Adding It Up: Quantification of the Benefits of Research in Accelerator-Based Physics

Benefits from accelerator-based physics fall into three major categories: health, wealth, and stealth.  The health benefits are innovations in medical imaging.  Wealth benefits cover a wide array of products and processes than are sold in markets.  National security benefits, from counterterrorism detection to military applications, form the stealth component, typically far too probabilistic to assign meaningful dollar values.  We propose a research program to quantify health and wealth benefits in five areas:  1) medical imaging, 2) medical technology, 3) ion implantation, 4) electron beam curing, 5) the World Wide Web, and 6) light sources.  A purely econometric approach to valuing these benefits is insufficient to work with the data available and to estimate net benefits over alternatives.  A promising approach is quantification that relies on a judicious combination of expert opinion from developers and users of accelerator-based physics applications, combined with placement in an economic context such as relating to size of markets and value relative to alternatives.  While medical researchers have striven to assign dollar values to medical treatments, lives saved and illnesses avoided provide alternative metrics that can avoid controversies about valuing life and limb.  For the other benefits in the wealth category, a dollar metric can be used.