Cooperative Stewardship: Managing the Nation's Multidisciplinary User Facilities for Research with Synchrotron Radiation, Neutrons, and High Magnetic Fields (1999)

The nation’s six synchrotron light sources, five neutron sources, and high-field magnet lab are uniquely valuable resources that contribute to the development of new products and processes, create jobs, enhance the skill level of the U.S. scientific community, and increase U.S. competitiveness. Because of the high cost of building and operating these facilities, ¹ only a limited number can be funded, and they must be made widely available. They have been located predominately at universities or federal laboratories and made available to users nationally and internationally to conduct experiments.

Each facility consists of a core that generates the desired photons, neutrons, or high magnetic fields, together with a surrounding array of experimental units that enable users to apply these commodities in their research. Typically, funding for construction and operation of the facility core comes from a single agency (the steward), while support for the experimental units and the visiting scientists can come from the steward or other government agencies or private sources (the partners). The facilities represent a large and continuing investment of the nation’s

resources, from which their ultimate owners—the public—expect maximum returns in terms of scientific and technological achievements.

These facilities have achieved phenomenal success (BESAC, 1997, 1998; NSF, 1988) and have contributed to the evolution of ever more advanced scientific capabilities. These capabilities in turn have attracted a larger and more diverse scientific user community. This same success and growth have created stresses in the system that threaten to make current management and funding methods untenable in the future. Several key issues are addressed in this study.

• Adequacy of funding. In the last decade, growth in the numbers of both facilities and users has strained the budgets of funding agencies. While ad hoc methods have provided additional operating funds for the facilities, the funding agencies still struggle to upgrade and run the facilities while maintaining support for their traditional mission area research programs at efficient levels.

• Stability of funding. Currently a single steward has the responsibility for funding and maintaining each core facility. Because of the broadening of the user communities, there is pressure to expand the sources of core funding. However, history has demonstrated that if core operations and maintenance become dependent on dispersed funding, the entire facility operation may be threatened by the reduction or withdrawal of support by a single component (see Chapter 3 section, “Dispersed Funding and Management Model”).

• Adequacy of instrumentation. Sufficient funding for the development, provision, maintenance, and upgrading of experimental instrumentation has seldom been available from the steward agencies. As a result, partnerships have been formed with outside groups to provide expertise and financing for experimental units at most of the synchrotron facilities. A lack of such partnerships at neutron facilities, combined with inadequate funding, has contributed in part to gross inadequacies in experimental instrumentation.

• Changing user demographics. The user communities of synchrotron, neutron, and high-magnetic-field facilities have increased significantly in recent years; the growth in the number of users from the biological community of synchrotron facilities is particularly notable. Many new users need more training and support from the facility than did their predecessors, and this further strains facility operating budgets. In addition, changes in the user demographics of a facility may lead to a mismatch between the mission of the primary funding agency and the scientific aims of the user community being served.

• Legal concerns. Facility users must sign agreements that are not transferable from one facility to another and that are considered by many to be unnecessarily complicated. In addition, the unresolved question of whether researchers can retain full intellectual property rights to research conducted at the facilities is a concern to many users, especially at DOE facilities.

This study was initiated to explore strategies that steward and partner agencies can use to address these challenges.²

Synchrotron radiation is created when charged particles, traveling at relativistic speeds, are deflected by a magnetic field. This radiation is unique by virtue of its high intensity, brightness, stability, and broad energy range, extending from the far infrared to the x-ray region. The radiation is continuous in wavelength and is polarized and pulsed, with the exact characteristics depending on the generating device.

Historically, synchrotron facilities descended from particle accelerators that were developed for high-energy physics research. Gradually, other researchers, initially in materials science, realized that the photons produced by the particle accelerators could provide unique probes of the structure and properties of condensed-phase matter. Accordingly, “parasitic” instruments were attached to many of the accelerators to use these photons for research.³ These parasitic research activities were so successful that a second generation of accelerators and storage rings was dedicated to the production of synchrotron radiation for research (Clery, 1997). The most important of these facilities have come on line since 1980, and, unlike the neutron sources discussed below, most have operated as user facilities from the outset.⁴ The U.S. synchrotron user facility inventory includes five dedicated user facilities and one parasitic facility.⁵

Neutron beams can be generated either by nuclear reactors (continuous beams) or by accelerator-based devices called spallation sources (pulsed beams). Like synchrotron light sources, spallation neutron sources depend on the particle accelerator technology developed initially by the high-energy physics community. A spallation neutron source consists of an accelerator that shoots packets of

high-energy protons at heavy metal targets. The burst of neutrons that each proton-metal collision produces can be moderated so that its energy range is appropriate for condensed-phase matter research and then formed into a useful beam.

Historically, neutron facilities descended from neutron reactors that were first constructed in the early 1940s as part of the U.S. atomic energy program. These reactors were used initially to demonstrate the feasibility of chain reactions and to generate fissile materials for military purposes. Subsequently, several small reactors were built to produce radioisotopes by neutron activation, to study engineering issues related to the production of atomic energy, and, almost as an afterthought, to produce beams of low-energy neutrons for other research purposes. Pioneering experiments using neutrons, initially in materials science, demonstrated the value of neutron beams as probes of the properties of matter. The reactors built subsequently, in the 1960s, had neutron beam research as an important activity from the outset, although they did not open their doors fully to the outside community as user facilities until the 1970s. The U.S. facility inventory includes three reactor-based neutron sources and two spallation sources.⁶

Magnetic field research has always been conducted at dedicated facilities because the importance of the responses of matter to magnetic fields has been obvious for more than two centuries. Magnetic field strength is a thermodynamic variable—similar to temperature and pressure—that affects the properties of matter; the stronger the fields, the greater the effect. High-magnetic-field facilities enable researchers to examine the response of matter to very strong magnetic fields. At present, magnets that generate fields greater than about 15 T are so costly to build and operate that they require significant federal support; lower field magnets, below about 15 T, do not need to be located in major facilities and thus are outside the scope of this study.

