ITHACA, N.Y. --The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Cornell University $88,183,000 for the operation of the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) accelerator over the next 54 months.
The funding recommendation was made by the NSF's Division of Physics and approved by the National Science Board.
Karl Berkelman, director of the Cornell Laboratory of Nuclear Studies (LNS), which operates CESR, said the new funding "will enable the continued improvement of the facility for front-line investigations in fundamental particle physics and for X-ray research in microbiology, materials science and other fields."
The NSF physics division noted that the accelerator physics group at Cornell is "world class" and that through their research and graduate student training, "the Cornell group is an essential part of the national high-energy physics program."
The division also noted that "by any standards, CESR is an extremely efficient and productive research facility." The agency's funding for CESR, the NSF said, represents about 3 percent of the total dollars spent on the national particle physics program, but experiments at CESR have accounted for about 18 percent of the papers on experimental particle physics published in the past three years in such prestigious journals as Physical Review.
The National Science Board also has approved amended funding for the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) of $16,481,000 over five years. This amount includes an anticipated $2,706,000 that is being transferred to the NSF from the National Institutes of Health. CHESS Director Sol Gruner said the money is being used to upgrade and support beam lines used for macromolecular crystallography.
Funding for CESR for fiscal year 1999 (Nov. 1, 1998-Oct. 31, 1999) is $19,486,600, which includes $9,250,000 previously awarded as a six-month bridging grant to continue operations until the new package could be completed. The NSF said this amount was judged "to be adequate to achieve the proposed goals, owing to increased contributions from Cornell and decreased operating expenses during upgrade installation periods."
The fiscal 1999 funding is 1 percent higher than the fiscal 1998 level, and it represents 12.1 percent of the current plan for the NSF's physics division and 47 percent of the fiscal 1999 budget for the agency's Elementary Particle Physics Program.
The CESR accelerator is an electron-positron colliding beam facility for research in high energy physics studies, in particular using the CLEO II particle detector. CESR also is used to produce high-energy X-rays for CHESS for studies in areas such as materials science, biology and medicine. CHESS is an independent Cornell research facility.
Related World Wide Web sites: The following sites provide additional information on this news release.
-- CESR: http://www.lns.cornell.edu/public/lab-info/cesr.html
-- CHESS: http://www.chess.cornell.edu/
-- LNS: http://www.lns.cornell.edu/