Yes! We welcome all interested participants, whether or not they submitted proposals last year. Your proposal may be a little different from those submitted by groups already involved: it won't have a "summary of previous work" section (unless you've already been doing linear collider R&D related to your proposal).

Try to find out what would have made your proposal stronger, in the eyes of the reviewers. Keep in mind that they read many proposals during a short period of time, so the clarity of your exposition is very important. If you have already made progress on your project (in site of the lack of support), use that to point out the virtues of the effort you would like DOE to support.

Ask for help from the national labs. Fermilab and SLAC are very willing to assist university-based efforts in a variety of ways. Develop a clear sense of what you need, then discuss it with them. Look on-campus: some universities can provide matching funds to help leverage federal support.

We will need to share limited DOE support among a number of university groups, so an overly large request will collide with other groups' needs. Be reasonable. You will be requesting support for LC R&D. The funds are not intended to compensate for shortfalls in support for other (non-LC) projects. You should be able to provide an accurate accounting of how the awarded funds were used for linear collider work at the end of the project.

By the end of the day, September 30.

This schedule allows the combined proposal document to be delivered to the review committees in early November. (It is possible that the reviewers won't need the proposal until later in November. If this proves to be the case we may be able to relax the schedule by a couple of weeks. We'll keep you posted; please don't assume that an extension of the deadline is a sure thing!)

In spite of budget problems last year (the FY03 budget wasn't approved by Congress until mid-February!), DOE was able to support us at close to the level discussed at UCSC. The amount of support that will be available for the FY04 proposals is uncertain at the present time, though the agency hopes to be able to provide at least this much support next year, to be shared by the accelerator and detector proposals. To further complicate matters, it may not be possible for DOE to know the level of funding in advance of the submission of our proposals.

We're serious about the deadline: a few of us will be assembling a 600+ page document from about 70 different files. Post-deadline changes or additions tend to require reassembly and repagination of the entire document, reconstruction of tables of contents, and so forth.

The LCRD proposals to DOE should be for three years, unless you expect the project to require less time for completion.

The DOE expects to find $400k - $800k for accelerator R&D and ~$500k for detector R&D.

Yes-- they can help you get a sense of where your project will fit into the larger scheme of things, and can inform you of related work being done by other groups. You'll probably want to collaborate with other groups with similar R&D interests to avoid duplicating each other's work.

As long as you can get us a sensible proposal by the due date, you're fine. Since there have been widely-publicized meetings at UT Arlington and Cornell in recent months the organizers tend to feel that the community has had a reasonable amount of advance notice concerning the proposal process.

We expect that the reviewers will want to see projects directly related to R&D needed to design (and build) one of the likely accelerator/detector combinations presently under consideration.

We expect that the process will be similar to last year's: the DOE asked each group to submit all sub-proposals for detector R&D to the agency as supplemental funding requests after the entire proposal had been reviewed. Accelerator R&D sub-proposals to DOE that were closely related to work already supported by DOE were also submitted as supplemental funding requests. However, accelerator projects not closely related to ongoing work were submitted as new grants. (This mechanism permitted the DOE to support accelerator R&D by groups whose base funding had normally been provided by NSF.)

It is expected that your DOE program officer will award support consistent with the recommendations that came from the proposal review.

• detector R&D projects: Probably yes-- we think DOE expects to create the necessary administrative structures to allow NSF groups to submit sub-proposals with the LCRD proposal. We'll keep you posted as we learn more.
• accelerator R&D projects: Yes. You should submit your EOI and subproposal to us in the same fashion as is being done by DOE groups which had been doing detector work and are submitting new (accelerator) R&D projects.

Write a single sub-proposal. In your budget be sure to make it clear how you would like the support to be apportioned between your groups. Later, both groups should submit separate identical copies of the sub-proposal to DOE.

A reasonable way to proceed would be to write a separate sub-proposal for each of the projects.

The DOE group should write a sub-proposal for the DOE proposal, much as it would do if it were collaborating with another DOE group. The NSF group should submit the UCLC equivalent of a sub-proposal as part of their proposal writing process. In your (LCRD) budget you'll specify how much support your DOE group is requesting, but it might be useful to indicate how much support the NSF group is requesting for the first year in order to allow reviewers to gauge the size of your joint project.

It might be a good idea to request a small amount of support to cover travel associated with meetings at which the simulations are discussed. The LCRD and UCLC proposals might be viewed as indicators of sorts of the level of involvement in Linear Collider research by the US community. To the extent that this is the case, the presence of efforts which do not need resources this year might be beneficial. In addition, it might make it easier for you to receive funding at a later time for prototyping the devices you are now simulating.

Here they are: