30 Aug 2009
Budget issues were a problem for the 2009 fiscal year which began on 1 October of last year. We began this fiscal year with a Continuing Resolution budget with spending levels held flat from the previous year. This led to a delayed start of Run9 as funds made available by the Continuing Resolution were not sufficient to sustain the planned 21 week run. The run began on 1 February with the hope that the budget would be favorably resolved by mid-April before our operations funds were exhausted. The budget was indeed favorably resolved in early April and came with sufficient funds to allow an extension of the run through the first week of July. The run began with 250 GeV x 250 GeV polarized proton collisions followed in mid-April with 100 GeV x 100 GeV polarized proton collisions. The last week of the run was run with a special beam setup for the STAR experiment that allowed a study of physics with forward tagged polarized protons. This was the first year of physics running with 250GeV x 250 GeV polarized protons. The 250 GeV x 250 GeV commissioning was a success with first collisions achieved 2 weeks into the run. Both the STAR and PHENIX experiments were once again operational for this run.
RHIC will begin operations for Run10 this Fall around Thanksgiving. The plan is to begin with 100 GeV/n x 100 GeV/n gold beam collisions (further studies of the "perfect liquid") followed by an energy scan (initial search for a "critical point and onset of deconfinement") down to about 4 GeV/n x 4 GeV/n gold beam energies.
Once the RHIC program ended we turned our attention to two experiments supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency that made use of a 4 GeV beam from the AGS (the last accelerator in the chain of injectors for RHIC) to study the delayed neutron response of materials to protons. The experiments were completed by mid-July.
The eighteenth and nineteenth rounds of Radiobiology experiments (NSRL-09A and NSRL-09B) began in March and ended in June. The twentieth round (NSRL09C) is set to begin in September. These experiments make use of the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) that uses beams from the Booster Accelerator to study radiation effects for the NASA space program.
Scheduling Physicist web page - FY2009
Status Updates (RHIC Broadcast)
Phil Pile (pile@bnl.gov)