International Union of Pure and Applied Physics

WG.9: Working Group on International Cooperation
in Nuclear Physics (ICNP)

 
 
Minutes 2011

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IUPAP WG.9 Annual General Meeting (AGM) held at MIT in Cambridge, MA, July 24, 2011

Present:

  • Anthony W. Thomas – Chair
  • Willem T.H. van Oers – Secretary
  • Samuel Aronson
  • Hideto En’yo
  • Brian Fulton
  • Sydney Gales
  • C. Konrad Gelbke
  • Alinka Lepine-Szily
  • Jean-Michel Poutissou for Nigel Lockyer
  • Hugh Montgomery
  • Dan-Olof Riska
  • Guenther Rosner
  • Hideyuki Sakai
  • Susan Seestrom
  • Robert E. Tribble
  • Zeblon Vilakazi
  • Wenlong Zhan

Regrets: 

  • Umberto Dosselli
  • Victor A. Matveev
  • Dong-Pil Min
  • Shoji Nagamiya
  • Horst Stoecker

C12 Observers present: 

  • Constantia Alexandrou
  • Donald F. Geesaman
  • Alexei Korsheninnikov
  • Weiping Liu
  • Giovanni Ricco
  • Pia Thoerngren-Engblom 

Adoption of the Agenda and Approval of the Minutes of the last AGM held at TRIUMF on July 4, 2010.

Report by the Chair:
The Chair reported on the status of the electronic version of IUPAP Report 41 – still to be updated are the sections ‘Hadronic Nuclear Physics’ by Guenther Rosner and ‘Executive Summary’ by the Chair. Efforts need to be made to enter the descriptions of the following Russian facilities: the Kurchatov Institute, Moscow, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR-Dubna), the Institute for Nuclear Research (INR-Moscow), the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP-Moscow), the Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEP-Protvino) (Victor A. Matveev has been approached regarding this matter).

Planning for the 2013 Nuclear Science Symposium:
In the context of the mandate given to the IUPAP Working Group WG.9, a second Nuclear Science Symposium is to be organized in 2013. This second symposium, to be arranged by IUPAP WG.9, is to be a meeting point of the lead proponents of nuclear science worldwide, of nuclear science administrators, and of government representatives. Unlike the first symposium the program for the second symposium should have direct input from the latter two groups. In addition, the program should also have direct input from the management of the very large nuclear physics facilities and notification should be given to the European Union’s Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) with its connection to the Council of Science Ministers. The OECD Science Forum should be informed through its secretary Stefan Michalowski. As a further remark, it is to be noted that the committee of Funding Agencies for Large Collaborations (FALC) meets twice per year.

A letter will be drafted by the Chair to initiate the process of organizing the 2013 Nuclear Science Symposium; it will be circulated first among Hideyuki Sakai, Susan Seestrom, Guenther Rosner, and Nigel Lockyer, Sydney Gales, and Wenlong Zhan.

The Chair will also draft the report on the 2009-2011 activities of IUPAP WG.9, which is to be submitted to the IUPAP General Assembly, meeting at the Institute of Physics (IOP), London, UK, on November 2-4, 2011.

Composition of IUPAP WG.9
The Chair also reported on the current composition of IUPAP WG.9; for the list of members see http://www.triumf.info/hosted/iupap/icnp/index.html under ‘Current Membership’. The Chair indicated to be leaving the chair position at the end of 2011. With only one nomination received Robert E. Tribble was confirmed as the new Chair of IUPAP WG.9. The Secretary, serving at the pleasure of the Working Group, will continue in his present position.

