End of year review

The story of the year is undoubtedly the fall of investment banking and governments rushing to inject tax payers money into what was left. But physicists had come to expect funding difficulties well before the financial crash in September. By December 2007, one of the UK's main funding councils, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), announced an £80m hole in its budget, whilst the US Congress dished out much less than President Bush requested for the 2008 financial year, forcing some national lab such as Fermilab to lay-off staff.

The two stories continued throughout 2008, going through a few twists and turns, until a $186bn "supplemental bill" was passed by US congress in July containing an extra $338m for science. Meanwhile, the STFC, after consulting the community, produced a priority list for facilities, which largely meant that most of them would get some level of funding. And a review into the health of UK physics, chaired by Bill Wakeham, concluded that UK physics was in a "good state of health", but warned that "significant damage" had been done to the UK's international reputation following the STFC fracas.

The year also saw the birth of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva. To media fanfare, the 27 Km collider circled its first protons all within a few hours of starting up on 10 September. Most of the public were probably wondering what merited round-the-clock coverage by the UK's BBC Radio 4, whilst the only black hole being produced was on Wall Street. The champagne corks were still popping, when nine days later, a magnet quench released some four tonnes of liquid helium when commissioning the proton beam at 5 TeV (the maximum energy is 7 TeV). Pictures released a few months later in December showed that magnets had been ripped from their floor connectors showing the force that was generated by the evaporating helium. It is now estimated the LHC will come online by June next year.

Early this year also saw a new family of superconductors, potentially saving the flagging field of high temperature superconductivity. These new iron-based materials superconduct at 26K, much lower then the record at 138K for a ceramic material composed of elements such as mercury, copper and oxygen (a family known as cuprates). The new materials, consisting of iron, lanthanum and oxygen, offer the promise of higher transition temperatures by easily manipulating the chemical substitution (much like the cuprates). But until now the highest has been 55K in a samarium-based compound.

The year ended with the US election and the following long wait for President-elect Obama to be inaugurated in January. His nomination of Nobel laureate Steven Chu for Secretary of the department of Energy is widely seen as showing Obama's green credentials. As is the choice of science advisor in physicist John Holdren who is professor of environmental policy at Harvard University. It will be interesting to see if Obama restores the science advisor as an "assistant to the President" position, which Bush denied to his science advisor John Marburger, as well as how Chu fares given his little political experience.

As for 2009? Well we have the restart of the LHC to look forward too, as well as wranglings over the US science budget for 2009, which has already been delayed until February -- so in the end not much change then.

Plugging the hole

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (sipri) the UK spent $59.2 bn during 2006 on military spending alone. While many graduates in the physical sciences go into defense related areas, it seems like the UK government is perilously playing with the future of physics in the UK; just because of a 'missing' $150 m in the budget of a leading funding council, peanuts compared to the vast sums spent on defense.

The council in question is the Science and Technology Facilities council (STFC) which funds most large scale physics experiments, such as the UK's contribution to CERN, the building and maintenance of the diamond synchrotron, providing research groups with grants as well as providing the funds for the next generation of big experiments (The International Linear Collider (ILC), for example).

Now, even though $150 m in the grand scale of things is not very much (think about the $ 50 bn loan that the bank of England gave to the troubled mortgage lender Northern Rock) the damage that it proposes to do to particle physics and astronomy is vast and the knock on effect to physics as a whole cant be ignored.

Whether it was just timing in the proposals cycle or an ulterior motive, the knock on effect for particle physics is particularly stark. Not only pulling funding out of the ILC -- that hopes to be the next big particle physics experiment after the LHC at CERN which will come on-line this year -- but also cutting research grants by 25 % in particle physics and Astronomy. It seems at first hand that areas such as condensed matter are relatively unscathed. The big facilities that are planned in the UK in condensed matter research, such as the Diamond light source or the second target station at ISIS have already or are well on the way to completion. It seems most probable that particle physics-- in terms of the ILC -- is just a lame duck(it is at this moment only planned), that has now been dealt its first shot. Similarly in ground based Astronomy, the UK is currently negotiating its subscription to the Gemini telescopes in Hawaii and Chile which runs out in the summer this year.

Although there seems to be no big effect on the closure of physics departments at universities, it will definitely cause concern to groups that are currently doing R&D into the ILC.

The reasons for getting in this mess are far from clear, and it is probably a mixture of many things: One the merger of two funding councils the PPARC and CCLRC into what is now the STFC only last summer would have brought some teething troubles. International subscriptions such as CERN are linked to GDP, which for the UK has increased which means increased payouts. The funding council has also taken on fluctuations in foreign currency, which before was protected by the government, and lastly there is the auspicious area of the economics of research grants. Recently the Full Economic Costs (FEC) have gone up to 80 %, this means that funding councils have to pay 80% of the indirect costs, such as lab infrastructure and permeant staff, before funding councils only had to provide money for temporary staff and special lab equipment and around 40-50% of the indirect costs.

Though one can argue whether the reasons above could have been avoided or not. The decision process that has led to pulling out of the ILC and Gemini telescopes is what has angered physicists the most. Without seemingly any consultation the council has ceased investment disproportionately among research fields. The outcry has been enormous and has probably surprised both the council and the government., which quickly released a review into the discipline. The review is likely more like a smokescreen as it will not try to reverse the decision taken by the STFC.

The media coverage of the events is already having an effect on graduates who are looking to go onto PhD's. Some say that the uncertainty is making them leave physics altogether to go into industry, a worrying trend.

All belts need to be tightened, yet the hole is not so deep, and a review wont cover it up....