World regions in stalemate over particle accelerator conferences

For years, the main particle accelerator conferences have alternated between North America, in odd years, and Europe, in even years. Beginning in 2011, to make room for Asia’s PAC to join the rotation, Europe will switch from a two-year to a three-year cycle, but the organizers and sponsors of the North American PAC are resisting such a switch.

In April, Michigan State University’s Stanley Schriber, who chairs the NA PAC steering committee, broke a tied vote in the committee, coming down against switching the conference to a three-year cycle.

Arguments for switching include keeping the total number of conferences in the field down and treating North America, Europe, and Asia as equal partners in the field’s increasingly global endeavors. Arguments against switching center on the nature of the NA PAC, which includes more engineers and technicians than the other PACs; on the rotation around North America, which gives graduate students and others an opportunity to attend without extensive travel; on the smaller size of the Asian PAC (APAC); and on worries that restrictions by the US Department of Energy (DOE) would limit the number of attendees at foreign conferences.

Albrecht Wagner, chair of the International Committee for Future Accelerators and director of the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) laboratory in Hamburg, says he is “very disappointed” that the NA PAC is sticking with the two-year cycle. ICFA and directors of the world’s major accelerator labs, he notes, have endorsed “the internationalization and coordination” of the PACs, so that one is held each year, with the venue rotating around the world. Adds SLAC director Jonathan Dorfan, “We cannot optimize science regionally anymore. We have to take full advantage of international opportunities, and therefore Asia should be part of the triumvirate.”

Shin-ichi Kurokawa, a deputy director of the KEK accelerator lab in Japan, notes that in 2010 the APAC will be held in Japan, and “for the first time there will not be another PAC in the same year.” By then, he adds, “it should be clear that in Asia accelerator physics is growing and is equivalent in spending and content to the rest of the world. I appreciate that the Europeans are switching to a three-year cycle. And I hope the Americans will do the same soon.”

An early suggestion by a subgroup of the NA PAC steering committee to keep the two-year cycle and to hold conferences in the three world regions at eight-month intervals got the thumbs-down in both Europe and Asia. “The conferences would be too close together and there would not be much new information to report,” says European PAC chair Chris Prior of the UK’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire. Subsequent suggestions by the subgroup, put forward this summer, include holding a PAC in North America every two years, and one in either Europe or Asia in the off years; and finding a way to shuffle the three-year cycles of EPAC and APAC with a two-year NA PAC.

“There is no specific acceptance of a particular sequence that would be followed by all three PACs,” says Schriber. “But there is an expression of good will, and a willingness to work together.” Any decision to change the cycle of the NA PAC would require, in addition to the steering committee’s vote, agreement of the meeting’s two sponsoring groups, the American Physical Society’s Division of Physics of Beams and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society.

“We have come up with ideas to move ahead,” Schriber says. The NA PAC committee will look for ways “to help strengthen the [2010] Asian PAC.” Another indicator of what compromises might be acceptable, he adds, “is whether the US government manages to get approval for a large number of [US] people to go to Canada, which is considered foreign travel,” for the 2009 NA PAC in Vancouver.

As of earlier this year, DOE regulations were tightened so that agency labs wanting to send more than 30 people to a conference—domestic or international—or spend more than $10 000 for conference attendance must now get approval from the DOE Office of Science. But, says Robin Staffin, the office’s associate director for high-energy physics, “that’s a reporting threshold, not a cap.” Moreover, he says, if the NA PAC is switched to a three-year cycle, “we would make every effort to accommodate this decision by facilitating travel.”