Long Range Plans for Nuclear Science:
Presentations were given on the Long Range Plans of NuPECC, NSERC, NSAC, and
ANPhA. The presentations proper can be found in the above website http://www.triumf.info/hosted/iupap/icnp/index.html  under ’Meetings’.
The NuPECC Long Range Plan ‘Perspectives for Nuclear Physics in Europe’ was officially published on December 10, 2010, in Brussels, Belgium, the then rotating Chair of the European Union. The report can be found at http://www.nupecc.org. A shorter version (very good reading) that illustrates highlights of the NuPECC Long Range Plan 2010 from the European Science Foundation and the European Collaboration Committee can be found on the same website. To be noted are the priority recommendations. The planned EURISOL facility (a next generation European ISOL radioactive ion beam facility) is to be considered by the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI). The FAIR facility at GSI in Darmstadt now carries a price tag of 1.5B Euros. Data taking is to start in 2018. There is a proposal to ask the users to share in the operating cost of  the facility ( 120M Euros per year). This cost sharing (except for the operation of a large detector) have never been a modus operandi in the field of nuclear science.   
The Canadian Long Range Plan for Subatomic Physics is to be submitted to NSERC in September 2011. Its recommendations deal with nuclear astrophysics, nuclear structure physics, and fundamental symmetries at the ISAC-I and ISAC-II facility at TRIUMF, with high energy physics being partners in the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN, with ‘off-shore’ particle physics at several other national laboratories, and with neutrino physics and the search for dark matter at SNOLAB.
NSAC has just completed its assessment of the neutron physics program in the US executed at LANSCE, NIST, and the SNS. The report deals prominently with the neutron EDM search envisaged at the SNS, which is to reach an upper limit in the order of
10(-28) before 2025; however, there are still many difficult technical hurdles to be overcome. The future of the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) is uncertain with the decision by the NSF Science Board to withdraw from the project. This may have an impact on the research program at SNOLAB, although the Sudbury mine, at the site of a large deposit of nickel formed by the impact of a large meteorite, does not allow for a larger cavity to be constructed, e.g. for a proton decay detector. With the last NSAC Long Range Plan dating 2007, a new Long Range Plan exercise should commence in the very near future. However, the current fiscal uncertainties in Washington, DC, are causing delays.
ANPhA reported on the first Long Range Plan for nuclear science in Japan with two categories of proposals (for projects costing more than $ 100M labeled ‘Origins of Matter’ and about $ 50M, respectively) to be submitted to the Science Council of Japan, a committee in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Under the first category fall the J-PARC upgrade costing $300M, foreseen for the years 2012-2016, and the RIKEN upgrade giving higher intensities of $150M. Under category B falls the upgrade of RCNP to 10 microA acceleration and the neutrinoless double beta decay and muon to electron conversion experiments. In Korea the site for a $500M rare isotope accelerator (KoRIA) has been chosen. Design of the accelerator is underway. This is a very ambitious undertaking, which will require a significant increase in the number of nuclear and accelerator physicists. In China there are currently new construction and upgrades efforts for three large nuclear science facilities.

Facilities:
Further detailed reports were presented on the status of FAIR at GSI, FRIB at MSU, 12 GeV upgrade of CEBAF at JLab, SPIRAL-II at GANIL, SuperB at Tor Vergata, Universita di Roma (an INFN project), and on the electron-ion collider proposals by BNL and JLab. The LHeC proposal from CERN could be discussed at a future meeting of IUPAP WG.9. The presentations proper can be found at the website http://www.triumf.info/hosted/iupap/icnp/index.html under ‘Meetings’ The FRIB facility will be a DoE project with a contribution of more than $93M from MSU. To be noted are the sizable number of technical innovations for the project, realized by a large staff of young experimental physicists at NSCL-MSU. At JLab the halfway point towards the completion of the 12 GeV upgrade of CEBAF has been passed. SPIRAL-II presents a large extension of the facilities at GANIL. The SuperB project has been awarded 250M Euros over five years by the Italian Government. It was the top ranked out of 14 national projects. Negotiations are underway to acquire surplus equipment from SLAC which could speed completion of the project. Both JLab and BNL are working towards proposals for an electron-ion collider to study the still missing tomography information of the nucleon. Efforts are being made preparing the science rationale for inclusion in the next NSAC Long Range Plan.

