Staging and Funding Plan

A complete discussion of the cost of E864 is given in the section on costs, so we give here some summary numbers and describe the plans for staging and funding the experiment.

The costs for the experiment can be divided as follows.

• The cost for BNL to build the beam, provide the analysing magnets, provide the counting houses, electrical power, and air conditioning totals $2.53M. Of this, $0.637M must be spent in FY 92 to remain on a schedule which permits the system to have a physics run in the winter of 1994. The costs estimated in succeeding years are $1.393M in FY 93 and $0.5M in FY 94.
• The costs for R&D which needs to be done to define the details of the detector total $156k. All of this needs to be spent in FY 92 in order to remain on schedule. Major elements of this are $70.5k for calorimeter R&D and prototype construction and $44.2k for straw tube R&D and prototypes.
• The cost for the equipment of the experiment is estimated to be $5.847M. This estimate includes all components. There is a possibility that this cost can be reduced by using existing equipment, e.g. cables. There may also be a significant saving if we are able to use the high voltage system developed for the HERA experiment ZEUS, in which small high voltage supplies are built into the base of each photomultiplier tube.

Because of the rather large cost of the detector, we have planned to build it in stages. For a variety of reasons our collaboration believes that it is essential for us to carry out significant new physics measurements in the run in the winter of 1994. The timeliness of the topic, the competition from CERN, and the essential role played by young postdoctoral scientists and graduate students in this program all tend to make a delay until 1995 for first results highly undesirable and possibly fatal to the experiment. The ability to do this is a constraint on the degree of staging which is acceptable.

Our plan is to provide all of the scintillation counter hodoscopes, the two straw chambers (S2 and S3) which are not inside the vacuum chamber, and about 25% of the calorimeter for the 1994 run. This staging defers about $ 1.95M of equipment funds to FY 94 and, as noted previously, about $ 0.5M of BNL costs for the beam, etc. to FY 94. With the detector described we can still make major advances in the new particle searches (levels of rather than for the full detector). The partial calorimeter will be located to optimize detection of neutrals and will permit searches for the H-dibaryon, neutral strangelets, etc.