Sole Source Justification for PR 241094

The University of Alberta (UA) group, under the leadership of Professor James Pinfold, is a member of the GlueX collaboration, the group proposing to mount a new experiment in Hall D at the upgraded 12 GeV accelerator facility at Jefferson Lab. As a GlueX collaboration member, and because of their extensive electronics experience in the nuclear/particle physics field, the UA group is uniquely placed to design and build the custom electronics specified in this contract. Further, as part of their GlueX membership, they will be applying substantial non-DOE resources and manpower to this work.

Key to the selection of UA are their previous experience building similar electronics for other experiments, their unique understanding of the needs of the GlueX collaboration by virtue of their being a full member of the collaboration, their extensive knowledge of the state of the art in this narrow field by virtue of their previous work and through their broad knowledge of the scope of work being done in this field, and their connection to and active collaboration with the original designer of the ASIC that will be modified under this contract.

It would require extensive research by and training of an industry group to come up to speed in this field, along with constant monitoring of their work and progress by JLab to ensure they did the work correctly. Developing GlueX electronics is not a simple matter of writing down the specifications and having it built; there are innumerable tradeoffs and unwritten conventions that only a group with extensive experience in the field possesses.

Further, their use of non-DOE resources will substantially reduce the cost to JLab. Any industrial supplier would by necessity include such costs in the contract price. For example, administration costs, facility use costs, overheads, etc. not mentioned in this contract would all be covered by non-DOE funds controlled by the UA group.

In summary, although an industry group might be able to perform this work, none have the combination of experience, broad knowledge of the field, and internal knowledge of needs of the GlueX experiment that the UA group possesses. Further, an industrial supplier would have to charge much more to cover their overheads. Thus the choice of UA as a sole-source supplier for this contract is quite reasonable.

Elliott Wolin

12-Apr-2006