Nuclear Science in Russia:
An impromptu exposition of nuclear science facilities in Russia was given by Alexei Korsheninnikov. These are the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow (with a 80-100 MeV linear accelerator for electrons plus a 450 MeV booster ring and a 2 GeV main storage ring), the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) in Moscow (with a 36 MeV 200 mA proton linear asccelerator with a neutron production target), the Institute for Nuclear Research (INR) in Troitsk (with a 600 MeV proton and H- linear accelerator operating in the range 160 to 420 MeV as well as a deep under water neutrino telescope at Lake Baykal and neutrino observatory at Baksan, Kabardino-Balkaria), the Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Protvino, (with a 70 GeV proton synchrotron), and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna (for the particle accelerators at JINR and their use see: http://accelconf.web.cern.ch/AccelConf/IPAC10/talks/tuzra02_talk.pdf   The facilities at the Budker Institute for Nuclear Physics (BINP) in Novosibirsk and the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute (PNPI) are described in IUPAP Report 41.

Nuclear Science in Latin-America:
ALAFNA (Associacion Latino Americana de Fisica Nuclear y Aplicaciones) has been formed with a statute and bylaws and met at the IX Latin-American Symposium on Nuclear Physics and Applications, in Quito, Ecuador, July 18-22, 2011. Chairs are Alinka Lepine-Szily from Brazil and Andres J. Kreiner from Argentina. It is organizing symposia and workshops on a regular basis through out Latin-America and would very much like to attract increased participation in these from Europe and North-America. Its existence is very timely with the proposed underground laboratory ANDES for nuclear science at a depth of 1,500m in a tunnel going from Brazil to Chile.

Nuclear Science in Africa:
Nuclear Physics on the African continent was discussed by Zeblon Vilakazi of i’Themba Laboratories with a 200 MeV open-sector cyclotron for basic and applied nuclear physics. Other accelerators for nuclear physics can be found in Egypt. Algeria, and Nigeria. Encouragement will be given to foster collaborations within Africa.

OECD Global Science Forum: Astroparticle Physics:
In March 2011 the OECD Global Science Forum published the report of its Working Group on Astroparticle Physics (see www.oecd.org/sti/gsf ). Even though the report pertains to cover the evolution of the universe from its beginning at the ‘Big Bang’ till today Nuclear Astrophysics is missing in the report. With various actions requested by the OECD Working Group from IUPAP, it appears necessary that the IUPAP Commission on Nuclear Physics (C12) takes up this issue with IUPAP’s Executive.

Funding Discussions:
The implications of the proposal by GSI to have the Users Groups share in the costs of operating the FAIR facility were discussed at length. A majority of those present was concerned about the impact of this approach on the broad participation in experimental nuclear physics, not only by the industrialized countries but also by the developing countries. IUPAP WG.9 anticipates further discussions on this issue.

Next Meetings:
With the IUPAP WG.9 AGM in 2010 at TRIUMF in Vancouver, BC, and the 2011 AGM at MIT in Boston, MA, and in all probability the meetings of IUPAP WG.9 and IUPAP C12 in 2013 taking place at the time of the International Nuclear Physics Conference in Florence, Italy, June 2-7. it appeared most appropriate that the IUPAP WG.9 and IUPAP C12 meetings in 2012 take place in Asia. To keep the time needed to attend these meetings for many of the members of IUPAP WG.9 (and C12) to a minimum, the location of the two meetings should be either Tokyo or Beijing having many direct flights from Europe, North-America, and the Far-East. The tentative dates are August 17 and 18, 2012 (Friday and Saturday). The location and dates will be confirmed shortly.

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TRIUMF, Vancouver, BC, August 4, 2011
Willem T.H. van Oers, secretary of IUPAP WG.9                         


   
 
 
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