LANSCE Call for Proposals: Proton Radiography FY16

19/11/2014

The Los Alamos Neutron Science Center is issuing a Call for Proposals for experiments for the Proton Radiography Facility during Fiscal Year 2016 (October 1, 2015, – September 30, 2016), with consideration for extensions into FY17.

The proton radiography facility utilizes uses 800 MeV protons, provided by the LANSCE accelerator facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), to diagnose dynamic and static experiments in support of national and international weapons science and stockpile stewardship programs, and other experiments that benefit from the unique capabilities of proton radiography. An overview of proton radiography capabilities is attached or can be found at lansce.lanl.gov/prad.

Timeline
Deadline for proposals is 5 pm Friday February 6, 2015. Oral presentations by the proposers to the Program Advisory Committee (PAC) will be scheduled for the week of February 23, 2015. The PAC will review the proposals and develop a final ranking by the mid-March.

Scope
Currently, pRad beam production operations are fully covered by NNSA programmatic sponsors. However, approximately 10% of the beam time at pRad is available for compelling scientific proposals from institutions without programmatic sponsors and proprietary work or work-for-others agreements. For all experiments, costs for personnel not on the pRad team and unique experimental costs, including fabrication and assembly of the experimental package, must be borne by the user.

Proposal selection
Submitted proposals will be ranked on:

1) Programmatic relevance and impact

2) Quality of the science being proposed

3) Quality of experiment conception and feasibility with the stated resources and requested time

4) Existence of the physical foundations for the proposed research

Unclassified Proposal Submission
Unclassified proposals must be submitted using the LANSCE proposal submission: https://www.lanl.gov/orgs/lansce/

First time users: click “First-time LANSCE User? Create a new User Account”.

Registered users: If you have forgotten your password click on “Forgot your password?” from the login screen to reset your password.

Once logged in, click on “Create proposal” at the top right of the page and complete the requested information.

Please contact the pRad User Office, pRad-uo@lanl.gov, or 505.667.6069 for assistance or if you have questions.

For any U.S. Government funded submitters, the proposal must be reviewed by the appropriate classification authority and be appropriately marked prior to submittal.

Classified Proposals Submission
Unclassified versions of classified proposals must be submitted using the LANSCE proposal submission: https://www.lanl.gov/orgs/lansce/. Classified versions of such proposals must be sent to Alexine Salazar either electronically on the secure network (alexine@lanl.gov) or via appropriate classified mail transmission channels. If the latter is chosen, you must contact Alexine Salazar first to ensure that proper mailing protocols are followed. To request a classified template, please contact Alexine Salazar (alexine@lanl.gov).

All classified proposals are required to have had classification levels appropriately determined and all submitted documents should be appropriately marked.

Proposals containing sigma 15 or 20 information, please contact Robert (Doug) Fulton, by e-mail: fulton_robert_d@lanl.gov, for information on how to proceed.

Proposal Description
Technical, operational, and safety risks specific to the proposed experiment must all be identified in your proposal. Proposals must provide a detailed description of the experimental devices, the experimental configurations and beam time requested. Good integration with theory, modeling, and validation programs (where appropriate) will improve proposal ratings.

Technical Questions
For technical questions regarding details involved in fielding pRad experiments or in other types of experiments that could be fielded, please contact Alexander (Andy) Saunders ( asaunders@lanl.gov ). Other questions may be directed to the pRad user office (pRad-uo@lanl.gov, or 505.667.6069). For information about the Proton Radiography call for proposals go to: lansce.lanl.gov/uresources/proposals.shtml

Program Advisory Committee
All experiments whether they are dynamic, static, classified, or unclassified will be reviewed by the Program Advisory Committee (PAC). The PAC is an advisory committee to the LANSCE User Facility Director and not a funding committee. The PAC ranking may be folded into programmatic sponsor’s decision-making processes and used as a means for Laboratory management to identify potential funding. All proposals that cover work that is continuing or are an extension of work being done during FY15 must attach either a progress report, a final shot report, or a published paper on the results of that work.