Remarks by
Dr. Raymond L. Orbach
Director, Office of Science
U.S. Department of Energy
at an All-Hands Meeting
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
Palo Alto, CA
June 23, 2005
Thank you, President Hennessy,
for your very kind words; Jonathan, for your
kind words, and the hospitality of SLAC and
Stanford University.
It is a great pleasure and privilege
to be back amongst you and especially to receive
this kind of welcome. Thank you all for coming
out. It is a special tribute to SLAC to note,
as we have seen it develop, that this is the
finest laboratory in the world with a history
of discovery and a future of excitement.
About 40 years ago, SLAC was started
with the visionaries who had the dreams of building
a pioneering physics center. Through the contributions
of thousands of people, including scientists,
engineers and staff, and collaboration with
other scientists from around the world SLAC
has successfully made those dreams come true
and pushed forward our understanding of physics.
Some examples are:
Pief, who pretty much wrote the book on how
things get done.
LINAC, SPEAR, PEP, SSRL, and now the LCLS.
Bjorken: The elucidation of the Parton Model
in scaling behavior in QCD, who won the Lorentz
award in 1978.
Sid Drell: Quantum theory of radiation, arms
control, and more prizes than you can name.
Taylor: Key experiment proving protons are
made up of smaller constituents; Nobel prize
in 1990 with Kendall and Friedman.
Perl: Discovering the tau lepton; Nobel prize,
1995.
Richter: Discovery of the charm quark; Nobel
prize in 1976 shared with Ting, led construction
of SPEAR in the first detector, MARC I.
Quinn: Theory of CP violation and unified
theories.
Addis et. al.: Created the first high-energy
physics database in the mid-1970s, later evolving
into SPIRES.
Prescott: Demonstrated a parity violation
in neutral currents.
Winick et. al.: Development of the SSRL, using
wiggler magnets to develop multiple high-power
beams for users.
Farcas and Wilson: RF pulse compression technology,
effectively doubling the energy delivered
by the main linac.
Kunz, Johnson et.al.: First United States
www site and web server.
Breidenbach: Design, development and execution
of the SLAC Large Detector, including the
SLC, Stanford Linear Collider Controls.
Arnold: Led numerous fixed target experiments
demonstrating electromagnetic properties of
nuclei and their connection to QCD.
Atwood et al.: Led applications of high-energy
physics technology, the space-based astrophysics
missions — in particular, GLAST.
Dorfan: Spokesman for the first SLAC linear
collider experiment, revamping MARC II and
project manager for the PEP-II B-Factory.
Seeman: Design and commissioning of PEP-II
as well as ongoing upgrades.
These are shining examples of
how SLAC’s family involvement and appreciation
of the pioneering effort has always been the
hallmark of this laboratory. It is, and will
be, a strong foundation for new directions of
the laboratory as it’s about to embark
on future success to come of comparable magnitude.
There is no other place in the world that has
a history and tradition and future of that magnitude.
Just recently — in fact,
in an e-mail dated June 21, this past Tuesday
— Pat Dehmer, who is the Associate Director
of Basic Energy Sciences for the Office of Science,
wrote, “The attainment of 500 milli-amps
in SPEAR 3 is a great accomplishment. The fact
that SPEAR 3 marched up to 500 milli-amps without
a hiccup is a real tribute to the engineers
at SLAC.”
It’s again a statement of
the remarkable ingenuity and increase in current
that you were able to bring about without a
hiccup — a tribute to the faculty, to
the staff, to the students at SLAC and your
commitment. What I like most of all was the
exciting remark and explanation made by Dave
Dungan — “The machine behaved as
designed” — which is pretty telling
about the way in which things are done here
and we are very grateful in the Office of Science
to have the quality and the achievement that
this laboratory presents.
I also want to make a comment
about Stanford, because as you know, Stanford
is the contractor for this laboratory and in
the Office of Science, when we measure the importance
and the relevance of our contractors, we look
at what we call “value-added.” The
value added by Stanford to SLAC — to our
laboratory — is remarkable. The President
has already mentioned the facility, the guest
house. Behind us, we have the Kavli Institute.
That was a private gift to Stanford University,
which the university placed here on a federal
government site — leased from Stanford,
but run and owned by the federal government.
I know of no other example of a contractor who
has taken their own personal gifts and contributed
it to the success of a national laboratory.
With the Kavli Institute, of course, begins
a whole new field of science that is becoming
ever more relevant and more exciting to the
future of science. But there’s much more.
There will be the LCLS, the Linac
Coherent Light Source. That concept started
here. It started because of the quality of the
beam in the linac and the ability to use that
beam for spontaneous amplification of stimulated
emission. And very, very true to the SLAC tradition,
if you read the original paper by Herman Winick
— this is dated 1993. Herman talks about,
“The first laser would start operation
at a wavelength of around 10 nanometers,”
— that is a hundred angstroms —
“in a single sub-picosecond pulse.”
Well, thanks to the ingenuity
of the SLAC staff, the wavelength will be one
and a half angstroms in the hard x-ray range,
the luminosity will be ten billion times any
other light source on Earth at that wavelength,
and the pulse length can be as short —
with some real photons present — as three
hundred attoseconds. When I first heard that,
when Keith told me that number, I had to look
up what an attosecond was because I hadn’t
heard it. If you remember your h-bar, that’s
of the order of a couple of eV — which
means that that machine, which Herman described
so modestly a little over a decade ago, will
be able to envisage — able to see —
the structure of a single macromolecule and
see the chemical bond change in time —
in real time — as the chemical processes
develop. It opens up a field, both theoretical
and experimental, with untold future opportunities.
And it would not have happened had it not been
for the ingenuity of the SLAC family.
The ability to see the structure
of macromolecules that cannot be crystallized,
the ability to see the chemical bond being formed
during the process of a chemical reaction —
Pauling never dreamed about it. It gives us
opportunities — just think of time-dependent
Hartree-Fock calculations, which we know to
be modest in their accuracy — whole new
areas of theoretical science will be developed.
I’ve mentioned already the computational
prowess of SLAC. The combination of the very
large database research and the high-end computation
power of SLAC, together with these opportunities,
in the experimental domain, will give us simulation
opportunities again not available elsewhere.
When you package them altogether,
ultrafast science becomes a new science, a new
field of study. And it’s very reassuring
that Stanford University has invested in a center
for ultrafast science, that we will have a home
in the LCLS building for ultrafast science here
at SLAC.
It’s going to be a future
opportunity that will not be available elsewhere.
The United States will have a lead of at least
a decade over the XFEL in Germany, if not longer.
And we already have plans for an upgrade at
the LCLS that will continue American leadership
in this field for another decade to come.
This is the commitment of the
Office of Science. We can make it because of
what you provide. We are going to insist on
U.S. leadership in world science. And we will
structure our investments, our budget and our
commitment to being the very best in the world
at what we do. We could not carry that off without
the SLAC family and the support of Stanford
University.
Thank you.
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