[Moller] MOLLER collaboration meeting

[Krishna Kumar]

Dear MOLLER Collaborator:

This email is just to announce that we have scheduled a MOLLER collaboration meeting for September 28/29 (Fri/Sat) at Jefferson Lab. It will be an opportunity to review the status of the experimental design and expand/prioritize ongoing developments in various subsystems.

I want to take this opportunity to update you on a few things.

As you may recall, we submitted an MIE proposal to DOE NP in late September last year. The original intention at that time was that DOE would use the document to initiate a physics review in anticipation of having the MOLLER project enter the "CD pipeline". Recent conversations with the NP office by Mont and myself leave us with the understanding that this still remains the plan, though everything has been delayed in terms of future funding requests due to the initiation of the study by the NSAC subcommittee. This is in response to a Charge sent down by the Office of Science at DOE and the MPS division of the NSF to advice the agencies on the implementation of the 2007 Long Range Plan of US Nuclear Physics (http://cyclotron.tamu.edu/nsac-subcommittee-2012/) in light of recent tight funding constraints.

I remind you that the MOLLER experiment is explicitly mentioned in the 2007 LRP report as an important future direction of the NP subfield of Fundamental Symmetries, and is implicitly part of primary recommendation #3 in the Executive Summary, which called for significant investments in this subfield. Since that time, support and exposure for the physics motivation and importance of MOLLER has steadily increased. MOLLER is now routinely mentioned as an important new initiative in fundamental low energy electroweak physics in conference talks and appears in the "wish list" of potential future projects that could be part of the next wave of mid-range DoE investments in NP subfields. 

The FS subfield has organized a workshop in Chicago (http://www.phy.ornl.gov/funsym/) in preparation for the NSAC Subcommittee meeting in September. Kent Paschke has been invited to give a 30 minute presentation of future JLab PV initiatives at this meeting, which will form the basis for presentations to the NSAC subcommittee meeting in early September. We are working on getting a separate presentation for the JLab PV program at the September NSAC meeting during the FS presentations and of course we expect that MOLLER will also be prominently featured in JLab's presentations of the 12 GeV program to the subcommittee. 

Parenthetically, I am sure you know JLab is preparing a White Paper for this process (you have seen a draft which was circulated to the Users). I have been the primary editor for the PV part of this document. 

I expect that we will emerge from this NP exercise even stronger than before. The main impact of the process for MOLLER at the moment is a roughly one year delay from the timeline we had envisioned last September. It think we can reasonably hope for DOE to start initiating a review in Spring 13 and we can realistically hope for major project funding in '14 or '15.

In the meantime, we must continue to build on the various aspects of the conceptual design to the extent possible. This is a tough year for funding, especially for engineering design. Nevertheless, we have obtained a small amount of funding from JLab to initiate engineering studies at MIT-Bates of the hybrid spectrometer coils. The immediate goal is formulate specifications for the hybrid torus including adequate water cooling and preliminary tolerances in order to get feedback on the range of cost estimates and technical feasibility of fabrication. 

The simulation group continues to develop the tools required to fine-tune the design of the spectrometer optics in order to maximize signal and minimize background. We have begun a first pass attempt at the required collimation. A subgroup has launched work on simulations aimed at devising the light guides required for the primary detectors. Another subgroup has begun thinking about tracking for the Q2 measurement and calibrating pion backgrounds. The primary place to get status reports before the collaboration meeting is the "Supergroup" teleconferences organized by Mark Pitt (including one this afternoon). 

Finally, I want to take this opportunity to congratulate Silviu Covrig for winning the DoE Early Career Award. Silviu will use the award (~0.5M$ a year for 5 years) to develop a CFD facility at JLab to support the development of 12 GeV cryotargets. Needless to say, the MOLLER target development will figure prominently in his research plans in the latter years of the duration of the award.

Cheers, 
KK