Letters of interest

January 31, 2001

Dear Colleague,

I would like your help in the next three weeks.

The NSF and the DOE are supporting the work of a national committee to investigate whether the U.S. should develop a National Underground Laboratory and, if so, to recommend a specific site. The work of this committee is described at www.sns.ias.edu/~jnb under the menu item Underground Lab.

The final meeting of the committee will be on March 3-4. The results will be presented to the agencies in the latter part of March.

The committee would like to receive one or two page informal `letters of interest' from experimentalists who might be interested in using an underground laboratory for science. These letters will be transmitted with the committee report to the NSF and DOE.

To be most useful to the committee and to the funding agencies, the letters may contain the following material: *) brief description of the science (with one or two references if appropriate); *) statement of why underground facilities are required for this work; *) depth required to perform the experiment well (can be specified in different ways); *) additional requirements for a potential National Laboratory; *) some indication of the institutions or people who might be involved in this experiment, and *) anything else you think might be helpful to the committee or to the funding agencies.

The letters of interest are not formal statements of intent to perform an experiment. They are for use of the committee and the agencies in forming an impression of the quality and variety of the science that requires underground facilities and the characteristics that are needed in an Underground National laboratory.

To be most useful to the committee, the letters of interest must be received by my office in hard copy by Friday, February 19th. If you are interested, please send a letter to the committee as soon as possible (and send me an email notifying me that you have a sent a letter so I can be sure to look for it).

You may pass this invitation on to anyone else you think is appropriate from a scientific point of view.

Sincerely yours,

John Bahcall
Asrophysics Centre
Institute for Advanced Study
1 Einstein Dr.
Princeton, NJ 08540




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