Time Running Short At Big Bang Device
By VALERIE COTSALAS
Published: February 27, 2005
IF Congress approves President Bush's 2006 budget proposal, scientists working on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory will face new pressure in their effort to pry open the mysteries of the early universe.
The operators of the $600 million collider are in a race to be the first to create and identify a substance called quark-gluon plasma, a hot, dense state of matter postulated to have existed an instant after the Big Bang.
The 2006 budget proposal trims $8 million from the RHIC budget, which is $106 million this year. Scientists at B.N.L. say the cut would mean that the machine, which typically runs for 31 weeks each year, would only have enough money to operate for 12 weeks. They say a reduction in running time would reduce the chance that the lab will prove the creation of the elusive plasma before a new, more powerful collider in Switzerland begins operation in 2007.
Scientists and administrators trekked to Washington this month for talks with officials of the Department of Energy, which operates B.N.L.
''We have been discussing how we are going to deal with the RHIC 2006 budget proposal,'' said Satoshi Ozaki, who is in charge of the project. ''We have a rather pessimistic budget scenario for the next five years.''
RHIC is currently the most powerful collider of its kind on the planet. It is essentially twin subterranean tubes, each with a circumference of 2.4 miles, in which ions propelled by huge magnets are raced around in opposing directions at nearly the speed of light, then crashed into each other. Scientists say each head-on collision approximates, on the tiniest scale, the explosion in which the universe was born.
Starting the machine up and shutting it down takes about six weeks, first to chill the tubes to near absolute zero and fine-tune the beam, then to warm them up again after the experiments. So in a 12-week run, only 6 weeks would be available for experiments. But RHIC scientists are planning to shut it down for more than a year after its 2005 run ends in June. Starting it up again in late September 2006, the lab plans to combine funding for 2006 and 2007 to keep RHIC running for 22 weeks.
''If this reduced budget scenario continues for many years, we'll be in a cycle of running every two years, rather than every year,'' said Thomas Ludlam, associate chairman of the physics department at B.N.L.
In 2007, however, scientists near Geneva are expected to flip the switch on the Large Hadron Collider, which is more powerful than RHIC. Though the main goal of the Swiss machine, operated by CERN (an acronym of the French for European Council for Nuclear Research), is to find a theorized subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, scientists there also hope to create and identify quark-gluon plasma. It makes no difference to the advancement of science who first cooks up a quark-gluon plasma. But pride is at stake. ''Of course the competitive juices are flowing,'' Dr. Ludlam said. ''Our U.S. scientists are not happy about moving at a slower pace.''
The view at the Department of Energy is that RHIC has disproved the prevailing theory of quark-gluon plasma, and that this is itself an important discovery.
''The original concept of the Q.G.P. is just dead wrong,'' said Raymond Orbach, director of the office of science at the Department of Energy. ''What this piece of equipment has done is to show that there is something much more interesting that is happening at these temperatures and pressures.''
He was referring to results announced by B.N.L. in 2003, when scientists said they had created a form of matter hotter and denser than any before measured. But they would not call it quark-gluon plasma, and later tests showed that the substance seems to act as a fluid rather than a gas, an unexpected result.
''We saw some exciting results and understood that we're dealing with some form of matter that has many characteristics of Q.G.P. that we expected and some which are different than what we expected,'' Dr. Ludlam said.
RHIC scientists say creating a new state of matter fulfills their goal, but they won't be satisfied until they can know what the new stuff is.
''There is a conflict, I have to admit that,'' Dr. Ozaki said by telephone from Washington last week. ''But we have to be certain that we can support whatever we say with the data. And we need a lot of machine time for that.''
Return on investment is also an issue. Construction and operating costs for RHIC exceed $1.1 billion so far. And jobs hang in the balance. Derek Lowenstein, the chairman of B.N.L.'s collider-accelerator department, said he'll have to lay off 30 of the 355 scientists, engineers, technicians and administrators if the budget is cut by $8 million.
Many RHIC scientists are expected to head for Switzerland once the CERN machine starts up, Dr. Ludlam said. But Dr. Orbach said that scientists are already leaving RHIC to work at CERN as its collider nears its start-up date, not because of funding cuts.
Dr. Ozaki remains optimistic. ''I'm certain we'll reach the main goal of RHIC before the L.H.C. goes online,'' he said. ''If we can characterize this phenomenon, show that this substance is made up of quarks and gluons, then we have succeeded.''