The FRIB Science Advisory Committee met on October 29th to review the status of FRIB equipment planning and recommend near-term actions the FRIB Laboratory should take to assist users in equipment development. Prior to the meeting 15 working group updates were received. These included status updates, near-term plans, needs, and collaboration lists. The working groups continue to make good progress. Many are planning major activities in 2014 including holding workshop, finishing preliminary designs, and writing science white papers.  A report from the SAC will be submitted to the FRIB director. Based on this report, feedback will be provided to the working groups by the FRIB Laboratory.

Additionally, the 3rd annual Low-Energy Community Meeting was held August 23-24, 2013 at Michigan State University. Tim Hallman from DOE-SC and Bradley Keister from NSF addressed the community meeting. Plenary talks included ATLAS at ANL and NSCL at MSU, as well as an update on progress in nuclear theory and talks from two Association for Research at University Nuclear Accelerators (ARUNA) members Notre Dame and HIGS at Duke.

Among 274 participants were 49 that joined by webinar. The meeting consisted of 17 separate collaboration/working group meetings that were held with short summaries presented to the full gathering on the last day. Plenary talks were given by representatives from U.S. user facilities, the two ARUNA labs, and the theory community. One talk provided a review of the low-energy nuclear workforce statistics and demonstrated the important role nuclear science grades play in many fields. The meeting also included a talk on the U.S. Nuclear Data Program that highlighted applications and particular needs of the program in areas related to nuclear power, security, and applications to other fields of science. Details of the meeting program and links to the talks can be found here.

Participants at the meeting held a town meeting to discuss community concerns. An outcome of this discussion was two unanimous resolutions one related to the importance of operation of existing facilities for research and the other encouraging exploration of multi-user capabilities. A third resolution was unanimously approved supporting the establishment of an FRIB Theory Center. Text of the resolutions can be found at the Community Meeting website, which also includes information about two extended working group gatherings held prior to the meeting:

• Recoil Separator Working Group held a workshop August 21-22
• Astrophysics Group held a workshop August 22

The low-energy community meetings are organized by a committee of representatives from the U.S. low-energy national laboratories, JINA, user groups and major research equipment collaborations. Current representatives are Baha Balantekin, Carl Gross, Paul Fallon, Rod Clark, Witek Nazarewicz, Guy Savard, Hendrik Schatz, Bradley Sherrill, Michael Smith, Ingo Wiedenhoever. The group will shortly begin planning for next year’s meeting–so if you have any comments or suggestions (or would like to help organize the meeting) please contact any of the organizing committee members.