Thursday, September 18, 2008

JLAB Gets Money to Upgade CEBAF

Thomas Jefferson Laboratory has been given the go-ahead by the DoE to upgrade CEBAF to obtain up to 12 GeV electrons.

This is certainly good news, considering that maybe a couple of years ago, it appears that either CEBAF or RHIC was in jeopardy of being shut down due to lack of funding. Note that while CEBAF (and also RHIC) actually collides particles in their experiment, these are not considered as high energy particle colliders. In the sometime-puzzling world of physics and also how physics is funded in the Dept. of Energy, these are considered as nuclear physics experiments, and not high energy/particle physics experiments. RHIC and CEBAF are thus funded by a different division of the DoE, the nuclear physics division, not the high energy physics division.

So with the termination of SLAC as a high energy facility, and with the pending shut down of the Tevatron, the US will technically cease in having any high energy particle colliders within its shores for the first time since the field of experimental high energy physics was created.

Zz.

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