Users Group: News
The NSAC 2007 Long Range Plan for Nuclear Science - Message from Larry Cardman
Many of you have heard the broad outlines of the outcome of the NSAC Long Range Plan "Resolution Meeting" held in Galveston, TX the first week in May. While the formal, written document will not be completed until this Fall, I am delighted to be able to provide you here with the wording of the recommendations and a few other details.
The Long Range Plan will have four, prioritized, formal recommendations:
- We recommend completion of the 12 GeV Upgrade at Jefferson Lab. The Upgrade will enable new insights into the structure of the nucleon, the transition between the hadronic and quark/gluon descriptions of nuclei, and the nature of confinement.
- We recommend construction of the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, FRIB, a world-leading facility for the study of nuclear structure, reactions and astrophysics. Experiments with the new isotopes produced at FRIB will lead to a comprehensive description of nuclei, elucidate the origin of the elements in the cosmos, provide an understanding of matter in the crust of neutron stars, and establish the scientific foundation for innovative applications of nuclear science to society.
- We recommend a targeted program of experiments to investigate neutrino properties and fundamental symmetries. These experiments aim to discover the nature of the neutrino, yet unseen violations of time-reversal symmetry, and other key ingredients of the new standard model of fundamental interactions. Construction of a Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory is vital to US leadership in core aspects of this initiative.
- The experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have discovered a new state of matter at extreme temperature and density—a quark-gluon plasma that exhibits unexpected, almost perfect liquid dynamical behavior. We recommend implementation of the RHIC II luminosity upgrade, together with detector improvements, to determine the properties of this new state of matter.
The first recommendation supports the outstanding science program that has been developed by the JLab community for the Upgrade, and is a tribute to the hard work that has gone toward realizing the facility. It is wonderfully encouraging news. The second recognizes the central place nuclear structure plays in our field and the importance of a major new facility for restoring US leadership in the field. The third recognizes the signal contributions nuclear physics has made and can make to our understanding of the standard model and neutrino physics, and the quality of the research motivating the construction of DUSEL. The last recommendation highlights the discovery of the quark gluon plasma and the value of a luminosity upgrade to study its properties in detail.
There is also a fifth (but unnumbered) formal recommendation focused on R&D aimed toward the development of an electron ion collider as a next generation tool for QCD physics:
We recommend the allocation of resources to develop accelerator and detector technology necessary to lay the foundation for a polarized Electron Ion Collider. The EIC would explore the new QCD frontier of strong color fields in nuclei and precisely image the gluons in the proton.
This will appear as the lead recommendation in a section that will discuss "initiatives." An EIC was a formal, joint recommendation of both the "Hadronic Physics" and "Phases of QCD" Town Meetings. The other initiatives that will be included are: Accelerator Physics; the Gamma Ray Energy Tracking Array (GRETA); and theory topical collaborations.
The very positive outcome of this Long Range Plan for the laboratory is the result of an enormous effort by the entire JLab community over many years, and we can all look forward to realizing the science that motivated this work.