Stan Schriber continues as PAST Chair until January 2013.
ORGANIZATION
The PAST TC has been organized with the following responsibilities. As the past PAST Chair, Ilan Ben-Zvi (BNL) will be in charge of the Fellows and Awards subcommittee; responsible for nominating our PAST award candidates and fellows. As the former past PAST Chair, Bruce Brown (FNAL) will be in charge of our Web and Communications subcommittee; responsible in part for our PAST TC web site. Our elected PAST TC member for IEEE-NPSS AdCom, Sandra Biedron (ANL), is chair of our Nominating, Education and Outreach (includes our interests in Women in Science and Engineering) subcommittee; responsible in part for nominating members who could be elected to serve on the IEEE-NPSS AdCom. And finally, Paul Schmor (TRIUMF) is chair of our Conferences subcommittee.
CONFERENCES
PAC’09
PAC’09, the 23rd Particle Accelerator Conference, organized by the TRIUMF laboratory under the auspices of the APS-DPB and IEEE-NPSS was held in Vancouver B.C. Canada, 4th–8th May 2009. The conference opened Sunday with a well-attended student poster session and reception for delegates followed by opening remarks on Monday from TRIUMF director Nigel Lockyer and Program chairman Shane Koscielniak. The meeting closed on Friday with concluding remarks from LOC chairman Yuri Bylinsky and a pre-recorded farewell from the conference chairman Paul Schmor. Tragically, Paul suffered a serious and debilitating illness, Guillain-Barre syndrome, a week before the meeting and was unable to share in its success.
PAC’09 was an outstanding conference by any measure: 1327 participants, 74 industrial exhibits, 148 students, 197 orals, 1570 posters, and 23 satellite meetings. Making all that run smoothly and confidently is an achievement TRIUMF and its conference coordinator, Sandi Miller, can be proud of. What the statistics cannot capture was the vitality of the meeting: several standing-room-only orals sessions, the throng of the enthusiastic and energetic poster sessions, the myriad technical conversations. An important component was the presence of students about to enter our field as apprentice accelerator physicists and engineers. Fifty-one students received travel grants thanks to generous support from PAC’09, the APS and IEEE, U.S. laboratories ANL, BNL, TJNAF, LLNL, and industry sponsors AAPS, Diversified and MDS Nordion. Incidentally, registrations were slightly higher than is conveyed by the numbers above; the WHO-recognized global H1N1-influenza epidemic announced 30th April led to about 60 cancellations, many of them from Japan where laboratory restrictions were imposed on foreign travel.
Particularly memorable were the packed rooms for four talks: Richard York’s FRIB: A New Accelerator facility for the Production of Radioactive Beams, Mark Hogan’s Road to a Plasma Wakefield Accelerator based Linear Collider, both on Tuesday; Paul Emma’s Commissioning Status of the LCLS X-Ray FEL, and Thomas Haberer’s Commissioning of Hadrontherapy Synchrotrons HIT and CNAO, both on Thursday. These talks cement the opinion that particle accelerators are key to every frontier, be it astrophysics, high-energy physics, materials science, or nuclear medicine. This same thought was echoed at the opening plenary by Michael Turner’s 400 Years of Discovery with Telescopes and Microscopes, Alan Shotter’s Radioactive Beams for Astrophysics, and at the closing plenary with Stefan Karsch’s remarkable account of Single Particle Diffraction at FLASH, Thomas Mason’s New Generation of Neutron Sources, and Nicholas Walker’s rallying call Progress Toward the International Linear Collider. For our community, this sense of scope and achievement for our craft more than made up for the disappointment over the too-short-lived Large Hadron Collider Commissioning, as reported by Jorg Weninger. A unifying theme of the opening plenary, the International Year of Astronomy, was alluded to directly by Turner and Shotter: both recognized the convergence of astronomy/cosmology and nuclear/high-energy-particle physics, and both marveled that accelerators provide the means for studying the “heavenly laboratory” under controlled conditions.
Behind the scenes the proceedings office toiled away, starting to produce the permanent conference record formed of papers and speakers slides. By 8th May all 1591 of the received contributions had begun processing, and of these 1329 were completed and ready for the final stage, Quality Assurance. As of June 12th, 1491 contributions were ready for publication. The proceedings team, led by Martin Comyn, is owed a vote of thanks. The conference organizers wish also to express their thanks to the speakers, the session chairmen and the delegates for making PAC’09 a resounding success.
Finally, PAC’09 wishes a similar good fortune to the three following conferences: PAC’11 the next in the continuing North American series, to be hosted by Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York City, the IPAC’10 in Kyoto Japan, the first of the 3-year international cycle, and the IPAC’11 in San Sabastien Spain.
PAC’11
Planning is underway for the next conference in the PAC series, PAC’11, which will be held at the New York Marriott Marquis in downtown New York, NY, 2011 March 28 – April 1. This conference will be the first PAC conference in North America being held between the three-year cycle IPAC conferences: the first, IPAC’10, being held in Kyoto, Japan 2010 May 24 – 28 and the second, IPAC’11, being held in Spain 2011 September. The chair of our PAC’11 conference is Thomas Roser, BNL, who is busy putting his conference team and budget together.
IPAC’12
Planning is also underway for the first IPAC conference, IPAC’12, to be held in North America, the third in this new series and for us the 25th in the series of xPAC conferences in North America. It will be held in New Orleans, LA, 2012 May 20 – 26 at the New Orleans Convention Center with Vic Suller, LSU, the conference chair; Jeff Corbett, SLAC, the science program chair; and Kevin Morris, LSU, the local organizing committee chair. Vic is busy putting his conference team and budget together.
PAC’13
The North American Particle Accelerator Conference for 2013 (PAC’13) will be organized jointly by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC). The conference will take place in the fall somewhere on the U.S. West Coast. The conference management team is being organized. Steve Gourlay, LBNL, is the acting conference Chair and the Scientific Program Chair, to be named at a later date, will be from SLAC.
IPAC’15
A search subcommittee chaired by Derek Lowenstein, BNL, has completed its task naming Andrew Hutton, JLab, as the conference chair for an international particle accelerator conference that will be held in Richmond, VA in the Spring of 2015, to be hosted by JLab with assistance from a few other institutions.
Stan Schriber can be reached at his home in Eagle, ID 83616 USA; Phone: +1-208-631-8208, E-mail: schriber@nscl.msu.edu
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