The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center has to go on an unexpected crash diet this year, thanks to budgetary blues brought on by the Iraq war and Congress’s insatiable appetite for pork. The high-energy physics laboratory, which is run by the university for the Energy Department, will have to cut 125 jobs and will shut down a major particle experiment seven months earlier than it had planned, according to Persis Drell, the lab’s director, who announced the bad news last week.
This was supposed to be a stellar year for high-energy physics and for SLAC, as the Stanford center is known, in particular. The lab had just last month brought in Ms. Drell as its new director and had started its last run of the B-Factory, which collides electrons and antimatter particles called positrons to create B mesons. By studying how those particles decay, physicists hope to learn why the universe contains mostly matter, instead of an equal mixture of matter and antimatter.
Congress had promised in last year’s America Competes Act to increase support for physical sciences and to put the Energy Department’s Office of Science on track to double its budget. The president had requested a 16-percent increase for the 2008 fiscal year, but Congress trimmed it back to 5.3 percent, according to an analysis conducted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The high-energy physics program suffered the worst of all Energy Department science programs.
At SLAC, that translates into a $25-million drop in support from what the lab expected, which means a 20-percent cut in the high-energy-physics operating budget there, said Ms. Drell. So SLAC will shut down the B-Factory in early March, instead of continuing the experiment through the end of September. And the lab will announce approximately 125 layoffs next month.
Meanwhile, according to the AAAS analysis, the Energy Department’s Office of Science budget contains $124-million in earmarks — money set aside for particular projects that have generally not gone through the same kind of peer-review process as the B-Factory experiments.
SLAC is not alone in facing cuts. The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will have to trim 200 jobs, and the budget slashes support for the proposed International Linear Collider — the next big accelerator project, which American physicists hope to lure to this country.
Michael Tuts, a professor of physics at Columbia University, called the current budget woes “a crisis.” In an interview with The Chronicle, he said the situation would hurt morale just as the focus of high-energy physics is shifting from the United States to Europe, where the Large Hadron Collider is expected to start operations this summer. —Richard Monastersky
