LCLS/SSRL day 2: The Joining
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Day two of the Users' Meeting kicked off with a round of presentations in a joint LCLS / SSRL plenary session focused on big-picture concerns like federal budgets and the political landscape. APS Public Affairs director Mike Lubell detailed his view of the fiscal outlook for the upcoming 2009 budget, and he cautioned attendees not to pin their hopes on much thaw in the budget freeze that began with last year's continuing resolution. Lubell predicted little would change until 2010. The new associate director of DOE Basic Energy Sciences, Harriet Kung, followed Lubell with an overview of current BES priorities, and for the most part echoed his budgetary assessment.
However, as Kung went on to point out, the sun is indeed still shining. Lightsource science, she said, stands at a revolutionary dividing line, similar in scope to the discovery of electricity. Revolutionary science is required to bring about real change in how we think about energy, and the existing lightsource facilities under BES (four of the six in the US) are playing a major role in that revolution. In the 20th century, she reminded us, we learned how to observe matter on the atomic scale. Today, we're learning how to control it. SLAC director Persis Drell took an even longer view in the meeting's keynote, delivered this afternoon to a crowd of about 150. These are exciting times, she said, in the realm of atomic and molecular physics, and the LCLS will certainly open new doors in the control of matter on the scale of the ultra fast and ultra small. Among the myriad factors involved, success will depend in part on how the culture of collaboration within the lightsource community evolves. Drell said the particle physics community learned a similar lesson long ago, that the best results came when accelerator physicists and experimentalists worked closely together. That kind of association is not the traditional model for the lightsource community. But that's likely to change, I learned in a subsequent conversation with Keith Hodgson (SLAC Associate Lab Director for Photon Science). He said making the LCLS beam work is as much an art as science for accelerator physicists, and users will surely come to depend on that connection. SSRL Director Jo Stohr made an interesting point earlier in the day that bodes well for the evolution of such a relationship. SLAC is actively developing plans for a new office complex intended to centralize SLAC's accelerator physicists under one roof, combining the varied talents drawn from both SSRL and LCLS, as well as from the long legacy of PEP. Getting those physicists talking and mingling and sitting together, he said, will surely pay dividends. posted by Brad Plummer @ 6:00pm
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