light
sources. We plan to establish at SLAC an extension of the Bio-X program on the
main campus, encompassing a 30,000 square-foot building as the home of the
Structural Molecular Biology Center. The prospective site for this building is
between the SSRL main building and the SPEAR ring.
Likewise we are looking to build on the established program at the Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials on campus, with a satellite program at SLAC/SSRL. The B Factory has plenty of headroom for improved performance and will be continuously upgraded until it achieves about eight times its design luminosity by 2006. Babar and its sister detector Belle at KEK, will continue to rewrite the book on heavy quark and lepton physics, both benefiting from accelerator facilities with the capability of delivering bewildering amounts of data. Such a large step in our knowledge base has an excellent chance to generate far-reaching discoveries in particle physics.
And most important for the future of the
laboratory, these two facilities, the upgraded SPEAR and the upgraded B Factory,
provide long bridges into the future — both can
be expected to take us comfortably into the next decade. And who knows what
further upgrades may not be possible. During the last year, our B Factory
machine and detector teams have been studying a facility that would have 100
times the present peak luminosity... fiscal considerations and the evolution of
the driving physics questions will tell as to the need for such a further step.
But we are doing much more than that to ensure an exciting scientific future. In
recent studies by their respective HEP communities, Asia, Europe and the U.S.
all have agreed that there is a compelling need for a TeV-scale linear collider
and that, without such a facility, we cannot expect to have a full understanding
of some of Nature’s most intriguing mysteries: What gives particles mass? Is it
the ubiquitous Higgs mechanism? Is Nature super-symmetric, implying a doubling
of the number of Nature’s fundamental particles? Do we live in a world of more
than four dimensions?
All regions concur that the linear collider should be a fully international endeavor. SLAC can be truly proud of the leading role it has played in the last 15 years that brought about this unprecedented worldwide consensus. Realizing a linear collider somewhere in the world will not be easy, but the will of the international HEP community is so strong and the scientific imperatives are so great, that I believe it is within reach to convince the leading governments to work together to make this scientific and technological adventure a reality.
What will SLAC’s role be, since such a machine
does not fit on the Stanford site? Naturally we plan to be fully involved in
exploiting the exciting science at the linear collider. But we also plan to be
major participants in the design, construction and operation of the machine and
the detector wherever the linear collider is built. We surely have a lot of
expertise and experience to offer! Naturally we hope that it will be built in
the United States and there are certainly excellent prospective sites in
California. Our position of leadership and our resolve to make the linear
collider a reality remain as strong and committed as ever and, when it comes to
pass, it will have profoundly positive impacts for SLAC.
As we have heard, synchrotron light sources caused a revolution in X-ray
science, opening up research horizons that were simply inconceivable prior to
the 1970’s. The next such revolution will come from X-ray lasers, sources of
coherent X-rays whose intensity will be about a billion times the present
synchrotron sources, and whose time intervals will be a few thousand times
shorter than present sources. The scientific potential of such a source is
staggering! Such a facility will allow biologists to reconstruct proteins in
their naturally occurring molecular form, chemists to track chemical reactions
at their natural timescales, allow material scientists to manipulate atoms in
totally new ways. To build such a facility requires a high energy, low emittance
linear accelerator — exactly what we have at
SLAC. And so using the back one-third of our linac, we are in the enviable
position to be the first laboratory in the world to realize such a source – we
call it the Linac Coherent Light Source, or LCLS for short. The President’s FY03
budget and the Senate and House Bills that will move forward to the
Congressional conference proceedings all include $6M for project engineering
funds to start this project. Last month Ray Orbach gave the go-ahead for the
all-important critical decision 1, or CD1, for the LCLS. We are poised for a
construction start in the near future with machine commissioning beginning in
2007. This facility will extend our scientific capabilities into a new arena and
further enhance the growing X-ray community at SLAC.
Particle astrophysics is an exploding field of major recent discoveries. The
leading questions addressed by astrophysics and high energy physics are
increasing the same – what constitutes the dark matter of the Universe, what is
the mysterious dark energy accelerating the outer regions of our Universe, what
are the enormously energetic sources of pulsed energy that we see in the
heavens, to name but a few. SLAC has joined this exciting adventure as the host
to the Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope, to be launched in 2006. The seminal
idea and the critical technologies for that instrument were developed at SLAC.
GLAST is a discovery-oriented mission that is eagerly awaited by the
astrophysics community. But this is only the beginning. SLAC will be the host of
Stanford’s Pehong and Adele Chen Particle Astrophyics and Cosmology Institute,
enabled by a most generous gift from the Chen family. This Institute, a
partnership of SLAC and our sister campus departments of Physics and Applied
Physics, will be a catalyst that will catapult Stanford into a position of
leadership in this emerging scientific frontier. We hope that it will become a
mecca for experimentalists, theorists and observers alike.
And don’t forget the surprises -- we’ve come up with quite a few in the past……
So as we bring this celebration to a close, I invite you to imagine what I am
certain will be forty more years of glorious science.
This celebration could not have happened were it not for the super-human effort
of a highly motivated group of our staff who organized this extravaganza as
volunteers. Appearing now on the video screen are the names of the 40th
Anniversary Committee. They were magnificently backed up by the Implementation
Team, also now being displayed. Over 50 additional volunteers are ensuring that
today runs smoothly. And I apologize to those of you whom I have omitted, this
has been a monumental task. I know that no-one will be offended if I highlight
in particular the “human glue” that held the many facets of this celebration
together—Pat Kreitz, Neil Calder and Elie Lwin,
and by the Committee Chair Sid Drell. Sid, as with everything you have done for
this Lab, your contribution was simply sensational. Please join me in saluting
all those who worked to make today a great success.
And my sincere thanks to those in attendance for helping to make this day so
meaningful. I invite you all to leave the tented enclosure to enjoy comradeship
and refreshments out on the “Green”. ...and I hope to see many of you when we
celebrate our 80th!!
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Last Update: Friday October 04, 2002 by Bellevin