The US Department of Energy’s Office of Science has unveiled its 20 year science facility plan. This is in effect a roadmap for future scientific facilities to support the department’s basic science and research missions. The plan prioritizes new, major scientific facilities as well as upgrades to current ones. The 28 facilities listed cover the range of science supported by the Office of Science, including high-energy physics, nuclear physics and advanced scientific computation.
The list begins with 12 facilities that are identified as near-term priorities. Priority one is ITER, the international collaboration to build the first fusion experiment capable of producing a self-sustaining fusion reaction. Priority two is an UltraScale Scientific Computing Capability, to be located at multiple sites, which would increase the computing capability available to support open scientific research by a factor of 100.
Four facilities tied for priority three, including the Joint Dark Energy Mission, a space-based probe being considered in partnership with NASA; the Linac Coherent Light Source to provide laser-like radiation 10 billion times greater in power and brightness than any existing X-ray light source; and the Rare Isotope Accelerator that would be the world’s most powerful research facility dedicated to producing and exploring new rare isotopes not found naturally on Earth. Six others complete the near-term priorities. These include the 12 GeV upgrade for CEBAF at the Thomas Jefferson Laboratory and the BTeV experiment at Fermilab.
A linear collider operating in the TeV energy region heads the list of eight mid-term priorities. These also include a Double Beta Decay Underground Detector and an upgrade to provide a 10-fold increase in the luminosity of Brookhaven’s RHIC II. The eight far-term priorities include a Super Neutrino Beam, 10 times more intense than those currently available, and eRHIC, a project to add an electron accelerator ring to the existing RHIC complex.
