the country related to the SSC. Funds for these fellowships are being provided by the Texas National Research Laboratory Commission but, again, as I say, the people involved are from across the country, and it is very exciting to begin already to see the young scientists getting involved in this program. They are going to be the leaders in ten years when we have completed this machine, and they are the people who will be making the discoveries. Beyond the fellowship program we are working with local educational people in our communities to see how right from the beginning we can use our resources and all the interesting engineering tools, construction activities, magnets and research that can be part of, again, a national resource in education starting right from the beginning, before we even begin the research programs of the laboratory. Let me conclude by saying the SSC laboratory is off to a very exciting and productive start. We must now maintain the momentum of the first year by vigorously pursuing our magnet development program, carrying out the design and testing activities at the site, planning the initial experimental program and building on the foundation of educational programs we have begun to implement. Thank you very much. [The prepared statement of Dr. Schwitters follows:] SSC Status Prepared testimony of Roy F. Schwitters, Director Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory before Subcommittee on Energy, Research, and Development Committee on Energy and Natural Resources U.S. Senate April 24, 1990 STATEMENT OF ROY F. SCHWITTERS DIRECTOR, SSC LABORATORY Why do we want to build the Superconducting Super Collider? Since humans became curious about the world around them they have sought answers to two basic questions: What are things made of? How do they work? The answers to these questions have evolved over time and have now reached the stage at which we can describe what we know about the constitution of matter and the forces that affect matter in terms of what is known as the "Standard Model." Ail experimental evidence that has been gathered to date is consistent with the Standard Model and yet the model is itself incomplete, for while it does an excellent job of describing reality it is unable to explain why reality takes the form it does. The next step, then, in the long and intellectually exciting quest to understand our world is to understand the inner workings of the Standard Model and what lies beyond. T.D. Lee, a Nobel laureate in physics has said: Our aim is to understand that set of laws which governs everything. SSC When President Reagan announced his intention to proceed with the construction of the SSC, he signalled this country's resolve to remain a world leader in the search for knowledge and understanding. His announcement changed the nature of the SSC from a conceptual effort to understand the design of a next-generation accelerator into a project with the goal of creating the world's most powerful accelerator and the world's premiere high energy physics laboratory. Through 1987 and 1988, much of the effort of the Department of Energy on this project focussed on finding a site for the SSC. The Department enlisted the help of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering in part of the site selection process, and by January 1989 it had selected a site in Ellis County, Texas as the future home of the SSC. Also in January of 1989, DOE chose Universities Research Association, a consortium of 77 leading research universities, to serve as the management and operating contractor for the SSC with responsibility to design, build, and operate the SSC Laboratory. Thus the Laboratory has now been in existence for just over a year. I would like to report to you now about the accomplishments of the past year and about the goals and plans for the future. When it was formed last year, the new Laboratory agreed with DOE on a number of important tasks to be undertaken in its first year. The Laboratory was to: mobilize its effort near the Ellis County site, develop a site-specific baseline design, schedule, and cost estimate, select an architect-engineer/construction manager, continue development of the SSC magnets, and initiate scientific programs This was an ambitious program, particularly for an enterprise that did not even exist just over a year ago, but I am pleased to report that the dedicated people that have come to work on this project have accomplished the short-term goals that had been set out for them. Mobilize effort near the site At the time that the SSC Laboratory was established, design and planning work on the SSC had been going on for several years at the Central Design Group located at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California. There, some 80 people had developed a conceptual design for the SSC and, working with scientists and engineers at Fermilab and at Brookhaven National Laboratory, had begun a research and development program to design the large superconducting magnets that will steer the proton beams around the collider ring. The fledging Laboratory established temporary office headquarters in South Dallas, incorporated the Central Design Group (inviting any of its staff that wished to come to Dallas to do so), and began recruiting staff. At present, the SSC Laboratory has a staff of just over 500, organized in three project divisions (magnet systems, accelerator systems, and conventional construction), a physics research division, and a number of supporting and administrative units. The temporary headquarters have expanded to accommodate this staff, though the goal is to move to the permanent site in Ellis County as soon as possible. Develop baseline design, schedule, and cost estimate Perhaps the Laboratory's most important activity in its first year was the preparation of a site specific design and associated schedules and cost estimates. The Central Design Group had, in 1986, completed a conceptual design for the SSC but that design must be viewed as a hypothetical design located at a generic location because the site had not yet been chosen. Using the conceptual design, schedules prepared with the Central Design Group, and economic assumptions provided by the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Energy generated a cost estimate for the project of $5.9 billion in then-year dollars. In early 1989, the SSC Laboratory began its work on the design of the SSC, using as a starting point the 1986 conceptual design. The intervening three years had yielded considerable new information for the designers. An actual site had been chosen and could be incorporated in the design. Operating experience at other accelerators, most notably those at Fermilab, CERN, and HERA provided information about the behavior of particles in accelerators and the performance of superconducting magnets. And the SSC magnet research and development program was well along the path toward demonstrating the concept and design of the large superconducting dipole magnets. The result of the design effort has been a recommended design for the SSC that proposes an accelerator with a beam energy of 20 TeV, luminosity of 1033 cm-2 sec-1, injection energy of 2 TeV, magnet field strength of 6.59 T, magnet aperture of 5 cm, and tunnel length of about 54 miles. The recommended design provides for four initial interaction regions and includes tunnels that could be outfitted in the future to provide experimental bypasses. The major changes from the 1986 conceptual design are the injection energy (up from 1 TeV), the magnet aperture (up from 4 cm), and the bypasses. The first two changes were recommended based on careful analysis of the behavior of particle beams at other accelerators and on simulations of particle behavior run on supercomputers that showed that with the lower injection energy and smaller aperture the reliable operation of the accelerator could not be assured. To verify the interpretation of the new information and the correctness of the recommendation based on that information, the Laboratory asked its Machine Advisory Committee, a group of internationally recognized accelerator scientists and engineers, to review the data and provide an independent recommendation. The report |