HEPL News

Professor Sandy Fetter served as Director of the Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory (HEPL) during the past year. (Fetter has now stepped down, and Professor Robert Byer is the new Director.) Fetter spent much of this year working with the HEPL Administrative Committee (those faculty with significant research activities in HEPL) planning for the future of HEPL, particularly over the next five years. The committee developed the following mission statement: "HEPL's mission is medium-scale interdisciplinary projects in fundamental science and engineering generally requiring development of sophisticated new technologies."

At present, HEPL has three medium-scale projects:

1. Free Electron Laser (FEL), with Alan Schwettman and Todd Smith
2. Gravity Probe-B (GP-B), with Franics Everitt, John Lipa, Brad Parkinson (Aeronautics and Astronautics), and John Turneaure
3. Solar Oscillation Investigation (SOI), with Phil Scherrer

The FEL and SOI programs will probably remain stable over the next five years, but the GP-B project will definitely decrease from its current size as the flight phase actually occurs (near the year 2000) and the data-analysis phase takes over. This transition, long planned, is a major impetus for the current year-long review.

In addition, HEPL has several smaller projects, some of which may well grow into the more standard medium scale. The Administrative committee has made a commitment to support new activities that have a modest possibility of growing into typical HEPL projects, even at the expense of currently successful projects. Fortunately, plans for a few such projects are already underway, and it is likely that one or more will maintain the tradition of HEPL faculty initiating and developing new and technologically ingenious projects that goes back to the work of William Fairbank and Robert Hofstadter. These projects include:

1. The Stanford Test of the Equivalence Principle (MiniSTEP) program, which is the culmination of many years of work by Francis Everitt and Paul Worden: it seeks to verify Einstein's Equivalence Principle with an improved accuracy of several orders of magnitude compared to previous investigations. The current version of the project is a joint effort between NASA and the European Space Agency.
   
   
2. The Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) project is an outgrowth of Hofstadter's Egret detector that was part of the Gamma Ray Observatory (GRO) flown in the late 1980's. It involves new state of the art sensors for high-energy gamma rays that are robust and require no expendable materials. This effort is being planned as a joint project between HEPL (led by Peter Michelson, with NASA support) and SLAC (with DOE support), and includes significant foreign collaboration. In addition to the detectors and several other new technologies, it will yield much improved data on astronomical gamma-ray sources.
   
   
3. Galileo is a joint Ginzton-HEPL project (funded by the National Science Foundation, with Robert Byer and Peter Michelson as co-Principal Investigators) to develop a new and improved laser interferometric detector for gravitational waves. The apparatus (being constructed in End Station II) will ultimately be relocated in one or both of the sites dedicated to Laser Interferometers for Gravitational-Wave Observations (LIGO) in Louisiana and Washington state.

The second important issue is the need for a steady stream of unrestricted sources that can be used to support Laboratory activities such as speakers, visitors, small-scale renovations, and specialized common facilities and equipment. This problem arises in part from recent federal actions on unallowable charges, and its solution will require both persistence and ingenuity.

Back to 1997 Newsletter Table of Contents