The response to our announcement of the RIA Workshop 2000, to be held at the Sheraton Imperial Hotel in Durham, North Carolina, has been wonderful. Over 100 participants are already registered. We hope and encourage many more of you to come since we would like as much community input into the physics to be done at RIA as possible and to show the wide support for this facility in the community. This Workshop is both important and timely for the future of RIA.
If you plan to come we urge you to register ahead of time on the Web site, noting any Working Groups you are interested in as well. This will help us in our planning for the Workshop and will help the Conveners in developing the Working Group discussions. The organization of the Workshop will be as follows. (The detailed program is availble on the RIA Web site.) There will be a very few (tentatively six) Overview Talks on RIA as a facility and on the different research areas to be addressed at RIA. Representatives of the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation and the chair of NSAC will give their perspective on RIA in the Long Range Plan process. Most of the time will be devoted, though, to Working Group discussions for each research area. These discussions will be coordinated by the Conveners listed below. These sessions will include short talks by whoever wishes to make a presentation and will stress as much open discussion as possible. The Workshop is planned to end at 1:30 PM on Wednesday, July 26.
The Working Groups and their Conveners are as follows:
Nuclear Structure: Cyrus Baktash, Paul Fallon, Thomas Glasmacher, and Robert Janssens
Astrophysics: Peter Parker and Michael Wiescher
Fundamental Interactions: Bob Tribble and Alejandro Garcia
Reactions: Bill Lynch and Lee Sobotka
Anyone who would like to make a short presentation in a Working Group session should sign up for the appropriate Working Group at the Web address http://cycpc50.nscl.msu.edu/ria/wgsignup.htm and your information will be forwarded to the relevant Conveners so that they can organize and plan the discussions in a coherent and productive fashion. Alternatively, you can contact the Conveners directly. You can sign up for more than one topic in any of the Working Groups and for more than one Working Group. Please sign up as early as you can to facilitate this process.
If, for some reason, you are not able to register either for the Workshop or for a Working Group through the Web site, please send an e-mail to Thomas Glasmacher (riaws00@nscl.msu.edu) and he will do it for you. Lastly, in order that everyone can think about possible RIA experiments in a consistent framework, a working set of beam intensities for RIA will shortly be posted on the Workshop Web site. We realize, of course, that there are significant uncertainties in these calculations but they should serve as the best current guidelines in checking the feasibility of potential experiments. With everyone's input, cooperation, ideas, and enthusiasm, we hope to have an excellent and productive Workshop.