Major shake-up coming for Fermilab, the troubled U.S. particle physics center

In an unusual move, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has quietly begun a new competition for the contract to run the United States’s sole dedicated particle physics laboratory. Announced in January , the rebid comes 1 year after Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), which is managed in part by the University of Chicago (UChicago), failed an annual DOE performance review and 9 months after it named a new director. DOE would not comment, but observers say its frustrations include cost increases and delays in a gargantuan new neutrino experiment. “I don’t think it’s surprising at all given the department’s evaluation of [Fermilab’s] performance,” says James Decker, a physicist and consultant with Decker, Garman, Sullivan & Associates, LLC, who served as principal deputy director of DOE’s Office of Science from 1973 to 2007. Although Fermilab passed its 2022 performance evaluation, the one for fiscal year 2021 was “one of the most scathing I have seen,” Decker says. DOE hires other parties to run its 17 national labs on 5-year contracts that can be renewed annually for another 15 years or more. Only rarely does DOE seek a new contractor because of performance problems. Since 2007, UChicago has run Fermilab with the Universities Research Association (URA), a consortium of research universities, in a partnership called the Fermi Research Alliance (FRA). The university also runs Argonne National Laboratory. D...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news