John Seeman (AD) (Photo by Diana Rogers)

John Seeman was appointed Assistant Director of Accelerator Systems for the Technical Division in September. He will continue as head of the Accelerator Department, a position he has held since 1998.

Seeman said he has enjoyed his years at SLAC. "It’s been a great twenty years—a lot of hard work and a lot of good people. I was fortunate that way."

Seeman’s first position at SLAC in 1982 was as Head of the Linac Group where he worked on the Stanford Linear Collider (SLC). "The SLC commissioning was great fun for me and the other accelerator physicists and managers but at times a little frustrating. Every day a new accelerator physics effect came up which needed to be understood. That’s why we’re here! We were creating a new field of accelerator study in real time. It kept us on our toes."

"We would often stay working until 2 a.m. and then be back in for the 8 a.m. meeting to report our findings," he said. "When things got rough at 1 a.m. in the control room, we often said ‘It doesn’t get any better than this,’ referring to how exciting the results were and we didn’t want to be anywhere else."

Seeman next worked for PEP-II, where he was System Manager for the High Energy Ring, PEP-II Deputy for Accelerator Physics and Head of the Commissioning team.

"The whole team on PEP-II worked very long and hard to get all the details right and it paid off," said Seeman. "PEP-II commissioned very quickly and reached world record performances four months after BABAR was on-line. PEP-II reached its design parameters in about a year and a half."

"The team did not stop there. Through the work of many people, we have in practice more than doubled the design-integrated luminosity per day during the past year. With recent hardware upgrades PEP-II should do even better with another factor of two increase over the next 18 months and perhaps a further factor of two over the next four years. PEP-II has plenty of room to grow."

The future holds exciting possibilities, Seeman said. "For way down the road, we are investigating the possibility of a Super-PEP-II that may produce 10 to 100 times the data per day. Future studies will tell if this possibility looks feasible. We would very much like to keep SLAC’s trend going."