Facilities and Project Management Division
The Facilities and Project Management Division is responsible for planning, constructing, upgrading and operating the Office of Nuclear Physics (NP) program's user facilities. These facilities include the ATLAS facility at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), and the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator (CEBAF) at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF). The Division is also responsible for overseeing the fabrication of major instrumentation used at these facilities and elsewhere, for Research and Development (R&D) activities to advance the facilities in areas such as instrumentation, detectors, and accelerator technology, for overseeing NP's Laboratory Stewardship responsibilities at BNL and TJNAF and for the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)/Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs. NP facilities and experiments provide world-class capabilities to address forefront nuclear physics questions and are utilized by ~3,000 researchers annually from universities, national laboratories, and industry.
In addition, the Division is responsible for the Isotope Development and Production for Research and Applications (IDPRA) subprogram. IDPRA supports the production, and the development of production techniques of radioactive and stable isotopes that are in short supply for research and applications. Isotopes are high-priority commodities of strategic importance for the Nation and are essential for energy, medical, and national security applications and for basic research; a goal of the program is to make critical isotopes more readily available to meet domestic U.S. needs. This subprogram is steward of the Isotope Production Facility (IPF) at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the Brookhaven Linear Isotope Producer (BLIP) facility at BNL, and hot cell facilities for processing isotopes at ORNL, BNL and LANL. The subprogram also coordinates and supports isotope production at a suite of university, national laboratory, and commercial accelerator and reactor facilities throughout the Nation to promote a reliable supply of domestic isotopes. The National Isotope Development Center (NIDC) at ORNL manages the coordination of isotope production across the many facilities and the business operations of the sale and distribution of isotopes.
Ongoing projects within the Division can be found below. Information on the process for developing projects is available here. Questions regarding the Division should be directed to the Director of the Facilities and Project Management Division (Jehanne Gillo) in the Office of Nuclear Physics.
Line Items:
These are construction projects with a total project cost (TPC) of over $5 Million. There is currently one such project:
12 GeV Upgrade
Location: Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
TPC: $310 Million
Project Status: CD-3: Approved 09/15/08
The proposed 12 GeV Upgrade will double the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility's (CEBAF's) beam energy from the current operating value of 6 GeV to 12 GeV to provide much more precise data on the structure of protons and neutrons. Specifically, the upgrade will enable scientists to address one of the great mysteries of modern physics - the mechanism that 'confines' quarks together. New supercomputing studies indicate that force fields called 'flux-tubes' may be responsible, and a 12 GeV electron beam is required to excite them, which should lead to the creation of never-before-seen particles. Jefferson Laboratory is proposing to upgrade the accelerator, construct a new hall and beam-line, and upgrade and/or add new equipment in the existing experimental halls. The Upgrade has the support of a large and active user community (~1,200 scientists from 29 countries). The scientific program and technical concept of the 12 GeV Upgrade has been thoroughly reviewed by the Department of Energy/National Science Foundation Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, which identified rapid completion of the 12 GeV Upgrade project as its highest recommendation in the 2007 Long-Range Plan.
Major Items of Equipment: Active
These are capital equipment investments with a TEC greater than $2 million.
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Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE), LBNL
This MIE fabricates the U.S. contribution to the CUORE experiment at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy to explore fundamental neutrino properties by searching for neutrinoless double beta decay of the tellurium-130 isotope. It received CD-2/3 approval in December 2009 and is scheduled to finish in FY 2015. This is a joint project with NSF.
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Rare Isotope Beam (RIB) Science Initiative
This initiative consists of six projects to fabricate instrumentation for experiments at leading rare isotope beam facilities around the world. The projects were initiated in October 2010 with completion scheduled between FY 2013 and FY 2016.
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STAR Heavy Flavor Tracker (HFT), BNL
This MIE fabricates a high-precision tracking and vertexing device inside the Time Projection Chamber, based on ultra-thin silicon pixel detectors and more conventional silicon pad and silicon strip detectors. The project received CD-2/3 approval in October 2011, and is scheduled for completion in FY 2015.
Additional Efforts:
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FRIB
Location: Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI
TPC: Not Baselined
Project Status: CD-1: Approved 09/01/10
Construction of the proposed Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) project will establish a facility that will produce large quantities of a wide variety of rare isotopes by breaking stable nuclei into rare isotopes. High intensity primary, stable-isotope beams are produced in Electron Cyclotron Resonator (ECR) ion sources and accelerated up to at a minimum energy of 200 MeV/nucleon by a superconducting linear accelerator capable of delivering 400 kW of beam power at full energy. Secondary beams of rare isotopes are produced "in-flight" and separated from unwanted fragments by magnetic analysis. These rare isotope beams are delivered to experimental areas or stopped in a suite of ion stopping stations where they can be extracted and used for experiments at low energy, or reaccelerated for astrophysical experiments or for nuclear structure experiments. FRIB will take advantage of previous investments in the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) facility and Michigan State University commitment to provide ion stopping, reacceleration capabilities to 3 MeV/nucleon and a wide array of experimental equipment. The project includes the necessary infrastructure and support facilities for operations and the 1000-person user community. The Project will design, build, and install the accelerator hardware, experimental apparatus, civil construction, and central facilities required to produce an isotope facility. The enhanced facility will be designed to meet requirements that ensure high reliability and availability for the user programs and ensure excellent scientific productivity.