A high-magnetic-field laboratory, the Francis Bitter Laboratory, was established at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960 with the support of the U.S. Air Force. Its mission was to design, construct, and operate both super-conducting and resistive electromagnets that generate high magnetic fields for research. In 1973 responsibility for management and funding of this facility was transferred to NSF. In 1990, following an open competition, the NSF established the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) in Florida at a new facility built and operated by a consortium made up of Florida State University (Tallahassee), the University of Florida (Gainesville), and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The NHMFL also has a pulsed facility located in New Mexico at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The typical facility user is a member of a small research group based in an academic institution, a national laboratory, a for-profit corporation, the facility itself, or a similar foreign institution that is supported by individual investigator grants from agencies like NSF, NIH, and DOE, or by corporate funds. The user generally visits the facility a few times a year to collect data that cannot be obtained using ordinary laboratory equipment. The users have varying levels of experience with the technologies at these facilities. Some have been involved in instrument development and need little training or educational support. Others have only a modest understanding of the instrumentation and require extensive support from the facility. The number of inexperienced users is growing, and the implications of this trend are discussed in Chapter 2.

The user facilities attract talented scientists from around the world; each year some 10% to 20% of users of U.S. facilities are from foreign countries.⁷ In turn, significant numbers of U.S. scientists travel abroad to use foreign facilities,⁸ some of which provide capabilities that are either not available at U.S. facilities or are oversubscribed. This reciprocity of access to user facilities is essential for keeping both the instrumentation and U.S. scientific inquiry vital and state of the art.

The user facility enterprise is large, whether measured by the numbers of scientists involved, the cost of the facilities, or the size of the annual operating budgets. In 1998, about 7,000 scientists (see Table 1.1) used the major facilities in the United States, and when those who collaborate with users are included, the size of the community swells to several times that. The number of users is increasing due to recognition of the benefits that facility use offers to increasing numbers of scientific fields and to recent additions of new advanced capabilities at the facilities (see Chapter 2).

The magnitude of the U.S. investment in the neutron, photon, and high-magnetic-field sources of the major user facilities, the sources of funding of the facilities, and the ongoing operating and maintenance expenses are presented in Table 1.2. As the table shows, replacing the core portion of the existing user facilities would cost over $5 billion. The annual operating costs of the cores of

these facilities are almost $300 million. Table 1.2 does not include the magnitude of the investment in or the operating and maintenance costs of the instruments installed at the facilities.

The funds that support user facilities can be divided into funding for the cores and funding for the experimental units. The federal government has been and remains the source of most of the core funds, but state governments have made significant contributions to NHMFL and SRC, among others. Funding for the experimental units comes from remarkably heterogeneous sources.

Because of its historical responsibility for atomic energy, the Department of Energy supports most of the nation’s synchrotron light sources and neutron sources. DOE responsibility for most of the facilities has been assigned to the Office of Basic Energy Sciences; responsibility for LANSCE is shared between DOE’s defense program and basic energy sciences. Other user facilities are supported by the Department of Commerce and NSF. The Department of Commerce sponsors a reactor-based neutron user facility and a small synchrotron at NIST.⁹ NSF sponsors two synchrotron light sources and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.

At neutron and photon facilities, a diverse group supports the research instrumentation and support staff of the experimental units. On the research floor of a single facility, there could be hardware purchased by several divisions of both DOE and NSF, by several NIH institutes and divisions, by nonprofit organizations such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and by for-profit corporations. The widely varied user research projects are similarly supported by diverse sources.

The funding system for experimental instrumentation depends on the facility type. In synchrotron facilities funding is in large measure the result of decisions taken in the 1980s, when DOE constructed three new synchrotron light sources

(ALS, NSLS, and SSRL). To be able to use these new facilities more rapidly than could be internally supported, outside scientists organized into participating research teams (PRTs)¹⁰ were invited to develop some of the instrumentation. PRTs served two purposes: (1) they provided a mechanism for recruiting the talent needed to design and construct the instrumentation required to bring the facilities online quickly and (2) they provided a mechanism for raising funds to build and operate that instrumentation. In exchange for their contributions to the facilities, the PRTs were granted 75% of the available time on their beamlines.

The PRT system has not been used for neutron facilities until recently; instrumentation has been provided by the facility. Limitations in facilities’ budgets have impeded the development and construction of instrumentation necessary to optimize the neutron sources. However, neutron facilities now appear to be moving toward a system similar to that in place in the synchrotron light sources: for example, the current upgrade at LANSCE will involve instrument construction through spectrometer development teams.

The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory funding for instrumentation is predominantly provided by NSF and the state of Florida. DOE funded the preexisting pulsed field facilities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory of the NHMFL.

Chapter 2 provides a detailed discussion of the U.S. synchrotron, neutron, and high-magnetic-field user facilities, emphasizing trends in their scientific applications and user communities. The stresses faced by the facilities and their supporting agencies due to the changing needs of the user community and the management changes that may be required to meet these needs in the future are also discussed.

Chapter 3 traces the evolution of user facility management models in the United States, describes the current status of facility operation and funding, and compares them with models in user facilities in other countries. The strengths and weaknesses of the current stewardship models, either simple stewardship or steward-partner, are also discussed.