The restart of operating the PSI high intensity proton accelerator (HIPA) is expected to be delayed by about 2 months due to the Corona virus situation. The pandemic team of PSI approved a scenario where in-house research at the correponding facilities will be possible from mid of July on. External users at HIPA will only be allowed as of September 1st.
This means that we have to shift many of the approved SμS experiments from May-July to autumn (Oct-Dec) and we will have to cancel the originally planned (summer 2020) calls for SμS and SINQ proposals. For particle physics we will have to cancel some approved experiments and shift others. We will be in contact with all PIs of the experimental efforts to coordinate the action.
For all experiments foreign travel restrictions and entry requirements into Switzerland need to be carefully considered. Currently, no foreign users are allowed into Switzerland. However, we will update this information in case restrictions will be lifted.
In order to be able to carry out approved experiments of external users who cannot travel to PSI, we may consider the feasibility of shipping samples to PSI and to run the experiments by PSI staff with remote user participation.
We will start to work on a revised schedule in late May/beginning of June when it will become more clear if the current HIPA schedule can be met. For piE1/Dolly some cuts are expected because the entire period May-December was already allocated for particle physics and SμS experiments.
The dates for the next calls for proposals can always be found here.
We are sorry about these inconveniences, but we think that in this way we can manage to run most of the approved experiments in 2020.