FRIB is funded through a cooperative agreement with Michigan State University.
The facility upgrade at the Texas A&M University (TAMU) Cyclotron Institute (CI) will greatly enhance its capabilities for research with both stable and radioactive beams. The upgrade consists of: (1) re-commissioning the K150 (88") cyclotron, coupling it to existing beam lines in order to provide intense stable beams into the K500 experimental areas and using it as a driver to produce radioactive beams; (2) developing light-ion and heavy-ion guides for stopping radioactive ions created with the K150 beams; (3) transporting 1+ ions from ion guides into a charge-breeding electron cyclotron-resonance ion source (CB-ECRIS) to produce highly charged radioactive ions for acceleration in the K500 superconducting cyclotron. When completed in FY 2013, the upgraded facility will provide high-quality re-accelerated secondary beams in a unique energy range in the world.
This is an R&D effort to determine technical feasibility of using high purity, isotopically enriched germanium to explore the nature of the neutrino via neutrinoless double beta decay (DBD). It is expected to evolve into an international collaboration that would support a proposed tonne-scale Majorana experiment at an appropriate underground facility. Projects that study DBD with extreme sensitivity such as these will address two fundamental properties of the neutrino, its absolute mass scale and its particle-antiparticle nature, that are important for understanding the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe and the evolution of the cosmos.
In FY 2007, U.S. university scientists started participation in the German-lead Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment. This experiment aims at a model-independent kinematic measurement of the mass of the electron neutrino with a sensitivity of 0.2 eV, which represents an increase in sensitivity by an order of magnitude over previous experiments. Fabrication of the U.S. contribution to the instrument was completed in August 2011, and its commissioning at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology has started. Data taking is expected to commence in FY 2014.
Closed Projects: Major Items of Equipment
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ALICE EMCal at the LHC, LBNL
This MIE fabricated a large electromagnetic calorimeter (EMCal) for the ALICE experiment at the LHC, and is a joint project with France and Italy. It received CD-2/3 approval in February 2008 and was completed on cost and schedule in September 2011.
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Fundamental Neutron Physics Beamline (FNPB), ORNL
This MIE fabricated two beam lines at the Spallation Neutron Source to deliver record peak currents of cold and ultra-cold neutrons for studies of fundamental neutron properties. It was completed on cost and schedule in June 2010. The project received funding under the Recovery Act.
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GRETINA Gamma-Ray Detector, LBNL
This MIE fabricated an array of highly-segmented germanium crystals for gamma ray tracking. It received CD-2/3 approval in October 2007 and completed on cost and schedule in March 2011. This detector is being shared by the Nation's low energy accelerator facilities operated by both DOE and NSF.
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Neutron Electric Dipole Moment (nEDM),
ORNL
This MIE was aimed at fabricating a cryogenic apparatus to measure the neutron electric dipole moment using ultra-cold neutrons from the FNPB. It received CD-1 approval in February 2007. The MIE was terminated in FY11 following an NSAC review to reassess scientific merit and technical feasibility in the context of an optimized national neutron program. In accordance with NSAC recommendation, we continue to support a focused R&D effort aimed at resolving technical challenges with the proposed approach so as to inform DOE on the possibilities for mounting a world-class nEDM experiment in the future.
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PHENIX Forward Vertex Detector (FVTX), BNL
This MIE fabricated two silicon endcaps to extend the VTX tracking and vertexing capabilities in the forward and backward regions. The project was baselined at a Technical, Cost, Schedule, and Management Review in November 2007 and completed on cost and schedule in December 2011. The project has received funding under the Recovery Act.
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PHENIX Silicon Vertex Tracker (VTX), BNL
This MIE fabricated a barrel of silicon pixel and strip detectors for high-precision tracking and vertexing, and is a joint project with Japan. The project was baselined at a Technical, Cost, Schedule, and Management Review in May 2006 and completed on cost and schedule in December 2010.
Acronyms:
CD-0: |
Critical Decision 0: Mission Need |
CD-1: |
Alternative Selection and Cost Range |
CD-2: |
Performance Baseline |
CD-3A: |
Long-leadtime Procurements |
CD-3: |
Start of Construction |
CD-4: |
Start of Operations / Project Completion |
TEC: |
Total Estimated Cost |
TPC: |
Total Project Cost |